My research centers on the broad exploration of gender and identity in seventeenth-century French literature, theatre, and culture with a focus on the performance of transvestism on stage and through a few choice examples of cross-dressing as lived experience. I am also exploring a new dimension of transvestite theatre, considering the role and implications of violence within complex scenarios that frequently confound and conflate issues of gender identification while tending to deconstruct conventional seventeenth-century views of the traditional power structure governing the sexes.