Performance & Post-Show Discussion on Monday, 10/10 • 8:00 p.m. • Empie Theatre
About Kate Bornstein: In the highly theoretical field of gender studies, Kate Bornstein’s characteristically humorous, playful, and compassionate style makes hir work among the most accessible and entertaining. Bornstein’s complex relationship to gender and language appears even in her biography and resume, substituting “hir” for “her” and “ze” for “he” and so on. Bornstein makes choices about identity, the language with which “ze” describes “hirself” and the ways in which “ze” intervenes in the cultural binaries of gender, sexual identification, and other limiting identity constructions. Ze is an author and performance artist whose published works include the plays Hidden: A Gender, Cut’n’Paste, Virtually Yours, The Opposite Sex is … Neither!, Strangers in Paradox, Too Tall Blondes in: Love, and A Queer and Pleasant Danger, as well as the books My Gender Workbook, Nearly Roadkill and the groundbreaking 1994 book Gender Outlaw, which has become a staple text in women’s and gender studies courses at colleges and universities around the world.
About the performance : Bornstein was assigned the gender “male” at birth and was raised as a boy. During hir adult manhood, ze decided to change hir sex and become a woman. But, as ze says in hir autobiographical performance piece On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, “A few years after my gender change, I realized that being a woman didn’t work for me any better than being a man had worked. So just like I gave up being a man, I gave up being a woman. And I settled in to being neither.” Why does the constitution of “normal” exert so much sway in medicine? Can one opt out of the gender binary? And why? What acts of conscience does Kate Bornstein follow in her creative, scholarly, and activist interventions into the male-female identity structure that undergirds so many aspects of individual identities? What are the ethical issues of legal socioeconomic and cultural boundaries that attempt to conscript people like Kate Bornstein into a gender binary? If there is no normal, what might happen?