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Alice's picture

Kate Bornstein

Submitted by Alice on Mon, 11/23/2009 - 4:26pm.

 One of the parts I enjoyed most about Kate Bornstein's performance was how she blatantly stated that she is neither man, nor woman. Often times when we talk about transgender issues, I feel like we always fall into the same gender binary that we seem to always be fighting. You know, with language such as m to f and f to m. It was nice to finally have someone be completely comfortable with not defining themselves through one gender- or rather, feeling like they had to transition from one gender to another.

I was also intrigued by the performance being at villanova. I'll try not to stereotype too much here, but i wonder how the villanova students reacted to Kate's performance. If they were not comfortable with her directly asking them if they were part of the GLBTQ group, what did they think of her being so blatant about it? I wonder if it's one of those things where its ok for YOU to be this way but not for me...
Also, did anyone notice that Kate Bornstein's performance at Villanova was brought by the "women's studies" program there? I wonder how their syllabus and courses offered differ/are similar to ours.
Lastly, I loved how honest Kate was, especially when she was listing all her "problems": alcoholic, anorexic, depressed, cutter, suicidal, etc. Surprisingly, I was not uncomfortable when she was talking about it- even when she went into great detail. The only thing that really bothered me was when she was talking about the alternatives to suicide and she said it was better to starve yourself, than be suicidal. To me any type of self-harm shouldn't be promoted and there shouldn't be ones that are more tolerated than others. I don't know...just a thought. Overall though, i really enjoyed the performance! And it was nice to observe a campus other than in the tri-co for once.

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