Name: Gender Outlaw
ISBN: 9781101973240

Kate Bornstein

Includes the text of the play, Hidden: a gender.

On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us

Gender Outlaw

Sophie Shrimpton

I did not enjoy this at all. I sped through it to get through it. I’m struggling to pin down the main reason I disliked it. I think it was a mix of: I already know all the gender theory in this book and found it repetitive; I did not enjoy the lack of structure and found it bounced around way too much; I think I am either quite conservative or very radical because I don’t think trans and queer people need to embrace being a ‘freak’, I think the norm should be gender experimentation until gender no longer exists; I think I have internalised patriarchal and white supremacist ideas of writing and presentation and did not enjoy the ‘fluffier’ aspects e.g. I completely skipped the play at the end. I don’t like queer performance generally because I find it repetitive and want queerness to be naturalised everywhere and not sensationalised. 

It’s a shame I didn’t like this book, I am trying to read more about being trans to spur more exploration of that side of my identity. I don’t think I’m destined to have the same crisis about being trans than I did about being queer - it makes sense and I accepted it pretty readily. I guess once you’ve struggled over one hump, similar ones aren’t as difficult.

Audiobook ‘read’

Some ideas:
Visualisation of the gender binary as a circle with a line through it. For either side of the gender to shift, it has to eat into the other gender e.g. women working emasculates men as that is the realm of masculinity. This is perceived as an 'attack'. 

Belief in biological gender is belief in the supremacy of the body in determination of identity. By calling it sex we grant it superiority over all other indicators of gender. Just one type of gender

Making gender the main criteria for desire ignores/minimizes all the other dynamics of desire that are more important than gender

Batman and Catwomen are not hetero bc they are man/woman. Sexual preference based on latex, masks etc not on gender.

If sexual orientation based solely on gender categories, robbing ourselves of examination of our real sexual preferences. Same with gender. 

Desire based on identities - some stimulate, some diminish. Modify identities to make yourself attractive to people. 

Freeing to not have an identity, but also exhausting, can use identities to retreat into privacy so people know your boundaries. Definition as a way of demarcating space.

There is always removal in hetero relationships/sex. Much more closeness in queer relationships. Not performing roles, doing what you want and being honest.

Culture is obsessed with gender, and will be last to find out (like an obsessed teenager)

Murray S Davis in Smut - "Anything that undermines confidence in the scheme of classification on which people base their lives sickens them as though the very ground on which they stood precipitously dropped away. The vertigo produced by the loss of cognitive orientation is similar to that produced by the loss of physical orientation. Philosophic nausea, certain forms of schizophrenia, moral revulsion, negative experience, the horror of having violated a taboo and the feeling of having being polluted are all manifestations of this mental mal de mer, occasioned by the sudden shipwreck of cognitive orientation which casts one adrift in a world without structure. People will regard any phenomenon that produces this disorientation as "disgusting" or "dirty". To be so regarded, however, the phenomenon must threaten to destroy not only one of their fundamental cognitive categories but their whole cognitive system."

Call it gender not biological sex. Sex is fucking, gender is everything else. Gender hides between many false names, which are types of gender, which do not reveal anything about gender but reveal the paranoia of the society that constructs the types. Gender is typed to hold together the boundaries of a given group. Start doing away with gender by calling it gender.

Queer theatre spaces - Highways in Santa Monica, PS122 in New York, Josie's Cabaret and Juice Joint in San Francisco, Red Doraz: The Bearded Lady Cafe in San Francisco, Patrick Sculley's Cabaret Space in Minneapolis, Real Artways in Hartford, Connecticut, The Drill Haw in London, The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, It's Queer Up North festival in Manchester, The Locker Arts Centre in Minneapolis

Recounts a woman's acclimation into female roles after a sex-change operation, outlining the conflicting messages that are imposed upon each gender and presenting observations on a repressed society. Reprint. 20,000 first printing. Tour. NYT.

Gender Outlaw On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us

Reviews