2005

Bornstein’s playful performances about gender make “hir” work accessible and entertaining. Bornstein, one of the country’s most respected and sought after speakers in the field of postmodern gender theory, was assigned the gender “male” at birth and was raised as a boy. As an adult, Bornstein chose to have a sex change and become a woman, but later realized, “being a woman didn’t work for me any better than being a man …. So just like I gave up being a man, I gave up being a woman. And I settled in to being neither.” This fluid gender identity plays out in the language Bornstein uses when writing about hirself, substituting “hir” for “her” and “ze” for “he.”

Hir performance invites us to ask why constructions of normal exert so much sway in medicine, and how the pressure to fit into a gender binary generates ethical questions for us all. Join Bornstien to ponder the question, “If there were no category “normal,” what might happen?”

Bornstein’s published works include the books, My Gender Workbook and Gender Outlaw, and plays and performance pieces, The Opposite Sex is … Neither!; A Queer and Pleasant Danger; Virtually Yours; Cut ‘n’ Paste; and y2kate: gender virus 2000.

Bornstein’s books are taught at over 120 colleges and universities around the world and ze has performed hir work live on college campuses and in theatres and performance spaces across the USA, as well as in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria.

The Ethics and Politics of Identity is a year long series of programs, sponsored by the Muhlenberg College Center for Ethics, about the ethical challenges that surround the changing categories of social, national, and global identities. For more information on the series, or to view the schedule of events for the fall semester, please visit: