Kate Bornstein
Kate Bornstein is an author, playwright, performance artist, actor, novelist, choreographer, and gender theorist — and the personal accounts they've written about surviving PTSD and about being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder represent some of the most direct, first-person writing in their body of work.
Born on 15 March 1948 in Neptune City, Bornstein went on to study at Brown University before building a career that spans an unusually wide range of disciplines. They have worked as an author, playwright, performance artist, actor, novelist, choreographer, university teacher, and gender theorist — all conducted in English, and all rooted in their experience as a non-binary person and citizen of the United States. That breadth makes it hard to locate a single starting point for any one strand of their output; the theoretical and the autobiographical have run alongside each other throughout their career.
Bornstein's personal writing has addressed both PTSD and borderline personality disorder, bringing the same first-person directness to mental health that characterizes their work as a gender theorist. This willingness to write from inside difficult experiences, rather than at any clinical remove, appears across their output as an author and performance artist. They have also taught at the university level, carrying that combination of lived inquiry and formal practice into educational settings.
Bornstein received a Lambda Literary Award in recognition of their writing. The Library of Congress Name Authority file records them as "Bornstein, Kate, 1948-," anchoring their presence in the archival record of American letters. That entry, taken together with the Lambda award, marks the institutional acknowledgment of a body of work that reaches across gender theory, memoir, theater, and performance.
Quotes by Kate Bornstein
Kate Bornstein's insights on:
Our spirits are full of possibilities, yet we tie ourselves down to socially-prescribed names and categories so we’re acceptable to more people. We take on identities that no one has to think about, and that’s probably how we become and why we remain men and women.
As an exercise, can you recall the last time you saw someone whose gender was ambiguous? Was this person attractive to you? And if you knew they called themselves neither a man nor a woman, what would it make you if you’re attracted to that person? And if you were to kiss? Make love? What would you be?
When you’re a Scientologist it’s like the movie Goodfellas, where the gangsters hang out with only other gangsters. We only hung out with each other, so we knew we were saving the world.
It’s healthier for your soul to live outside and above a degraded moral code than within and beneath one.
The differences in the way men and women are treated are real. And the fact is this difference in treatment has no basis in the differences between men and women. I was the same person, and I was treated entirely differently. I got real interested in feminist theory – real fast.
It doesn’t really matter what a person decides to do, or how radically a person plays with gender. What matters, I think, is how aware a person is of the options.
If we buy into categories of sexual orientation based solely on gender – heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual – we’re cheating ourselves of a searching examination of our real sexual preferences.
One answer to the question “Who is a transsexual?” might well be “Anyone who admits it.” A more political answer might, “Anyone whose performance of gender calls into question the construct of gender itself.