Semester 3 – Core Course 13:

[EN010303] -Body, Text and Performance

Seminar script
Themes in Kate Bornstein: Queer Life/Queer Theatre&Hidden: A Gender, a
play in two acts

Submitted by Ann Mariya CF

II MA English
Submitted to Asst. Prof. Feneena S Mohammed

Introduction to Kate Bornstein

Katherine Vandam Bornstein (born March 15, 1948) is an American author,

playwright, performance artist, actor, and gender theorist. In 1986, Bornstein
started identifying as gender non-conforming and has stated “I don’t call myself a
woman, and I know I’m not a man” after having been assigned male at birth and
receiving sex reassignment surgery. Bornstein now identifies as non-binary and
uses the pronouns they/them and she/her.Bornstein has also written about having
anorexia, being a survivor of PTSD and being diagnosed with borderline
personality disorder. Kate (née Albert) Bornstein is an internationally renowned
American transgender performer, author, theorist and activist. Her acting portfolio
comprises performance art, theater, television and film. Her award-winning books
have been translated into five languages and are studied in schools and universities
worldwide.

Born in Neptune City, New Jersey, into a conservative middle-class Jewish family,
Bornstein attended Brown University and became the first person to graduate with
a degree in theater arts. Although Bornstein transitioned to female and underwent
sex. In Bornstein’s early career, she wrote art reviews for San Francisco’s LGBT
newspaper, The Bay Area Reporter. She subsequently became a prolific performer,
creating one-person shows, performance art and theater productions. In. 1989, at
the age of 41, she created “Hidden: A Gender,” a theater production exploring the
parallels between her own life and the life of Herculine Barbin, an intersex
person.Bornstein’s groundbreaking books challenge preconceptions about gender
binaries and help advance understanding of LGBT issues. Her 2000 book, “Hello,
Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws,”
received a Stonewall Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award. Her 2013
book, “My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving World
Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity,” won a 2014 Rainbow Project
Book List award from the American Library Association. In 2015 Lambda Literary
presented her with its Pioneer Award.Bornstein appeared as a regular cast member
on “I Am Cait,” the E! reality television program featuring Caitlyn Jenner, and has
provided commentary on news-and-opinion programs, such as MSNBC’s Melissa
Harris-Perry show. She is the subject of the acclaimed 2014 documentary “Kate
Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger,” produced by Sam Feder. The Advocate
magazine named it one of the best LGBT documentaries of the year, and it
received the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.Bornstein
appeared the 2017 film “Saturday Church,” and in 2018 she made her Broadway
debut in “Straight White Men.”A dedicated activist, Bornstein travels extensively
giving lectures and workshops at colleges and other venues. She recently started
personal gender-identity counseling she calls Heart to Heart Coaching With Kate.
The New York City Council has twice honoured her for outstanding citizenship for
her Advocacy for marginalized and suicide-prone youth. Bornstein lives in
Manhattan with her partner, Barbara Carrellas, an artist and sex educator.

Introduction to ‘Gender Outlaw '

Though performance artist, author, and transgender activist, Kate Bornstein, is still
very much alive, she is arguably destined for secular canonization when the
inevitable happens. Her ground-breaking book, Gender Outlaw, first published in
1994, extended the performativity of gender far past Judith Butler and the binary
cultural constructs of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ by proposing the eradication of gender’s
boundaries and inscriptions altogether. Using an accessible language of humour
and wit, rather than coded medical or psychiatric jargon, Bornstein has illuminated
alternatives to gender normativity for not only multitudes of transgendered and
transexual people, but for anyone unsatisfied with the ascribed limitations of their
gender. Even after her gender transformation surgery, the public called her as
“Neither a man nor a woman.” Bornstein shares her own plight as person who
faced a lot of struggle to attain a “Gender conformity.”

In 1969- she joined in living theatre, play boy magazine, eventually she realised
her life is disordered. She was afraid of whether her acting would be either tragic
or comic, she fails to trace orgin of her acting, she lack her voice. This she faced so
many challenges. Meanwhile she nurtured her desire for acting and theatre. She
had an innate talent for theatre, her love for theatre grow as she getting older.
Finally she begun a “Feminist theatre company.” The theatre was aimed at the
portrayal of life of lesbians; where performance completely did by lesbians and
writers are also lesbians. When the world was only familiar by hetero sexual norms
and ideas, Bornstein introduced the idea that gender is not biological but
constructed. She flourished homogeneous sexuality, including gays lesbian,
intersex etc. When the play gained it’s world wide popularity, homosexuals from
different part of the world arrived as interestingly to know more about this theatre.
They realised that this kind of theatre prioritise over the life and culture of gay,
lesbian which can be considered as an act of subversion of the preconceived norms
on gender by the society.

Themes of Queer theatre

Kate Bornstein, who has witnessed and is amazed at the success of her theatre, She
found herself inspired, and she was even more encouraged to address the
transgender issue. So, in 1964, Kate Bornstein invented the world’s first queer
theatre, where the LGBTQ community is highly privileged. She fulfilled the desire
of people who belong to the LGBTQ community to be a part of theatre, and she
asserts the need to realize that these people who are excluded, suppressed,
marginalized, and alienated by society also deserve stage and performance. The
importance she gave to queer theatre is that she sees theatre as a space for
performance for people in the LGBTQ community who didn’t get the right
positions or opportunities. She focuses on including the excluded, especially in
light of her own experience, who have never had a stable identity, opportunities
etc. Bornstein, through queer theatre, tried to blend gender with neutralism and
succeeded. Queer theatre negotiates the practice to deconstruct the constructed
order in gender and sexuality. One of the features of queer theatre is that the actors
self-discovery is a focal point. Most of the great actors were popularized through
the Queer Theatre. Queer theatre crucially functions to include the excluded people
in society. The objective of queer theatre is that they consider love to be the main
theme, but far away from normal love, the theatre is the embodiment of an
extraordinary version of love such as toxic love, obsessive love, hidden love,
deviated form love, unrequited love, and so on. Queer theatre plays denounce
heterosexual love, a new experience of love. The theatre portrait shows open
sexuality with a wide variety of erotica. In the 1980s, queer people and queer
theatre attained power; they succeeded in gaining positive feedback. She felt
herself proud, as she had made an exceptional change for the sake of queer people.
Bornstein insists that every theatre should include the excluded; the theatre must be
provocative; they should present a plot against the dominant act of culture; acts of
superiority or hegemony prevail in gender, performance, and sexuality. She claims
for the transformation, subject of unconditional love in stage, that demand, open
sexuality, and a wide range of eroticism. In a world where the main stream of
gender only exists within the male or female concept, either man or woman is
accepted, and others are expelled or declined themselves. So she believes that only
queer theatre can become the third space for others. Queer theatre is a critical
assessment of the constructed order of gender as well as performivity.

This play can be performed by any number of actors, any gender configuration,
and whatever sort of stage can be used on the streets. Stage is important to explore
everything that is free from traditional, constructive, conservative, preconceived,
and dominant themes and rules. Based on her own research and experience, she
addresses the issues of people through the sort of characters who struggle to
conform to their gender. The play thus questions global prejudice; where feminity
and gender are being questioned, she addresses the stereotype image of female
gender; hence, she challenges flaws of patriarchy, religion, gender construction,
etc.

Summary of the play

A Gender, a play in two acts is a play in two acts with just three main characters –
Herculine, Herman and Doc Grinder.

The setting is a studio where an interview is going to take place and Doc Grinder is
the host (we don’t know whether he is a man or woman, he kind of plays a neutral
gender). He talks to the audience directly. Then there is Herman who is sitting on a
leather chair in the left corner of the stage and in the center there is a bed which is
occupied by Herculine, who is kind of oblivious of the audience. Both Herculine
and Herman are going to talk about their lives and how they became ‘outlaws’.

Herculine’s story

Herculine was conflicted about her gender from when she turned 12 and felt a
lovely attachment with another girl of her own age Lea. Superior of her dormitory
had caught her kissing Lea and warned her for her misbehavior. And Herculine
feels as if she has lost her innocence and the sole reason for this is her intense
interest for knowledge. When she was 17 she received a letter from her aunt and
the content in the letter disturbed her but at the same time confused her. Her aunt
stated that people were calling her a vampire because she desires for fluids. Not
fluids of men but of women. She had lost her husband 15 years ago and is now in a
comfortable ‘arrangement’ with another woman named Babette. After Herculine
reads this. Letter, she felt it was mere rubbish. Will aunt go to hell for her doings?

But Herculine becomes scared because her passion for knowledge was increasing
and she herself was becoming a ‘vampire’. She feels as if she is sinning against
God. She is falling away from all that is womanly and her body is also changing.
She has lustful thoughts and intentions for Therese, a student in her dormitory. She
wanted to always play the role of man with Therese. Is she becoming a vampire or
a man?

We can see Doc Grinder intervening from time to time in the play because he is the
host.Two years have passed and Herculine has graduated and is now a teacher. She
is in a relationship with Sara. One night, Herculine starts having pain in her
stomach and the doctor finds the source of her pain as a pair of testicles descending
into her labia. That means, her vagina doesn’t open to a uterus and her clitoris was
found to be two inches long. She lived like a woman her whole life but now she
has started having male parts. What is she really? The doctor says that she is a
man. She realized that she will not be able to live as a woman and Sara will never
need her as a man. Hence, she decides to leave Sara and live in Paris to begin her
life as a man. The doctor said that all her reading as a child resulted in the
disappearance of the uterus and her man part to grow. The doctor asked her to
practice her manhood rigorously, for androgynous character is often accompanied
by imbecility. That is how Herculine became Abel. In the last scene we see a clerk
rectifying Herculine’s birth record where her name is changed to Abel and her sex
is changed to masculine sex.

In the end we realize that Abel commits suicide, an artful death. The society didn’t
accept his type of gender.

Herman’s story

Herman starts his story by introducing his father’s chair, the one that he is currently
sitting on during the interview. His father had made certain rules for sitting on the
chair. No girls were allowed to sit on the chair and if they did then. They had to
pay a quarter. When Herman was older he used to bring his girlfriends to his home
and made out or even had sex on his father’s chair and he would always leave a
quarter on the cushion.

Herman’s character is parallel to Kate Bronstein. Bronstein is actually displaying

her own story through this character.

He started having this feeling of being like a girl when he was just four. When the
students went to play in two separate lines, one for girls and one for boys. Herman
preferred to choose the girls line but the teacher corrected him and made him go
with the boys. She had a loathsome and disgusted look which little Herman
couldn’t decode.

When he was 13 he read a magazine with the picture of a beautiful blonde lady and
with the headline “SHE WAS A HE”. The beauty was Christine Jorgensen, EX- Gl.
A man who went against the rules to become the woman that she is today. She even
quoted that she was finally happy to be a woman and wanted more people who
wanted to be happy to follow her example.

Herman was always in a state of confusion. He was born a man but never had the
feeling to live like a man. He could naturally behave like a woman but could never
behave like a man. Even after his English teacher taught him about
gender(grammatical), he couldn’t get a proper idea about what gender is. Who am
I? This was the question to which Herman couldn’t find an asnwer. He read
anything and everything to understand what gender he was.

He acted in the theater and had to play the role of a motorcycle rough guy. But he
didn’t know how to talk like a man or walk like a man and the director had to teach
him everything. But after the first play he had a line of women waiting for him
outside his greenroom. The women had fallen in love with the bad guy. He learnt
how to get women and he learnt that once he gets a woman she would do anything.
He fucked every women who came for his looks. But they fucked the character
they had seen on the stage not Herman. He even had a girlfriend who had fallen
head over heels for him. And when he fucked all the women that lines outside the
stage door, he realized that he loved women but at the same time he wanted to
learn how to be a woman.

He wanted to become a woman and he wanted to take a decision about what he

wants in his life. This is the reason why he went mountain climbing, so as to find
answers to all his problems. There he found a shop with the poster of an old monk
in a cave holding a torch and looking into an open treasure chest and the poster
said “abandon your tedious search the answers have been found.” There he found
books talking about people like him, perverts likehim-homosexuals, lesbians,
rapists, psychiatrists, politicians etc.

Six years later Herman is working in that Diabology sales office in New York and
one day a woman walked into his office saying that she needed his help. She was
going on crying and people outside the office who knew her very well were
laughing at her. It turns out that the women is a transsexual and she had this
operation to make her a woman and now that he has gotten into Diabology
department have convinced her she has done the wrong thing and she wanted to
know if she pays enough money to Herman will she grow another cock. He
couldn’t give her an answer. After a few years he left the church of Diabology and
set in search of his gender blur.

We see Doc Grinder intervening and asking Herman certain questions. This is done
in the form of a reality show named ‘what’s my gender’. Herman says that he
doesn’t like having sex with men, hence he was not gay. He feels like a woman
irrespective of whatever dress he wears. Herman also makes it clear that he knows
very well the privileges that he will be leaving behind if he becomes a woman. He
states that he is a woman who like women. And the reality show ends with a final
question from Doc Grinder – “Herman, What’s your gender?” And Herman
answers with “I’m a woman”..Herman is abandoned by his mother, wife and
friends when he declares that he was a transsexual lesbian. Everyone left him.

He goes to Doctor Razor for undergoing a sex change operation. The doctor
misuses Herman by making him pay more money so that the doctor can pay money
to the bill collectors. Razor is one of the best doctors along with Dr. Weener, but
the scene in which they appear clearly shows us that they are not showing justice to
their job. Razer’s even made a mistake while doing the sex change operation on
another patient. This clearly shows how difficult it was for people to have a proper
and guaranteed sex change surgery. In the end Herman gets the operation done and
changes his name to Katherine.

Central Themes of play

Fluidity of Gender : Both the characters Herman and Herculine expose the fact
that gender is not a fixed entity; it is fluid. Gender is not taken for granted, but it
can be altered if it is required to do so. The first character, Herman, was born as
a woman, but eventually a male organ developed in her body, which she
discovered. She was born as a man who was trapped in a female body. But as
her longing for masculinity grows, not only mentally but also physically, she
has transformed into a male. The second character, Herculine, was born as a
man and was even attracted to and seduced by women. He even physically
consumed many of them as well. But later, he identified that his attraction for
women was true, but he actually desired a female identity. Just like Herculine,
Herman is a female trapped inside a male body. So he did the gender
reassignment surgery and became a woman.
 Gender and sexuality: The play is an account of the problems that related
to Gender and sexuality. It unveils the life of people who are disregarded by
the society, and titled as ‘outcast’ because of their blurred state of gender and
sexuality. The characters Herculine and Herman life comprehend the
atrocities that they have faced in the name of Gender and sexuality.
 Trans Homosexuality : Kate Bornstein who illustrate her own life as
someone who went through most subjugated experience because of a trans
homosexual. The character of Herman actually mirrors Kate own life. The
troubles and intimidating life of a trans homosexual is miserable to explain.
The usual attitude towards trans people is disgust and rejection. So the
challenge have to face by Trans Homosexuals is horrible in nature.
 Subversion of gender mainstreaming and conventions : The function of
Queer theatre is to question the mainstreaming gender and tendencies to
reject LGBTQ people as well. The play purposefully subverts the
stereotypical portrait of sex and gender that announce the conventional as
well as mainstreaming gender ‘either men or women '. Both the character’s
life illustrate the subversion of the constructed gender is possible and also
confirm no man or women determined to be man or woman forever.
 Deconstructs Social constructed gender and sexuality
 Prioritise over LGTBQ
 Defiance of Gender conformity: The term ‘gender-conforming’ refers to an
individual or a behaviour that is consistent with the gender expectations of
the society in question. Gender-conformity can come in many forms,
including dress, work, child care, or leisure activities. The characters who
predominantly scrutinize the possibility to live away from gender
conformity. But The character Herculine who ended up committing suicide
 because she became no longer able to live in a society that force people into
fit into a gender though they don’t want to be. The death of Herculine
enunciate how far she became unbearable of the atrocities from society as
being an individual who defended gender conformity.

The Queer theatre is the critical assessment of the gender construction and order
ideas, this particular play questions the stereotypical image of women as inferior
and oppressed. In a world where the main stream of gender only exists within the
male or female concept, either man or woman is accepted, and others are expelled
or declined themselves. So she believes that only queer theatre can become the
third space for others. Queer theatre is a critical assessment of the constructed
order of gender as well as performativity.

Main idea of the work that poignantly raise the question that is it necessary to be a
man or a woman? The play accentuate idea of the fluidity of gender is needed.
There should come a time when the column for sex would completely disappear
from all forms and arenas. Kate even discusses about gender blur, which is the
subject of the play as well. People like Kate, Herman, and Herculine are not men
as well as women. But at the same time they have both men and women within
them. This is what we call a gender blur. They are in a constant search to find a
home. Home is a place where we feel ‘be-longed’ to. For them, home is where they
will be accepted as what they are and will not be forced by society to ‘fit’ into one
of the categories created by society, which is ‘male’ or ‘female’. Inferiority of a
subject is produced by social norms. This is a mark of subjection. ‘I’m a girl but
I’m a boy, I am” – Kate Bornstein.