Kate Haskell's review of Gender Outlaw (original) (raw)

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Kate Haskell's Reviews > Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us

Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us
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Gender Outlaw was somewhat frustrating for me on a critical level. The whole book seemed to be written from a Marxist methodology wherein binary pairs are actually waging some kind of dialectic war. Since reading Levinas, I've never really seen binarisms in that way. Polar opposites are self-defining pairs, yes, but one need not be superior. Also, the extremes of the poles aren't the only valid options. Every binary pair is, in essence, a continuum. North has no meaning without South, but it also has no meaning without context. South of what? North of where? Likewise gender is a spectrum. More masculine than what exactly? Feminine with respect to which point on the chart? Bornstein and I arrive in similar places by completely different means, and it drives me batty. As a result, we seem preoccupied with completely different questions. Her questions seem to have a more activist tone — which leads neatly into her call for queer theatre as a form of activism. My questions lead me to ponder the structure itself and what the flaws in the structure have to tell us about our perception of gender and, more generally, the queer.

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Reading Progress

May 12, 2010 –Started Reading

May 26, 2010 –Finished Reading

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