Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
Edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman
Seal Press. 304 pages, $16.95
THIS BOOK is a kind of sequel to Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, published in 1994. Gender Outlaw, which has become a staple in Queer Studies classrooms, questions the fundamental necessity of dividing the human race into only two genders assumed to be “natural” and mutually exclusive. Gender oppression, in Bornstein’s view, is not only a form of inequality imposed on the value-neutral categories of “male” and “female,” but is intrinsic to them. As a charismatic speaker and performance artist, Kate Bornstein exemplifies her own argument. She has done a lot to spread the message that every person in every human culture performs a gender role.
