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Karina's picture

a lesson from kate bornstein

 

The thing that stayed with me the most after Kate's performance was the piece that she did about her 8th grade English teacher and the meaning of pronouns. I was struck by the obviousness of the things was pointing out, even though they were precisely the things about which one rarely thinks explicitly. “He” is used universally as the default “neutral” gender – a privilege which “she” has never and will never experience. If he is the default, it’s no wonder that “she” is the break from the expected, the disruption of the norm, the aberrant. Of course, at least “she” is a known radical, one that is still name-able. What happens is the disruption from the norm lacks a name, is neither the expected norm nor the one known radical (something outside of the he-she binary)? If that unnamed radical is so elusive it can’t even be named, then naturally it makes sense for people in our [fill-in-the-blank]-normative society to assume that it cannot possibly exist. It’s not that it’s a deviation from the norm – that’s already been taken care of: spotted, identified, and tagged as a “she” – it’s that its neither the norm nor the deviation from the norm. It’s neither IT nor NOT-IT. Boggles your mind, doesn’t it?

 

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