Kate Bornstein on social justice, Scientology, breaking social barriers
By Emily Bartlett
Published: Monday, September 24, 2012
http://www.tuftsdaily.com/kate-bornstein-on-social-justice-scientology-breaking-social-barriers-1.2768301The Tufts Social Leadership Initiative is hosting Kate Bornstein in Cohen Auditorium today for a lecture entitled: "World Peace through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity." If that title isn't enough to get you interested, the Daily had the opportunity to interview Bornstein about the upcoming event, her experiences in Scientology and being one of the first people to say that there's more to gender than just a man and a woman.
Tufts Daily: Tell me a little about what your talk is going to focus on this Monday at Tufts.
Kate Bornstein: I'm coming up to Tufts to speak on social justice. There have been attempts of coalition of marginalized people in the United States for a long time, but people keep getting left out. People that get left out a lot are people with mental health issues, people with disabilities, people with different genders, people with different sexualities or even activists fighting on behalf of equity on any of those four systems.
I'm looking to forge a true coalition of the margins. I think there are 15 spaces of cultural regulation, and gender and sexuality are only two of them. So are looks, so is disability, so is mental health, so is religion, race, age, class: 15 in total. What I want to show is how what I've learned from my analysis of gender as a transgender person, how that can be brought to bear to deconstruct the binaries that the other 14 spaces of regulation are masquerading as.
