Theater

Gender politics

by Dorie Clark

Fresh on the spiked heels of last year's Too Tall Blondes Do Sex, Death, and Gender, transgender performance artist Kate Bornstein returns to Boston on Monday with Y2Kate: Gender Virus 2000 -- which takes on the rapid spread of new notions about gender.

"On a lot of levels, people are changing their definitions about what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman," she says. "Some people, my people, are changing their bodies. Others are changing their identities without doing anything physically. What's ironic is that I'm old-school: being a transsexual isn't the only way to change your gender now."

The performance -- which will include a pop quiz for the audience, monologues, and an introduction by famed feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan -- sifts through the phenomena Bornstein has observed. She points, for example, to "a redefining of straight and queer based not on who you sleep with, but how you do it and how loud you are about it."

Start your week off right by subverting the binary-gender system: catch Y2Kate: Gender Virus 2000 this Monday, October 23, at 6 p.m. in Askwith Lecture Hall, Longfellow Hall, Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Appian Way, Cambridge. Admission is free. Call (617) 495-0740.