Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger
Transgender-dyke. Reluctant-Polyamorist. Sadomasochist. Recovering-Scientologist. Pioneering Gender Outlaw. - Meet Auntie Kate.
Trailblazing performance artist-theorist-activist, Kate Bornstein, takes us on a mind-bending quest through her world dismantling gender and seeking answers to the age-old question: What makes life worth living? Kate Bornstein is... captures rollicking public performances and painful personal revelations bearing witness to the pioneering gender outlaw who inhabits a space between male and female with wit, style, and astonishing candor. Frequenting 1990's day-time talk shows, Kate's book Gender Outlaw secured her place in history. While paving the way for generations of gender non-conforming people, she alienated others resulting in live protests and open letters going viral on the Internet. Increasingly, films narrate the personal lives and transitions of transgender people.
Moving the genre forward, Kate Bornstein is... focuses on Kate's brilliant work and multiplicity of complicated identities. As she receives a grim cancer diagnosis, Kate confronts her own mortality and purpose in life, giving her own motto renewed urgency: "Do whatever it takes to make your life worth living. Just don't be mean." By turns meditative and playful, the film invites us on a thought-provoking journey through Kate's world seeking answers to some of our biggest questions.
"This is a must-see documentary of 2014 and a treasure trove of preserved queer/trans history of Kate Bornstein's life and work. Bornstein's family history and relationships, stint in The Church of Scientology, her writing, books, activism, relationships, themes of gender and sexuality, a striking health diagnosis, and her search to answer some of life's deepest questions are explored in this interwoven, whimsical, and inspired portrait documentary of the wonderful Kate Bornstein. It's a must see documentary and a treasure trove of preserved queer/trans history of Kate Bornstein's life and work. It is also sure to warm hearts: Kate's charm pours out of the screen and is so affecting. Her recent cancer diagnosis, on top of her lifelong leukemia, make the production of the documentary incredibly timely and incredibly necessary." Ewan Duarte, Indie Wire
"Basking in the sartorial splendor that is our lady of perpetual nonconformity, Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger offers up a cinematic landscape we've not yet witnessed: the deserted railroad tracks of familial impasse, the shared feasts of domestic intimacy, and a visually-stunning oceanside sit-down between Kate and Sandy Stone. Scene by scene, Feder exposes the performance within the performance within the performance--nothing short of a trans revolution set to the score of our ever-evolving politics. - Maxe Crandall, writer, professor Stanford University
** BEST FEATURE DOCUMENTARY - Trans|Lations Film Festival, Seattle WA 2014
** FAVORITE FILM -Beacon Independent Film Festival, Beacon, NY 2014
** 1 OF TOP 10 BEST DOCS OF 2014 -The Advocate 2014
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Comments (2)
KB has kept me alive again and again since I was 14.
I began this film to celebrate trans lives. By the end I discovered the secret to what makes life more worth living. Kate Bornstein’s work through post-modern theory was instrumental in claiming a space for a non-binary gender. This work has given thousands of people, including myself, the ...Read more
I began this film to celebrate trans lives. By the end I discovered the secret to what makes life more worth living. Kate Bornstein’s work through post-modern theory was instrumental in claiming a space for a non-binary gender. This work has given thousands of people, including myself, the language and permission to inhabit gender in ways that are seldom given any space and /or time. Kate Bornstein is a Queer & Pleasant Danger, in content and form, reflects both this influence and theory. The film is nonlinear and rejects reductive explanations of being trans. For the initiated it is a more intimate experience with Kate. For the unacquainted it’s an invitation to learn. The film resists the tropes that are far too common in films about trans people such as an emphasis on a coming out journey, a medical transition, before and after pictures, experts or family members talking about the trans-subject – all of which I have come to believe are misguided and dangerous to our survival. I invite the viewer along – with Kate as your guide – into an unapologetically queer universe that is complicated and beautiful. And encourages you to consider what makes life more worth living.
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