Judith Butler Quotes

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender... identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results.

To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

I saw my gender - and myself - as something of a construct. Like anyone who read one too many women studies' books in the 1990s, I aspired to both 'do' and undo my sex.

We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

I always felt like the male from the time I was a child. There wasn't much feminine about me.

We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it's a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.

Oh, completely liberating because even if you don't do a woman right, you just have to put on high heels a wig, a bra and a dress, and I feel liberated.

When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that we've taken on a role or we're acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.

The art of what they call female impersonation, or the drag shows, really helped me to hone what type of woman I was.

I believe in assigned sex but not necessarily gender. Gender is a learned construct that is detrimental to both sexes.

We've been socialised and told that there is a way to describe people, and that way is by their gender or their sex.

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.

We have to find a way of understanding how one category of sex can be "assigned" from both and another sense of sex can lead us to resist and reject that sex assignment. How do we understand that second sense of sex? It is not the same as the first - it is not an assignment that others give us. But maybe it is an assignment we give ourselves? If so, do we not need a world of others, linguistic practices, social institutions, and political imaginaries in order to move forward to claim precisely those categories we require, and to reject those that work against us?

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

I take my hat off to the ladies. The amount of grooming-plucking and shaving and all the other things men never have to do. I went down and spent time with transvestites in London in the clubs and all that. Got an insight to that world, and it's a mad world, but they are very warm and very open people. It was a great experience.

I was assigned male at birth, is the way I like to put it, because I think... we're born who we are... and the gender thing is something someone imposes on you. And so, I was assigned male at birth, but I always felt like I was a girl.

When I was young, I and the whole world thought that all homosexuals were effeminate. And of course they're not. You can just see which people are effeminate; that's the only difference. So, I became a prototype of the effeminate man, because I was conspicuously effeminate. But camp is not something I do, it's something I am.

On Madonna: She's a gay man trapped in a woman's body.

The sex curriculum will be essentially by taught by the local gay community.

Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above.

The mind has no sex.

As I said in the Times and will say again here, I do, however, believe that most members of our community - as well as the majority of heterosexuals - cannot and do not choose the gender of the persons with whom they seek to have intimate relationships because, unlike me, they are only attracted to one sex.

I went to a gay bar, they wanted proof of sex so I showed them, they said it wasn't enough.