Meredith Monk Quotes

Masculine and feminine aspects exist in all beings.

Masculinity involves feminine qualities, and femininity involves masculine qualities.

We all have a cross-gender character: Every woman has a man that they can play, and every man has a woman that they can play.

I guess all of us have a little bit of both masculinity and femininity, and bridging the gap between those two things is really fertile.

Women's liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman.

I was a tomboy as a kid - I was skinny and had cropped hair and was often mistaken for a boy - and up until I was about six, I had my own very fluid ideas of gender in that I believed that, somehow, an individual could choose whether or not s/he wanted to be a boy or a girl.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

I wanted to show a normal young girl whose only difference was that she behaved in the way a boy might, without any sense of guilt on a moral or sexual level.

When I was born, there was a very isolated idea of what it meant to be a man or a woman, and you belonged to one gender or the other.

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Sex and gender are such befuddling mysteries even for those of us who are in the mainstream that you'd think we'd be wary of being judgmental. Yet much of society clings to a view that gender is completely binary, when, in fact, there's overwhelming evidence of a continuum.

Gender is between your ears and not between your legs.

I don't have the panic I used to have, meeting people who are androgynous, but when you meet someone whose identity is unclear, that throws your own identity into flux because the way we treat each other is very gendered.

I'm not convinced that what are traditionally considered to be male energies or qualities or female energies or qualities really have as much to do with gender as many people think they do.

I believe gender is a spectrum, and I fall somewhere between Channing Tatum and Winnie the Pooh.

The woman most in need of liberation is the woman in every man and the man in every woman.

… a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness for a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman

I get the male thing. I like being that for a woman. But I also like being a woman, too. I like being girly.

I look like a woman, but I think like a man.

I don't know what I am if I'm not a woman.

Bodies have a sex, but gender is a thing we made up, like your star sign or nationality. It doesn't really say anything about who you are. The destruction of gender binary would free everybody.

I'm really proud that MTV has joined the conversation about breaking down binaries.

I feel like there's no such thing as gender.

I absolutely think it is more acceptable for people who were assigned female at birth to dress in a typically gender non-conforming way. There was a time when people of all genders had long hair and anyone who wanted to wore jewelry - it was more a sign of status than a sign of femininity, per se.

Any kind of gender expression is performance for me, regardless of where it is on the spectrum.