Courtney Barnett Quotes

I felt alien my whole life, but I didn't feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.

One is not born a woman, but becomes one.

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.

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.

Ah, well, do I wish that we lived in a world where gender didn't figure so prominently? Of course. Do I even think about myself as a woman when I go to make art? Of course not.

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 was really raised in a gender-neutral household. I always knew I was a girl, but it never occurred to me that there was a limitation.

I grew up in a very patriarchal family. And I believe that I like being a woman. I act behaving like a woman.

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

I'm pretty feminine.

When I was five, long before I understood what the word 'gender' meant, I would always tell my mother that I wished I were a girl.

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

Masculinity involves feminine qualities, and femininity involves masculine qualities.

When gender comes down upon us, male or female, it comes as a restriction.

The terms 'male' and 'female' must be understood as representing no mere primitive opposition of sex to sex; but as defining two worlds of differing quality, in either of which men and women may jointly move and live.

I want to say that the way in which we understand gender actually changes the way we live gender.

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.

If we keep on talking about masculine and feminine and following those stereotypes, then we will make women suppress and despise their so called masculine qualities and men suppress and despise their so called feminine ones, and that's where all the trouble starts.

The more people, as you know, are able to be on whatever spectrum of femininity and masculinity they are on at that moment, that opens the door for women to not have to be the opposite of what the supposed traditional male is.

No one's female and male, we all have so many different traits. It's just a lie that these certain traits are male and these certain traits are female.

Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so that they no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves.

It seems to me that "Gender trouble" will always be important to try and open up our ideas of what gender is. So, I don't know if it's revolutionary, but maybe it still has something to say to those issues.

I am like a woman. I have a woman inside me.

I am not metrosexual. I am not macho. I am normal. I don't even wear nail paint.