Judith Butler Quotes

I think I never expected "Gender trouble" to have any particularly revolutionary effect so whatever effects it has, I'm always surprised.

It's not my concern. It's your concern. I just keep working. I keep posing certain questions and I think there are times when people think "What happened to the Judith Butler I used to know?" or "She's not doing gender trouble. Does that mean she refuses it or she's disavowed it?" And I would say no. I have not refused or disavowed anything.

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.

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.

"Gender trouble" is old. I mean, you know, in New York, it is old. I mean it's sweet. I mean people are really kind about it but it's like a former love affair you had and you're done.

I think in times of fear and hysteria in a culture, gender experimentation as it pertains to men has to go underground because it scares people too much and it's too much for people to take on. Especially when a culture is held hostage by fear and hysteria and fundamentalism.

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 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.

The business of fiction is the study of the human condition, and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with, thus making it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human condition!

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.

Some people look gender non-conforming because they want to look that way - they don't want to conform to society's expectations.

Gender is between your ears and not between your legs.

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.

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

Dressing up like a woman does not make me less of a man.

What we really need to look at is gender fluidity and the idea that gender can be customised however you want.

Transgender doesn't need to imply loud.

We're still stuck in male, female, feminism. I don't believe in, you know... I believe in gender equality.

As I began to grow, my family thought my obsessive interest in girly things was just a normal developmental phase.

The gender thing doesn't exist; it's a social construct you don't have to fit into.

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.

The important thing is to think about theory in life in that way. And I think we don't have to be theorists, we don't have to have gone to the academy, or to the university to learn theory and to be a theorist of gender.

Those that think my clothes are androgynous also still believe that women should look like Barbie dolls. That's precisely the problem, the deep-rooted assumptions about what is feminine.

I don't think about being male or female, I just behave naturally. I think in terms of excellence in science, not gender.