Judith Butler Quotes

I think we have to ask, not, what "Gender trouble" is today but where "Gender trouble" is today.

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

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 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.

We have to look at queerness as a means towards challenging normativity.

On ne na:"t pas femme: on le devient. One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman.

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.

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.

My first performance poem was about how sometimes I was teased for being manly, or a tomboy or whatever. It was saying how just because I looked a certain way and displayed myself a certain way didn't mean that I wasn't also a feminine human...a woman if you will.

"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 it [Trouble In Mind] was the only time Divine didn't appear in drag, or certainly one of the few times, anyway. Alan created a time and place that was no time and no place, so it was not identifiable with any particular period or any particular city or any particular country, for that matter. I mean, everybody spoke English, but that was about it. So you couldn't pigeonhole that film.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.

I'm wary of the word glam because I think that became the all-inclusive term with for any bloke with lipstick on, which is fine, you know, and that's what it is when it comes down to the public level.

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.

A man who reads effeminate may well be consistently heterosexual, and another one might be gay. We can't read sexuality off of gender.

Being perceived as a guy is nothing new or complicated to me. It is what it is.

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.

If I hadn't been born a woman, I would have certainly been gay.

I want to be a guy, but I want to wear a lot of makeup.

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.

I feel like I'm a drag queen.

I would say that I'm a feminist theorist before I'm a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist.

My own experience of gender has been about a lot of fluidity. In drag, I like to combine aspects of masculinity and femininity and rewrite the rules for those.

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

I'm of the opinion that gender is a social construct.