Judith Butler Quotes

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.

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.

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 sort of expect to see men in women's clothes. It's part of our culture. The key thing is, it has to be done quite badly.

I'm not trying to be a girl by putting on a dress - gender is separated by fabric.

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

I was always just so feminine. I don't think anyone who ever met me would describe me as a man.

It's my view that gender is culturally formed, but it's also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation.

My roles in the '80s were, like, gender dysphoric. I wasn't pretty, I wasn't this, I wasn't that. And I am kind of butchy, you know. That's just my thing.

Gender is a way to hide from the simple truth we all tell: 'Hey, I'm here, I have a body.'

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 don't think gender even exists.

A lot of people still have the idea that drag goes from one end of the gender spectrum to the other end of the gender spectrum, and they expect drag queens to be masculine out of drag and hyper-feminine in drag. I think that portrays a lot of binary thinking and, ultimately, a lot of misogyny.

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.

All the people that are so quick to say that, like, because I wear womenswear sometimes, that means I'm transitioning. People are just so ignorant and dumb sometimes.

I'm totally fine with myself. It's the other people I run into out there who are so hung up on gender. The way it trips them up is their problem, not mine.

Gender doesn't exist in my book.

I don't feel like a very feminine woman sometimes. I feel manly. When I was in my twenties I would say I was a masculine girl and now I realise the whole idea of femaleness is a construct. I'm a boyish girl, who talks over people and I do a boyish job.

I don't think I present as gender-conforming on screen, but some people need a little extra information.

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

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.

I never worry about the social backlash against my work because I'm a man in a dress, and somehow American society creates a buffer on how severe things are when you put a man in a dress.

I had always been a tomboy - I still am, at heart.

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