Judith Butler Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I always felt like the male from the time I was a child. There wasn't much feminine about me.

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

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.

As you get older it's more confusing. Suddenly, there's more pressure to fit in to your assigned gender.

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 don't think gender even exists.

I would not want to play a girl who masquerades as a boy for the rest of my life.

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've definitely met some people that cultivated a masculinity that they taught themselves. I don't know how they figured out how to do it, but I couldn't.

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.

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.

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

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.