Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being. — Judith Butler

Everyone has a set of presuppositions: what gender is, what it’s not. And they may not write them out or they may not be in theoretical books published by Routledge, but they have a theory. — Judith Butler

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. — Judith Butler

Every taxi driver I have ever spoken to has a theory of gender. — Judith Butler

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. — Judith Butler

I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women’s safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. — Judith Butler

I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender–free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are. — Judith Butler

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

What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some. — Judith Butler

Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me. — Judith Butler

Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed — Judith Butler

I don’t think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war. — Judith Butler

Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive? — Judith Butler

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender… identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results. — Judith Butler

Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. — Judith Butler

You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity. — Judith Butler