Judith Butler

Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics.

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• Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a "doing" rather than a "being".
• There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.
  • "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" (1990)

• 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.
  • "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Inside/Out (1991) edited by Diana Fuss

• Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
  • Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)

• Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
  • "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary" (1993), later published in The Judith Butler Reader (2004) edited by Sarah Salih with Judith Butler

• To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it. "About Denis" (2009) edited by Judith Butler