"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. If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all."
"If you look at some of the language in the basic writings of Hamas, there is that famous call to push the Israelis into the sea. Now, I would say that most Palestinian politicians on the ground say, of course that's not what we want, and even within Hamas there is some published debate about that claim, but until the claim is removed, it's still noxious."
3 likes
Source: Source: www.opendemocracy.net
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Judith Butler
"Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being."
"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 its 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."
"Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed."
"We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world."
"Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision."