Gender Performance Quotes

“Long before we had writing or farms or post-digital strike helicopters, we had each other. We lived together and changed each other, and so we needed to say “this is who I am, this is what I do.”

So, in the same way that we attached sounds to meanings to make language, we began to attach clusters of behavior to signal social roles. Those clusters were rich, and quick-changing, and so just like language, we needed networks devoted to processing them. We needed a place in the brain to construct and to analyze gender.”
― Isabel Fall

“The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure.”
― Bell Hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation

“Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque

“No desafio de repensar as categorias do gênero fora da metafísica da substância, é mister considerar a relevância da afirmação de Nietzsche, em Genealogia da Moral, de que “não há ‘ser’ por trás do fazer, do realizar e do tornar-se; o ‘fazedor’ é uma mera ficção acrescentada à obra — a obra é tudo”. Numa aplicação que o próprio Nietzsche não teria antecipado ou aprovado, nós afirmaríamos como corolário: não há identidade de gênero por trás das expressões do gênero; essa identidade é performativamente constituída, pelas próprias “expressões” tidas como seus resultados.”
― Judith Butler

“On weekdays, everyone would read Armistead Maupan's "Tales of the City," published as a novel in 1978. His leading character Michael "Mouse" Toliver, a clone-ish softie himself, laments the experience of meeting men– nice mustache, Levis, a starched khaki army shirt, strong– and trying to resist visiting the bathrooms, lest he encounter the giveaway, the fantasy-killer: face creams and shampoos for days." Mouse was only being wistful, but the underlying efemmophobia was pernicious on the scene. Masculinity can be something that gay men project onto one another, only to snatch it away at the first sign of inauthenticity. That they hadn't rolled out of bed looking ruggedly handsome, but required a beauty routine to get that way.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out