Atifa Zaidi

“The exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the subject.”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“Irigaray remarks in such a vein that "the masquerade... is what women do... in order to participate in man's desire, but at the cost of giving up their own".”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality.”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“If there is something right in Beauvoir's claim that one is born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity