I do think it's important that we experiment with new vocabularies. That new words help us conceptualize our social existence in a different way.

It wasn't possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.

Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.

"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.

I have also been invited to talk to psychologists and psychoanalysts and I liked that very much. Because, they are the ones who are bringing a lot of very, you know, problematic ideas about sexuality and gender into psychiatric and psychological settings. And I like having some influence there.

I think we are affected by others in all kinds of ways. I do understand what it's like to wish to control the conditions under which we can be affected by other human beings, but none of us really are.

I'm no great fan of the phallus, and have made my own views known on this subject before, so I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire.