I think I never expected "Gender trouble" to have any particularly revolutionary effect so whatever effects it has, I'm always surprised.

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.

I do know that some people believe that I see gender as a "choice" rather than as an essential and firmly fixed sense of self. My view is actually not that. No matter whether one feels one's gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives.

We have to have a very strong criticism of modes of cooperation that entrench inequality.

We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said we "should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge." It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability.

Where is democratic process or popular sovereignty for the endangered population? It cannot be "given" or "allocated" by some other power without that same power claiming the right to withdraw what it gives.