Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.

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.

To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.

I do not deny certain kinds of biological differences. But I always ask under what conditions, under what discursive and institutional conditions, do certain biological differences - and they're not necessary ones, given the anomalous state of bodies in the world - become the salient characteristics of sex.

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.

Let me say one thing to clarify my position. I think we can take distance from norm but I think we are also mired in norm, "empêtrés", I think you say in French. And I think the choices we can make are only in a certain struggle with the norms out of which we're constituted.

The pleasurable part of public mourning can also lead to a sense of self-sanctification that justifies in advance any war effort, whether or not the target and destruction are in any way related to the initial event.