… [The] theory of performativity was originally a theory of gender, about how gender is performed, how gender is enunciated and articulated and how it's done in relationship to certain kinds of norms. Performativity, in the work which I elaborated most fully, probably has to do with becoming a man or becoming a woman, or becoming something else, where the norms of man or woman are hegemonic and one has to negotiate them, either through replicating them and resignifying them or by crossing them or confusing them, or vacating them, or posing them many different relations.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
Cited in: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/quotes/
