Although there are authoritative discourses on gender -the law, medicine, and psychiatry, to name a few- and they seek to launch and sustain human life within discrete gendered terms, they do not always succeed in containing the effects of those discourses of gender they bring into play. Moreover, it turns out that there can be no reproduction of gendered norms without the bodily enact­ ment of those norms, and when that field of norms breaks open, even if provisionally, we see that the animating aims of a regula­ tory discourse, as it is enacted bodily, give rise to consequences that are not always foreseen, making room for ways of living gender that challenge prevailing norms ofrecognition.

— Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly by Judith Butler (Page 31 - 32)