(..) Certainly, we can and do try and discern various strategies that might contest dominant gender norms, and those strategies are essential to any radical gender and sexual politics. But we would doubtless make a mistake if we thought that we might remake our gender or reconstruct our sexuality on the basis of a deliberate decision. And even when we decide to change gender, or produce gender, it is on the basis of some very powerful desires that we make such a choice. We do not precisely choose those desires. Of course, gender and sexuality are different issues, but I do not think they can be fully dissociated. Certain forms of sexuality are linked with phantasies about gender, and certain ways of living gender require certain kinds of sexual practices. There are significant and widespread discontinuities between gender norms and normative sexuality, as we know. But in relation to both gender and sexuality, none of us has the choice of creating ourselves ex nihilo. We are transformed and acted upon prior to any action we might take. And though we can radically rework our genders or even try to rework our sexualities (though often failing), we are in the grip of norms even as we struggle against them.
In my view, gender is a passionate comportment, a way of living the body with and for others; and although sexuality is not reducible to gender in any sense, it is crafted and mobilized by signifiers that none of us actually choose. You might decide on what kinds of sexual relations you want; indeed, you might decide who enters you and whom you would like to enter, but even then, you are not deciding on the passion. You are deciding about what to do about something that is in part already decided for you, something that is prior to deliberation and never fully within its control. You are given over before you decide where and when to give yourself over. Performativity is a process that implies being acted on in ways we do not always fully understand, and of acting, in politically consequential ways. Performativity has everything to do with “who” can become produced as a recognizable subject, a subject who is living, whose life is worth sheltering and whose life, when lost, would be worthy of mourning. Precarious life characterizes such lives who do not qualify as recognizable, readable, or grievable. And in this way, precarity is rubric that brings together women, queers, transgender people, the poor, and the stateless.

(Judith Butler "Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics")