Top 85 Judith Butler Quotes

#1. Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #12906
#2. There is a new venue for theory, necessarily impure, where it emerges in and as the very event of cultural translation. This is not the displacement of theory by historicism, nor a simple historicization of theory that exposes the contingent limits of its more generalizable claims.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #13903
#3. Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #14160
#4. I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #55796
#5. 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.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #59920
#6. Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war. It's a commitment to living with a certain kind of vulnerability to others and susceptibility to being wounded that actually gives our individual lives meaning.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #151149
#7. Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #199259
#8. Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #229474
#9. Peace is a resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war .

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #229526
#10. If the subject is neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power ... the subject exceeds the logic of non contradiction, is an excrescence of logic, as it were.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #239847
#11. Irigaray remarks in such a vein that "the masquerade... is what women do... in order to participate in man's desire, but at the cost of giving up their own".

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #247409
#12. The critical image ... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #277205
#13. The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #301384
#14. It seems to me that responsiveness is a better source for understanding what moral claims are and how they work upon us.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #307124
#15. The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #309742
#16. Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #316929
#17. I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #355425
#18. I argue that even as the war is framed in certain ways to control and heighten affect in relation to the differential grievability of lives, so war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues largely considered separate from foreign affairs.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #364677
#19. It's my view that gender is culturally formed, but it's also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #368145
#20. Precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized precariousness for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence who often have no other option than to appeal to the very state from which they need protection.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #369106
#21. It will not do to say that international law is the enemy of the Jewish people, since the Jewish people surely did not as a whole oppose the Nuremburg trials, or the development of human rights law.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #473535
#22. I grew very skeptical of certain kind of Jewish separatism in my youth. I mean, I saw the Jewish community was always with each other; they didn't trust anybody outside. You'd bring someone home, and the first question was, 'Are they Jewish, are they not Jewish?'

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #491069
#23. Only if we accept the proposition that the state of Israel is the exclusive and legitimate representative of the Jewish people would a movement calling for divestment, sanctions and boycott against that state be understood as directed against the Jewish people as a whole.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #492541
#24. Honestly, what can really be said about 'the Jewish people' as a whole? Is it not a lamentable stereotype to make large generalizations about all Jews, and to presume they all share the same political commitments?

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #498891
#25. I think we are affected by others in all kinds of ways. I do understand what it's like to wish to control the conditions under which we can be affected by other human beings, but none of us really are.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #505360
#26. Wittig appears to take issue with genitally organized sexuality per se and to call for an alternative economy of pleasures which would both contest the construction of female subjectivity marked by women's supposedly distinctive reproductive function.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #514439
#27. A phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #591187
#28. Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #654527
#29. War begets war. It produces outraged and humiliated and furious people. That is almost invariably the case.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #657641
#30. We must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #671393
#31. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #692760
#32. Laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #742168
#33. Obama was late to affirm the Egyptian revolution as a democratic movement, and even then he was eager to have installed those military leaders who were known for their practices of torture.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #749453
#34. There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender ... identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #763365
#35. When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that we've taken on a role or we're acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #768171
#36. The principle of academic freedom is designed to make sure that powers outside the university, including government and corporations, are not able to control the curriculum or intervene in extra-mural speech.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #773254
#37. 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.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #784574
#38. I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #797039
#39. I think that public grieving is a good thing. People need to be grieved; loss needs to be acknowledged publicly, because it helps to confer a sense of reality on the loss but also because it makes it known that this was a real life.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #798784
#40. Our notions of what a human being is problematically depend on there being two coherent genders. And if someone doesn't comply with either the masculine norm or the feminine norm, their very humaness is called into question.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #811777
#41. I was off to Yale to be a lesbian

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #824811
#42. To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #835400
#43. Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other. A different dynamic it seems to me is at work in the critique of new sexuality studies.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #842205
#44. To operate within the matrix of
power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #849362
#45. Obama's failure to close Guantanamo is yet another instance where the rhetoric of democratic and constitutional rights proved not useful for his international relations, relations which are always pursued in ways that continue to link and fortify securitarian power with the opening of new markets.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #909008
#46. What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #950656
#47. The subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it. As

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #978790
#48. The exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the subject.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1042808
#49. If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1053996
#50. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is
also the discursive/cultural means by which "sexed nature" or "a natural
sex" is produced and established as "prediscursive," prior to culture,
a politically neutral surface on which culture acts

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1075812
#51. Sexual harassment law is very important. But I think it would be a mistake if the sexual harassment law movement is the only way in which feminism is known in the media.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1101886
#52. My parents were practicing Jews. My mother grew up in an orthodox synagogue, and after my grandfather died, she went to a conservative synagogue and a little later ended up in a reform synagogue. My father was in reform synagogues from the beginning.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1135736
#53. It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1149274
#54. If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1182878
#55. Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1194389
#56. Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1202931
#57. You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1310364
#58. Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1318028
#59. Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the existence of the small but important post-Zionist movement in Israel, including the philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram, the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet Yitzhak Laor.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1366973
#60. Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1424215
#61. The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1436427
#62. There is no reason to assume that gender also ought to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1440582
#63. Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act ... a doing rather than a being.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1457247
#64. The argument that all Jews have a heartfelt investment in the state of Israel is untrue. Some have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1462899
#65. Are we not, ethically speaking, obligated to stop its (violence) further dissemination, to consider our role in instigating it, and to forment and cultivate another sense of a culturally and religiously diverse global political culture?

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1503535
#66. We're not in control [of circumstances], but that does not mean we don't exercise a certain kind of conditioned agency. That's what it means to live in a community. That's what it means to live in society.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1513407
#67. When one set of Jews labels another set of Jews 'anti-Semitic,' they are trying to monopolize the right to speak in the name of the Jews. So the allegation of anti-Semitism is actually a cover for an intra-Jewish quarrel.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1545420
#68. A challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people only if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive or that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of Israel in its current or traditional forms.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1565918
#69. We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both "what" we do (the name for the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1573685
#70. Relationality [is] not only [a] descriptive or historical fact of our formation, but also an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives, one in which we are compelled to take stock of our interdependence.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1578746
#71. I would say that I'm a feminist theorist before I'm a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1586188
#72. Cameras help to minimize collateral damage, and very often, without a camera a missile cannot fire. Certainly, without a camera a drone can't function, which means that the very ways in which we wage war are determined in part by how cameras work and whether they work at all.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1689732
#73. We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1692063
#74. The life doesn't simply get erased. It gets imprinted and remembered.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1696257
#75. Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1699052
#76. There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1711096
#77. A man who reads effeminate may well be consistently heterosexual, and another one might be gay. We can't read sexuality off of gender.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1743421
#78. Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive?

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1752520
#79. Until we learn that other lives are equally grievable and have an equal demand on us to be grieved - especially the ones that we've helped to eliminate - I'm not sure we'll really be on the way to overcoming the problem of dehumanization.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1754507
#80. As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1821808
#81. Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of slave morality.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1831773
#82. 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.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1833237
#83. Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1834086
#84. Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1844413
#85. It seems that every text has more sources than it can reconstruct within its own terms.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes #1875038

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