Judith Butler Quotes
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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.
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I think I never expected "Gender trouble" to have any particularly revolutionary effect so whatever effects it has, I'm always surprised.
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We have to be able track the ways in which fear, for instance, is monopolised by state and media institutions, ways in which fear is actually promoted and distributed as a way of bolstering the need for greater security and militarisation.
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In the first instance, performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.
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The problem with Antigone is that she stood up to the despot Creon, but in such a way that she ended up dying. So she bought her defiance with her death. The real question I ended up asking was, "What would it mean for Antigone to have stood up to Creon and lived?" And the only way she could have lived is if she had had a serious social movement with her. If she arrived with a social movement to take down the despot, maybe it would have taken 18 days only, like in Egypt. It's really important to be able to re-situate one's rage and destitution in the context of a social movement.
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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.
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Where is democratic process or popular sovereignty for the endangered population? It cannot be "given" or "allocated" by some other power without that same power claiming the right to withdraw what it gives.
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Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
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Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
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All of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions - or norms - that help to form us.
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It is true that non-governmental organisations working within strong human rights frameworks are now confounded by securitarian forms of logic and power that extend the paternalistic bias of their work in new ways.
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No matter what someone else has done, it still matters how we treat people. It matters to our humanity that we treat offenders according to standards that we recognize as just. Justice is not revenge - it's deciding for a solution that is oriented towards peace, peace being the harder but more human way of reacting to injury. That is the very basis of the idea of rights.
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The Gulf War was a clear precedent as well, and it let us begin to understand how the US government would go to war to secure strategic oil reserves and potential markets.
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I think something happens only when people find that they are moved with others, find themselves linked or allied in new ways, showing up or speaking out in ways that resonate with one another. That resonating can be very compelling and lead to moving and speaking more emphatically and with sharper focus.
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Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.
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Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person's felt sense of gender was therefore "unreal." That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be. But I think I needed to pay more attention to what people feel, how the primary experience of the body is registered, and the quite urgent and legitimate demand to have those aspects of sex recognized and supported.
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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?
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Nothing is more important for transgender people than to have access to excellent health care in trans-affirmative environments, to have the legal and institutional freedom to pursue their own lives as they wish, and to have their freedom and desire affirmed by the rest of the world. This will happen only when transphobia is overcome at the level of individual attitudes and prejudices and in larger institutions of education, law, health care, and kinship.
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Genocide is not a legitimate option. It's not ok to decide that an entire population has no right to live in the world. No matter whether these relationships are very proximate or very distant, there is no entitlement to expunge a population or to demean its basic humanity.
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If you are asking whether states and state actors can only respond through revenge, then you are suggesting that diplomatic solutions are hopeless.
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Everyone has a set of presuppositions: what gender is, what it's not. And they may not write them out or they may not be in theoretical books published by Routledge, but they have a theory.
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We need to be I think equally sensitive to the injurious power of certain kinds of speech acts but also to the subversive and possibly liberatory effects of certain kinds of play.
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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?
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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.