Judith Butler Quotes
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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.
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Law itself is either suspended, or regarded as an instrument that the state may use in the service of constraining and monitoring a given population; the state is not subject to the rule of law, but law can be suspended or deployed tactically and partially to suit the requirements of a state that seeks more and more to allocate sovereign power to its executive and administrative powers. The law is suspended in the name of "sovereignty" of the nation, where "sovereignty" denotes the task of any state to preserve and protect its own territoriality.
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What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation.
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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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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.
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Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs - it is also not always what a trans person needs. Either way, one should be free to determine the course of one's gendered life.
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It seems to me that responsiveness is a better source for understanding what moral claims are and how they work upon us.
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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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So for instance in rap music, you very often hear words that would seem very racist, or very misogynous or very homophobic but in some of those instances, the words are being taken back or redefined so that they lose their injurious quality.
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To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.
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The state or global forms of power that seek to protect populations considered in danger may well extend their own power through those acts of protection.
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Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of slave morality.
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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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I reject totally the characterization of a transwoman as a mutilated man. First, that formulation presumes that men born into that sex assignment are not mutilated. Second, it once again sets up the feminist as the prosecutor of trans people. If there is any mutilation going on in this scene, it is being done by the feminist police force who rejects the lived embodiment of transwomen. That very accusation is a form of "mutilation" as is all transphobic discourse such as these.
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Let me say one thing to clarify my position. I think we can take distance from norm but I think we are also mired in norm, "empêtrés", I think you say in French. And I think the choices we can make are only in a certain struggle with the norms out of which we're constituted.
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Very often, if you just get the question: "Well, are you a Zionist?" if you say no, it's assumed that you want the destruction of the state of Israel and that you're involved in some actual or potential violent attack. But actually, you could say: "Not on this basis".
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It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.
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It's not like it's a brand new vocabulary that permits to have a new reality. It's rather a new vocabulary that lets us see that our lives have always been more complex than traditional categories allow. So, I think, you know, maybe the introduction of new words permits us to rethink what we've taken for granted about what forms bodies take, what the name is for certain kinds of sexual, intimate relations, how we think of a life.
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We cannot choose with whom we cohabit the world.
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I do situate myself in this problem of being a Jew who doesn't want to be represented by the state of Israel, a state that claims to represent all Jewish people and make me into a potential citizen.
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I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are.
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Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.
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I know that some subjective experiences of sex are very firm and fundamental, even unchangeable. They can be so firm and unchanging that we call them "innate". But given that we report on such a sense of self within a social world, a world in which we are trying to use language to express what we feel, it is unclear what language does that most effectively. I understand that "innate" is a word that conveys the sense of something hired-wired and constitutive. I suppose I would be inclined to wonder whether other vocabularies might do the job equally well.
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Revenge tries to solve the problem of vulnerability. If I strike back, I transfer vulnerability from myself to the other. And yet by striking back I produce a world in which my vulnerability to injury is increased by the likelihood of another strike. So it seems as if I'm getting rid of my vulnerability and instead locating it with the other, but actually I'm heightening the vulnerability of everyone and I'm heightening the possibility of violence that happens between us.