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We need a legal and political understanding of the right of the refugee, whereby no solution for one group produces a new class of refugees - you can't solve a refugee problem by producing a new, potentially greater refugee problem.
Judith Butler -
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.
Judith Butler
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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.
Judith Butler -
So there might be a kind of collective effort that allows for those risks to be taken, pose a certain danger but not a suicidal one.
Judith Butler -
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 -
We cannot choose with whom we cohabit the world.
Judith Butler -
I think maybe the destructive pleasure got turned into the destructive pleasure of war (something we see still in the images of US soldiers urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban soldiers). Something of the pleasure in destruction gets unleashed, and then becomes part of war effort rationalised first as revenge (or justice defined as revenge). But then it takes new forms, as we see now.
Judith Butler -
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
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There are surely many ways that media select and contextualise events determine the boundaries of public thinking happens, but we can note at the most obvious level the way in which forms of resistance or violence get cast as "conflicts" that assume two sides that are fighting only against one another.
Judith Butler -
It is clear that whatever language of democracy Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests.
Judith Butler -
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.
Judith Butler -
I want my arguments to be good arguments on the basis of what I actually have to say.
Judith Butler -
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 -
I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.
Judith Butler
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You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity.
Judith Butler -
Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so that they no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves.
Judith Butler -
We have to have a very strong criticism of modes of cooperation that entrench inequality.
Judith Butler -
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.
Judith Butler -
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 -
We have to ask how we can stretch and how sometimes we can break the norms that determine what's intelligible and readable and what is not.
Judith Butler
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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.
Judith Butler -
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 -
Although the history of dispossession and exile for Jews is very different from the history of dispossession and exile for Palestinians, they both have recent and searing experiences which might allow them to come to a common understanding on the rights of refugees, or what it might mean to live together with resonant histories of that kind.
Judith Butler -
Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact.
Judith Butler