Judith Butler Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Judith Butler's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Philosopher Judith Butler's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 194 quotes on this page collected since February 24, 1956! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • I do not mean to say that such institutions act unilaterally on psychic life, or that they determine certain psychic outcomes. Rather, they exploit forms of fear and insecurity that are there for any population - no political organisation of life could ever fully do away with fear and insecurity; but some work to intensify, accelerate, and make more acute forms of fear, and to provide ideological focus for such intensified fears, at which point critical thinking has a fierce rival. The critical analysis that shows precisely how those forms of fear are promulgated, and for what purpose.

    Interview with Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.
  • The idea that speaking at all on the topic, demanding public space in which to have that debate, is itself an act of complicity with violence, and violence against Israelis, understood as synonymous with Jews, and so violence against Jews, clearly stops the speech with an unspeakable allegation.

    Ideas  
    Interview with Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.
  • 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.

    Source: www.opendemocracy.net
  • 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.

  • Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.

  • ... that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.

  • I am sorry to be so blunt, but I do not see much ambiguity here. [Barack] 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. And now he is quick to make allies with the Muslim Brotherhood for tactical reasons as well (though earlier that same administration stoked Islamophobic fear about that very political party).

  • We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

    "Your Behavior Creates Your Gender". Interview with Max Miller, bigthink.com. January 13, 2011.
  • I was off to Yale to be a lesbian

  • If you look at some of the language in the basic writings of Hamas, there is that famous call to push the Israelis into the sea. Now, I would say that most Palestinian politicians on the ground say, of course that's not what we want, and even within Hamas there is some published debate about that claim, but until the claim is removed, it's still noxious.

    Source: www.opendemocracy.net
  • "Gender trouble" is old. I mean, you know, in New York, it is old. I mean it's sweet. I mean people are really kind about it but it's like a former love affair you had and you're done.

    Source: ilga.org
  • 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.

    Source: transadvocate.com
  • The real question is how do you survive at the same time you pose those risks? Because you need to survive. And it seems to me that you survive in community or in solidarity, with others who are taking the risk with you.

    Source: ilga.org
  • 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.

    Rights  
    Interview with Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.
  • What would it mean if we lived in a world in which no one held out for the possibility of substantial political equality, or for a full cessation of colonial practices - if no one held out for those things because they were impossible?

    Source: www.opendemocracy.net
  • It wasn't possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.

    Source: ilga.org
  • Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.

    Judith Butler (2004). “Undoing Gender”, p.19, Psychology Press
  • Maybe we need to start with the rethinking of what is "west" and what is "non-west." It seems to me that there are any number of populations who already cross that divide, and we could probably point to several existing states that belong exclusively neither to one category nor to the other. Do we use these terms to designate geographical realities, geopolitical ones, or perhaps sites of power, exploitation, orientalism that move through space and time in ways that have to be tracked historically.

    Interview with Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.
  • It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.

  • Whether one wants to be free to live out a "hard-wired" sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization - and with full institutional and community support. That is most important in my view.

    Source: transadvocate.com
  • We should all have greater freedoms to define and pursue our lives without pathologization, de-realization, harassment, threats of violence, violence, and criminalization. I join in the struggle to realize such a world.

    Source: transadvocate.com
  • Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act... a "doing" rather than a "being". There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results. 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.

  • To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.

    Judith Butler (2011). “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity”, p.42, Routledge
  • We're trying to divide groups or decide that some of them are truly victims and some of them are truly aggressors.

    Trying  
    Source: ilga.org
  • I think, what I want to say is that yes, my ideas have travelled into popular culture they also emerged from popular culture in a way, or from the general public as you put it. But not as a program.

    Thinking   Ideas  
    Source: ilga.org
  • I do not follow closely anymore, since there is a limit to how much heartsickness one can bear.

    Interview with Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.
  • We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually its a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.

  • 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.

    Interview with Jill Stauffer, www.believermag.com. May, 2003.
  • 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.

    Revenge   War   Thinking  
    Interview With Cihan Aksan, Jon Bailes, www.counterpunch.org. October 11, 2013.
  • I think there is a demand. The demand is for a radical economic and political restructuring of the world. And most people would say that's impossible. And it may or may not be achieved, but I think that's less important than articulating what a just and fair world can be.

    Source: www.truth-out.org
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 194 quotes from the Philosopher Judith Butler, starting from February 24, 1956! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!