Quote

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

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Judith Butler
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: February 24
Art Theorist
Feminist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Judith P. Butler
Judith Pamela Butler
Disappointed
Equally
Observation
Lacan
Female
Presumes
Issues
Heterosexuality
Clear
Observer
Show
Observers
Shows
Homosexuality

More quotes by Judith Butler

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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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Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.
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Maybe one of the jobs of theory or philosophy is to elevate principles that seem impossible, or that have the status of the impossible, to stand by them and will them, even when it looks highly unlikely that they'll ever be realised. But that's ok, it's a service.
Judith Butler
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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
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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.
Judith Butler
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Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.
Judith Butler
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Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.
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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.
Judith Butler
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We have to be able track the ways in which fear, for instance, is monopolized 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 militarization.
Judith Butler
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Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
Judith Butler
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All of those who inhabit the world have a right to be here by virtue of their being here at all. To be here means you have a right to be here.
Judith Butler
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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
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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.
Judith Butler
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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.
Judith Butler
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Surely binationalism is not love, but there is, we might say, a necessary and impossible attachment that makes a mockery of identity, an ambivalence that emerges from the decentering of the nationalist ethos and that forms the basis of a permanent ethical demand.
Judith Butler
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When I was young there were lesbians who said Oh, I will free myself of all norms of masculinity, all norms of heterosexuality . And then, they ended up in very complex relationships that were maybe full of heterosexual power dynamics or full of lesbian forms of masculinity and they became very confused.
Judith Butler
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Indeed, even if one believed that criticisms of Israel are by and large heard as anti-semitic (by Jews, anti-semites, or people who could be described as neither), it would become the responsibility of all of us to change the conditions of reception so that the public might begin to distinguish between criticism of Israel and a hatred of Jews.
Judith Butler
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Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
Judith Butler
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I do think it's important that we experiment with new vocabularies. That new words help us conceptualize our social existence in a different way.
Judith Butler
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If we think about sexual life for a gender life, it seems to me that we have to allow for certain kinds of changes or certain kinds of ways of reconceptualizing ourselves.
Judith Butler