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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?

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
States
Productions
Punitive
Need
Contemporary
Identities
Needs
Gender
Recourse
Relation
Oppressive
Identity
Happier
Law
Relations
State
Maintain
Order
Production

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As we interpret ourselves differently, we also live ourselves differently.
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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.
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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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People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from.
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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.
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Visual renditions of war not only establish what can be seen, and the audio-track established what can be heard, but the photographs also train us in ways of focusing on targets, ways of regarding suffering and loss.
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Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony
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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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It's important that if one opposes discriminatory speech, one opposes all kinds. That is that one decides on a principle that it will include all minorities. But if the protection of one minority against another minority is what is happening, then I worry about that.
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I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.
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I think maybe it's more important to know the traditional concepts we have for thinking about how bodies are feminine or masculine or how sexuality is, straight or gay. These categories very often fail to describe the complexity of who we are.
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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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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.
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Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war. It’s a commitment to living with a certain kind of vulnerability to others and susceptibility to being wounded that actually gives our individual lives meaning.
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If gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood.
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Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of “slave morality.
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I want to say that the way in which we understand gender actually changes the way we live gender.
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Perhaps we have to remember that there are forms of outrage that do not lead to any sort of mobilization, and there are ways of registering the facts that do not lead to outrage.
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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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What does it mean then to live with one another? It can be unhappy, it can be wretched, it can be ambivalent, it can even be full of antagonism, but all of that can play out in the political sphere without recourse to expulsion or genocide. And that is our obligation, to stay in the sphere with whatever murderous rage we have, without acting on it.
Judith Butler