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

More quotes by Judith Butler

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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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Obama's failure to close Guantanamo is yet another instance where the rhetoric of democratic and constitutional rights proved not useful for his international relations, relations which are always pursued in ways that continue to link and fortify securitarian power with the opening of new markets.
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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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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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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.
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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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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?
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To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.
Judith Butler
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I think we have to ask, not, what Gender trouble is today but where Gender trouble is today.
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The critical image... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure.
Judith Butler
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I do think we need to allow for there to be room for subversive and ironic speech. We need to be able to put out plays in which we make fun of ourselves or in which we interrogate the words that injure us. And maybe give them another meaning.
Judith Butler
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I think that many of the mobilizations against the wars waged by the US and its allies since 2001 have been non-violent and massive. We have seen them throughout European capitals and in the US, and in many other parts of the world as well. So it is not only imaginable, but already actual.
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Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.
Judith Butler
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People who expect enmity to suddenly convert into love are probably using the wrong model.
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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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.
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Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
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People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from.
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We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.
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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