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Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.

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
Feminine
Fixed
Roles
Biologically
Constructed
Socially
Masculine

More quotes by Judith Butler

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When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that weve taken on a role or were acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.
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 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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I must say, I feel the reception of my work is none of my business.
Judith Butler
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Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.
Judith Butler
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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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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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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.
Judith Butler
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Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.
Judith Butler
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If you are asking whether states and state actors can only respond through revenge, then you are suggesting that diplomatic solutions are hopeless.
Judith Butler
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I want to say that the way in which we understand gender actually changes the way we live gender.
Judith Butler
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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
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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.
Judith Butler
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What we need is a political and joyous alternative to the behaviorist discourse, the Christian discourse on evil or sin, and the convergence of the two in forms of gender policing that [is] tyrannical and destructive.
Judith Butler
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Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.
Judith Butler
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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.
Judith Butler
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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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The critical image... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure.
Judith Butler
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I think we have to ask, not, what Gender trouble is today but where Gender trouble is today.
Judith Butler
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A certain kind of permission is given to live differently, to conceptualize and to act according to a new conceptualization.
Judith Butler