Quote

Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.

Judith Butler

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Rather
Doe
Something
Gender

More quotes by Judith Butler

Image
We have to be able track the ways in which fear, for instance, is monopolised 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 militarisation.
Judith Butler
Image
You could protect a religious minority against gays and lesbians. Or you could protect gays and lesbians against a religious minority. And then, it seems to me something political is happening. Because we're not really looking at the kind of speech that is injurious.
Judith Butler
Image
Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.
Judith Butler
Image
Let me say one thing to clarify my position. I think we can take distance from norm but I think we are also mired in norm, empêtrés, I think you say in French. And I think the choices we can make are only in a certain struggle with the norms out of which we're constituted.
Judith Butler
Image
We set the actors on the scene through the banal discourse of conflict in ways that fully deflect from the history and struggle of colonial resistance, refusing as well by that means to link the resistance to other forms of colonial resistance, their rationale, and their tactics.
Judith Butler
Image
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.
Judith Butler
Image
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.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.
Judith Butler
Image
The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.
Judith Butler
Image
We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
I wonder about economic sanctions, though, since that is a way that states engage in boycotts against one another.
Judith Butler
Image
Until we learn that other lives are equally grievable and have an equal demand on us to be grieved - especially the ones that we've helped to eliminate - I'm not sure we'll really be on the way to overcoming the problem of dehumanization.
Judith Butler
Image
People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
Judith Butler
Image
I must say, I feel the reception of my work is none of my business.
Judith Butler
Image
Every taxi driver I have ever spoken to has a theory of gender.
Judith Butler