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I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality.

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
Safety
Butlers
Poverty
Decrease
Violence
Literacy
Open
Increased
Women
Categories
Much
Feminism
Gender
Equality
Decreased

More quotes by Judith Butler

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The important thing is to think about theory in life in that way. And I think we don't have to be theorists, we don't have to have gone to the academy, or to the university to learn theory and to be a theorist of gender.
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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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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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.
Judith Butler
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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
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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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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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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
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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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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.
Judith Butler
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The Gulf War was a clear precedent as well, and it let us begin to understand how the US government would go to war to secure strategic oil reserves and potential markets.
Judith Butler
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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.
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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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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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.
Judith Butler
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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
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It is true that non-governmental organisations working within strong human rights frameworks are now confounded by securitarian forms of logic and power that extend the paternalistic bias of their work in new ways.
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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It wasn't possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.
Judith Butler
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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.
Judith Butler