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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.

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
Understand
Links
Heterosexuality
Certain
Operations
Phobia
Able
Sexuality
Homophobia
Separate
Forged
Kind
Gender
Femininity
Mind
Kinds
Masculinity
Think
Absolutely
Trans
Thinking
Minds
Homosexuality

More quotes by 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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People who have been made stateless by military occupation are entitled to repatriation, and then the question is to which state, or to what polity or area? Those who have had their goods taken away are entitled to compensation of some kind. These are basic international laws.
Judith Butler
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I think I never expected Gender trouble to have any particularly revolutionary effect so whatever effects it has, I'm always surprised.
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 clear that whatever language of democracy [Barack] Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests.
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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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
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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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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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In fact in politics, sometimes the thing that will never happen actually starts to happen. And there have to be people who hold out for that, and who accept that they are idealists and that they are operating on principle as opposed to realpolitik.
Judith Butler
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We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.
Judith Butler
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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
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When I was twelve, I was interviewed by a doctoral candidate in education and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I either wanted to be a philosopher or a clown, and I understood then, I think, that much depended on whether or not I found the world worth philosophizing about, and what the price of seriousness might be.
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 was born a Zionist, because I didn't have a choice about that. It was the ether of my family life, but I certainly broke with it as I asked more questions about it. And that doesn't mean I want to see the destruction of a people, it means I want to see a state structure that might embody more substantially the basic principles of democracy.
Judith Butler
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Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
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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Popular sovereignty has to be given by a people to itself, and this is the important meaning of self-determination.
Judith Butler
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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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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.
Judith Butler