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I think that public grieving is a good thing. People need to be grieved loss needs to be acknowledged publicly, because it helps to confer a sense of reality on the loss but also because it makes it known that this was a real life.

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
Life
Also
Helps
People
Need
Loss
Real
Public
Needs
Known
Grieved
Thing
Sense
Confer
Good
Helping
Acknowledged
Think
Makes
Publicly
Thinking
Reality
Grieving

More quotes by Judith Butler

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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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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
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Perhaps we have to remember that there are forms of outrage that do not lead to any sort of mobilization, and there are ways of registering the facts that do not lead to outrage.
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It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.
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I have also been invited to talk to psychologists and psychoanalysts and I liked that very much. Because, they are the ones who are bringing a lot of very, you know, problematic ideas about sexuality and gender into psychiatric and psychological settings. And I like having some influence there.
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Indeed, even if one believed that criticisms of Israel are by and large heard as anti-semitic (by Jews, anti-semites, or people who could be described as neither), it would become the responsibility of all of us to change the conditions of reception so that the public might begin to distinguish between criticism of Israel and a hatred of Jews.
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In the first instance, performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names
Judith Butler
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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
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Gender trouble is old. I mean, you know, in New York, it is old. I mean it's sweet. I mean people are really kind about it but it's like a former love affair you had and you're done.
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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Possibility is not a luxury it is as crucial as bread.
Judith Butler
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There are ordinary spaces where people do, more or less, share neighbourhoods. In Haifa, there are whole communities that are more or less integrated. But of course that is with Palestinian Israelis who have, for the most part, accepted certain kinds of cooperative models, and also accept second-class citizenship.
Judith Butler
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As we interpret ourselves differently, we also live ourselves differently.
Judith Butler
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When I was young there were lesbians who said Oh, I will free myself of all norms of masculinity, all norms of heterosexuality . And then, they ended up in very complex relationships that were maybe full of heterosexual power dynamics or full of lesbian forms of masculinity and they became very confused.
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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Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.
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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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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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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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