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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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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
Words
Social
Conceptualize
Helping
Vocabularies
Important
Vocabulary
Different
Experiment
Way
Experiments
Think
Existence
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More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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I do think we need to allow for there to be room for subversive and ironic speech. We need to be able to put out plays in which we make fun of ourselves or in which we interrogate the words that injure us. And maybe give them another meaning.
Judith Butler
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Possibility is not a luxury it is as crucial as bread.
Judith Butler
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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
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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
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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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So there might be a kind of collective effort that allows for those risks to be taken, pose a certain danger but not a suicidal one.
Judith Butler
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Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
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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It wasn't possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.
Judith Butler
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I wonder about economic sanctions, though, since that is a way that states engage in boycotts against one another.
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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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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Although the history of dispossession and exile for Jews is very different from the history of dispossession and exile for Palestinians, they both have recent and searing experiences which might allow them to come to a common understanding on the rights of refugees, or what it might mean to live together with resonant histories of that kind.
Judith Butler
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Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war. It’s a commitment to living with a certain kind of vulnerability to others and susceptibility to being wounded that actually gives our individual lives meaning.
Judith Butler
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Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony
Judith Butler