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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

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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
Seems
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Sexual
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Gender
Think
Kinds
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Allow
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More quotes by 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
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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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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 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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I think something happens only when people find that they are moved with others, find themselves linked or allied in new ways, showing up or speaking out in ways that resonate with one another. That resonating can be very compelling and lead to moving and speaking more emphatically and with sharper focus.
Judith Butler
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Not all bodies are born in male or female. There is a continuum of bodies and it seems to me that trying to persuade medical and psychiatrist establishments to deal with the intersex involves critique of the binary gender system. Similarly there continues to be extreme, sometimes very extreme violence against transgender people.
Judith Butler
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All of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions - or norms - that help to form us.
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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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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People who expect enmity to suddenly convert into love are probably using the wrong model.
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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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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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
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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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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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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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It's my view that gender is culturally formed, but it's also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation.
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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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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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