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I think we need a politics that allows us to risk what is intelligible. To be maybe slightly unintelligible, too be slightly illisible. To take the risk of suggesting that the human form might take another form.

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
Human
Slightly
Humans
Allows
Need
Risk
Take
Maybe
Needs
Politics
Think
Another
Unintelligible
Thinking
Form
Intelligible
Might
Suggesting

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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I think, what I want to say is that yes, my ideas have travelled into popular culture they also emerged from popular culture in a way, or from the general public as you put it. But not as a program.
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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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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So for instance in rap music, you very often hear words that would seem very racist, or very misogynous or very homophobic but in some of those instances, the words are being taken back or redefined so that they lose their injurious quality.
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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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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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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We have to be able track the ways in which fear, for instance, is monopolized by state and media institutions, ways in which fear is actually promoted and distributed as a way of bolstering the need for greater security and militarization.
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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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 wonder about economic sanctions, though, since that is a way that states engage in boycotts against one another.
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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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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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.
Judith Butler
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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