Quote

The important thing is to think about theory in life in that way. And I think we don't have to be theorists, we don't have to have gone to the academy, or to the university to learn theory and to be a theorist of gender.

Judith Butler

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Thinking
University
Life
Theory
Gone
Learn
Important
Theorist
Thing
Theorists
Way
Academy
Think
Gender

More quotes by Judith Butler

Image
I think maybe it's more important to know the traditional concepts we have for thinking about how bodies are feminine or masculine or how sexuality is, straight or gay. These categories very often fail to describe the complexity of who we are.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
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.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from.
Judith Butler
Image
It wasn't possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What we need is a political and joyous alternative to the behaviorist discourse, the Christian discourse on evil or sin, and the convergence of the two in forms of gender policing that [is] tyrannical and destructive.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
Visual renditions of war not only establish what can be seen, and the audio-track established what can be heard, but the photographs also train us in ways of focusing on targets, ways of regarding suffering and loss.
Judith Butler
Image
A certain kind of permission is given to live differently, to conceptualize and to act according to a new conceptualization.
Judith Butler
Image
If gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood.
Judith Butler
Image
As we interpret ourselves differently, we also live ourselves differently.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I wonder about economic sanctions, though, since that is a way that states engage in boycotts against one another.
Judith Butler
Image
It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
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.
Judith Butler