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I was born a Zionist, because I didn't have a choice about that. It was the ether of my family life, but I certainly broke with it as I asked more questions about it. And that doesn't mean I want to see the destruction of a people, it means I want to see a state structure that might embody more substantially the basic principles of democracy.

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
Mean
State
Structure
Life
Family
Questions
Ether
People
Born
Certainly
Substantially
Means
Choice
Embody
Doesn
Asked
Zionist
Didn
Principles
Broke
States
Democracy
Basic
Might
Choices
Destruction

More quotes by Judith Butler

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I think there is a demand. The demand is for a radical economic and political restructuring of the world. And most people would say that's impossible. And it may or may not be achieved, but I think that's less important than articulating what a just and fair world can be.
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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We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually its a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.
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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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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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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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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Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
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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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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Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
Judith Butler
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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
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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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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
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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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Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.
Judith Butler
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Obama's failure to close Guantanamo is yet another instance where the rhetoric of democratic and constitutional rights proved not useful for his international relations, relations which are always pursued in ways that continue to link and fortify securitarian power with the opening of new markets.
Judith Butler
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Possibility is not a luxury it is as crucial as bread.
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