Quote

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

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
Helping
Norms
Form
Figuring
Body
Norm
Live
Construction
Bodies
Active
Position
Help
Constructions

More quotes by Judith Butler

Image
I must say, I feel the reception of my work is none of my business.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
I think that public grieving is a good thing. People need to be grieved loss needs to be acknowledged publicly, because it helps to confer a sense of reality on the loss but also because it makes it known that this was a real life.
Judith Butler
Image
Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
We need a legal and political understanding of the right of the refugee, whereby no solution for one group produces a new class of refugees - you can't solve a refugee problem by producing a new, potentially greater refugee problem.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.
Judith Butler
Image
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
Image
Genocide is not a legitimate option. It's not ok to decide that an entire population has no right to live in the world. No matter whether these relationships are very proximate or very distant, there is no entitlement to expunge a population or to demean its basic humanity.
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
We're trying to divide groups or decide that some of them are truly victims and some of them are truly aggressors.
Judith Butler
Image
When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that weve taken on a role or were acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.
Judith Butler
Image
Possibility is not a luxury it is as crucial as bread.
Judith Butler
Image
People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from.
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
Image
Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.
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
It is clear that whatever language of democracy [Barack] Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests.
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