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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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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
People
Pleasure
Genders
Strong
Eradicated
Sense
Shatter
Others
Hood
Self
Domain
Many
Bound
Important
Gender
Would
Bounds

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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.
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Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.
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Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
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It is true that non-governmental organisations working within strong human rights frameworks are now confounded by securitarian forms of logic and power that extend the paternalistic bias of their work in new ways.
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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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When I was young there were lesbians who said Oh, I will free myself of all norms of masculinity, all norms of heterosexuality . And then, they ended up in very complex relationships that were maybe full of heterosexual power dynamics or full of lesbian forms of masculinity and they became very confused.
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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.
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As we interpret ourselves differently, we also live ourselves differently.
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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.
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Maybe one of the jobs of theory or philosophy is to elevate principles that seem impossible, or that have the status of the impossible, to stand by them and will them, even when it looks highly unlikely that they'll ever be realised. But that's ok, it's a service.
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A certain kind of permission is given to live differently, to conceptualize and to act according to a new conceptualization.
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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.
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Every taxi driver I have ever spoken to has a theory of gender.
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
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Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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