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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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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
Free
Positions
Others
Crucial
Gender
Really
Variety
Think
Wide
Thinking
Accept
Accepting
Position

More quotes by Judith Butler

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Popular sovereignty has to be given by a people to itself, and this is the important meaning of self-determination.
Judith Butler
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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.
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Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of “slave morality.
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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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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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I do think we need to allow for there to be room for subversive and ironic speech. We need to be able to put out plays in which we make fun of ourselves or in which we interrogate the words that injure us. And maybe give them another meaning.
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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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
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Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.
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It's important that if one opposes discriminatory speech, one opposes all kinds. That is that one decides on a principle that it will include all minorities. But if the protection of one minority against another minority is what is happening, then I worry about that.
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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Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.
Judith Butler
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Possibility is not a luxury it is as crucial as bread.
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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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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People who expect enmity to suddenly convert into love are probably using the wrong model.
Judith Butler
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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.
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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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There are surely many ways that [media select and contextualise events determine the boundaries of public thinking] happens, but we can note at the most obvious level the way in which forms of resistance or violence get cast as conflicts that assume two sides that are fighting only against one another.
Judith Butler
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People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from.
Judith Butler