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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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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
Needs
Forms
Tyrannical
Sin
Convergence
Evil
Joyous
Christian
Discourse
Political
Alternative
Two
Alternatives
Form
Destructive
Need
Gender
Policing

More quotes by Judith Butler

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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
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Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.
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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It wasn't possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.
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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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.
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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
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... that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.
Judith Butler
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Every taxi driver I have ever spoken to has a theory of gender.
Judith Butler
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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
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I think we have to ask, not, what Gender trouble is today but where Gender trouble is today.
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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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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Possibility is not a luxury it is as crucial as bread.
Judith Butler
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Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of “slave morality.
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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What does it mean then to live with one another? It can be unhappy, it can be wretched, it can be ambivalent, it can even be full of antagonism, but all of that can play out in the political sphere without recourse to expulsion or genocide. And that is our obligation, to stay in the sphere with whatever murderous rage we have, without acting on it.
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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Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
Judith Butler
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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