Judith Butler Quotes

Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.

Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.

We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.

Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender... identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results.

We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones.

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.

To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.

As we interpret ourselves differently, we also live ourselves differently.

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.

We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

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.

Sexual harassment law is very important. But I think it would be a mistake if the sexual harassment law movement is the only way in which feminism is known in the media.

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.

We cannot choose with whom we cohabit the world.

Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.

Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.

Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.

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.

If we are looking for signs of democratization, then surely we are looking as well for forms of living on equal terms in and among cultural differences.

Everyone has a set of presuppositions: what gender is, what it's not. And they may not write them out or they may not be in theoretical books published by Routledge, but they have a theory.

You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity.

It seems to me that responsiveness is a better source for understanding what moral claims are and how they work upon us.

I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.

Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war.

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.

What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation.

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.

I must say, I feel the reception of my work is none of my business.

Popular sovereignty has to be given by a people to itself, and this is the important meaning of self-determination.

We need to be I think equally sensitive to the injurious power of certain kinds of speech acts but also to the subversive and possibly liberatory effects of certain kinds of play.

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.

We have to have a very strong criticism of modes of cooperation that entrench inequality.

What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.

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.

The critical image... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure.

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.

A certain kind of permission is given to live differently, to conceptualize and to act according to a new conceptualization.

War begets war. It produces outraged and humiliated and furious people. That is almost invariably the case.

I think, what I want to say is that yes, my ideas have travelled into popular culture they also emerged from popular culture in a way, or from the general public as you put it. But not as a program.

Every taxi driver I have ever spoken to has a theory of gender.

The life doesn't simply get erased. It gets imprinted and remembered.

Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.

I'm no great fan of the phallus, and have made my own views known on this subject before, so I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire.

People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from.

I do not follow closely anymore, since there is a limit to how much heartsickness one can bear.

If you are asking whether states and state actors can only respond through revenge, then you are suggesting that diplomatic solutions are hopeless.

I wonder about economic sanctions, though, since that is a way that states engage in boycotts against one another.

I think it's important to live with a certain danger and a certain risk.