Judith Butler Quotes

I do situate myself in this problem of being a Jew who doesn't want to be represented by the state of Israel, a state that claims to represent all Jewish people and make me into a potential citizen.

It is clear that whatever language of democracy Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests.

Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs - it is also not always what a trans person needs. Either way, one should be free to determine the course of one's gendered life.

I want to say that the way in which we understand gender actually changes the way we live gender.

We're trying to divide groups or decide that some of them are truly victims and some of them are truly aggressors.

It wasn't possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.

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.

The state or global forms of power that seek to protect populations considered in danger may well extend their own power through those acts of protection.

The question is whether NGOs that bring protection or aid or reparation therapies are furthering the possibility of self-determination or extending a form of managerial power and paternalism.

People who expect enmity to suddenly convert into love are probably using the wrong model.

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?

Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of “slave morality.

It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.

"Gender trouble" is old. I mean, you know, in New York, it is old. I mean it's sweet. I mean people are really kind about it but it's like a former love affair you had and you're done.

I think there is no one answer. It is still a struggle, there are tensions and I'm sure there are many people who would like to see these questions laid to rest or cease to be posed altogether.

I think I never expected "Gender trouble" to have any particularly revolutionary effect so whatever effects it has, I'm always surprised.

I think we have to ask, not, what "Gender trouble" is today but where "Gender trouble" is today.

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.

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.

I want my arguments to be good arguments on the basis of what I actually have to say.

We have to ask how we can stretch and how sometimes we can break the norms that determine what's intelligible and readable and what is not.

We must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are.

It would surely be a mistake to gauge the success of feminism by its success as a colonial project. p41.