List of Judith Butler Quotes

It's Not My Concern. It's Your Concern. I Just Keep Working. I Keep Posing Certain Questions And I Think There Are Times When People Think "what Happened To The Judith Butler I Used To Know?" Or "she's Not Doing Gender Trouble. Does That Mean She Refuses It Or She's Disavowed It?" And I Would Say No. I Have Not Refused Or Disavowed Anything.

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.

We're Trying To Divide Groups Or Decide That Some Of Them Are Truly Victims And Some Of Them Are Truly Aggressors.

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.

A Certain Kind Of Permission Is Given To Live Differently, To Conceptualize And To Act According To A New Conceptualization.

I Want To Say That The Way In Which We Understand Gender Actually Changes The Way We Live Gender.

I Have Simply Taken Some Of The Same Questions And Reposed Them In New Ways. But, You See, I Must Live. Right? I Mean I Can't Stay The Same For Everyone To Be Consumed As The Author Of "gender Trouble". I Have To Continue To Live And That Means I Have To "reposer Les Questions".

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.

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.

It Wasn't Possible Just To Rid Oneself, Simply, Of The Norms Through Which One Is Constituted.

I'm Trying To Think Of What Happens If We Take Expulsion Off The Table For Everyone, And Instead Think About The Rights Of Those Who Have Been Expelled Already, Which Would Include The Various Rights Of Refugees Who Came To Israel In The Aftermath Of Wwii, But Also Those From Other Countries, And What Rights The Palestinians Have Who Have Been Dispossessed Of Their Lands And Homes.

I Know That Some Subjective Experiences Of Sex Are Very Firm And Fundamental, Even Unchangeable. They Can Be So Firm And Unchanging That We Call Them "innate". But Given That We Report On Such A Sense Of Self Within A Social World, A World In Which We Are Trying To Use Language To Express What We Feel, It Is Unclear What Language Does That Most Effectively. I Understand That "innate" Is A Word That Conveys The Sense Of Something Hired-wired And Constitutive. I Suppose I Would Be Inclined To Wonder Whether Other Vocabularies Might Do The Job Equally Well.