Judith Butler

I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.

— Judith Butler

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

— Judith Butler

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

— Judith Butler

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

— Judith Butler

We cannot choose with whom we cohabit the world.

— Judith Butler

I was off to Yale to be a lesbian

— Judith Butler

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

— Judith Butler

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

— Judith Butler

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

— Judith Butler

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

— Judith Butler

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

— Judith Butler

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

— Judith Butler

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

— Judith Butler

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

— Judith Butler

I would say that I'm a feminist theorist before I'm a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist.

— Judith Butler

“The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead…

— Judith Butler

To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series…

— Judith Butler

Perhaps we have to remember that there are forms of outrage that do not lead to any sort of mobilization, and there…

— Judith Butler

When one set of Jews labels another set of Jews 'anti-Semitic,' they are trying to monopolize the right to speak in the…

— Judith Butler

We're not in control [of circumstances], but that does not mean we don't exercise a certain kind of conditioned agency. That's what…

— Judith Butler

I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to…

— Judith Butler

Photographs can be forms of recruitment, ways of bringing the viewer into the military, as it were. In this way, they prepare…

— Judith Butler

All of those who inhabit the world have a right to be here by virtue of their being here at all. To…

— Judith Butler

Genocide is not a legitimate option. It's not ok to decide that an entire population has no right to live in the…

— Judith Butler

I agree completely that nothing is more important for transgender people than to have access to excellent health care in trans-affirmative environments,…

— Judith Butler

... that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on,…

— Judith Butler

No matter whether one feels one's gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the…

— Judith Butler

If you look at some of the language in the basic writings of Hamas, there is that famous call to push the…

— Judith Butler

“In other words, they appeal to the state for protection, but the state is precisely that from which they require protection. To…

— Judith Butler

A challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people…

— Judith Butler

I certainly don't mean to suggest that all investigative journalism prior to 9/11 in the US was praiseworthy. But there were more…

— Judith Butler

“There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the…

— Judith Butler

The problem with Antigone is that she stood up to the despot Creon, but in such a way that she ended up…

— Judith Butler

We have to find a way of understanding how one category of sex can be "assigned" from both and another sense of…

— Judith Butler

“Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case…

— Judith Butler

I know that some subjective experiences of sex are very firm and fundamental, even unchangeable. They can be so firm and unchanging…

— Judith Butler

“To be touched is, of course, to undergo something that comes from the outside, so I am, quite fundamentally, occasioned by that…

— Judith Butler

It is always brave to insist on undergoing transformations that feel necessary and right even when there are so many obstructions to…

— Judith Butler

“...gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces…

— Judith Butler

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

— Judith Butler