Judith Butler Quotes

57 quotes in 902 categories

• There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.
• 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.
• You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity.
• It's my view that gender is culturally formed, but it's also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist…
• Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of “slave morality.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.
• Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.
• Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
• 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…
• Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
• We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.
• I was off to Yale to be a lesbian
• Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling,…
• I do not deny certain kinds of biological differences. But I always ask under what conditions, under what discursive and institutional conditions, do certain biological…
• In the first instance, performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which…
• 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…
• No matter what someone else has done, it still matters how we treat people. It matters to our humanity that we treat offenders according to…

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