“ According to Melanie Klein, we develop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. My wager is that Klein is right about that, even as she thwarts her own insight by insisting that it i… Judith Butler
“ There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdepen… Judith Butler
“ 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. Judith Butler
“ If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a… Judith Butler
“ 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. Judith Butler
“ It is not as if an 'I' exists independently over here and then simply loses a 'you' over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is part of what composes who 'I' am. If I lose you, under these co… Judith Butler
“ If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the… Judith Butler
“ 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 the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially agains… Judith Butler
“ The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, th… Judith Butler
“ You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity. Judith Butler
“ That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply t… Judith Butler
“ As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender isalso the discursive/cultural means by which sexed nature or a naturalsex is produced and established as prediscursive, prior to cult… Judith Butler
“ Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed Judith Butler
“ 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. Judith Butler
“ 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. Judith Butler
“ [W]e must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in rela… Judith Butler
“ Although some lesbians argue that butches have nothing to do with being a man, others insist that their butchness is or was only a route to a desired status as a man. These paradoxes have surely proli… Judith Butler
“ If there is something right in Beauvoir's claim that one is born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be sa… Judith Butler
“ When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of… Judith Butler
“ We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it's a phenomenon that is being produ… Judith Butler
