Quotes from Judith Butler

Precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized precariousness for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence who often have no other option than to appeal to the very state from which they need protection.

I argue that even as the war is framed in certain ways to control and heighten affect in relation to the differential grievability of lives, so war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues largely considered separate from foreign affairs.

we must learn to live and to embrace the destruction and rearticulation of the human in the name of a more capacious and, finally, less violent world, not knowing in advance what precise our form our humanness can and does take. It means we must be open to its permutations, in the name of nonviolence. [...] The necessity of keeping our notion of the human open to a future articulation is essential to the project of international human rights discourse and its politics.

But if there is no subject who decides on its gender, and if, on the contrary, gender is part of what decides the subject, how might one formulate a project that preserves gender practices as sites of critical agency? If gender is constructed through relations of power and, specifically, normative constraints that not only produce but also regulate various bodily beings, how might agency be derived from this notion of gender as the effect of productive constraint?

Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? –Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs

Sometimes "reality" is used to debunk as childish or unknowledgeable points of view that actually are holding out a more radical possibility of equality or freedom or democracy or justice.... It reminds me of parents who say, "Oh, you're gay..." or "Oh, you're trans—well, of course I accept you, but it's going to be a very hard life." Instead of saying, "This is a new world, and we are going to build it together...

L'incapacité à reconnaître les processus culturels spécifiques de l'oppression de genre elle-même n'est-elle pas une forme d'impérialisme épistémologique?

He sugerido que los muros de la academia deben de ser porosos, y que en la misma medida en que las instituciones académicas se vuelcan hacia adentro para refinar sus disciplinas y ámbitos de estudio, deben también volverse hacia el mundo público, y asumir que se sitúan ya siempre en el seno de ese mundo.

Zira, lezbiyen-gösterenine baÅŸvurularak neyin kastedildiÄŸi her zaman için kesin bir belirsizlik içinde kalm??t?r; zaten onun anlamland?r?lmas? her zaman için bir derece kontrol d???d?r, ayr?ca özgüllüÄŸü de ancak, kendi bütünsellik iddias?n? çürütmeye yarayan d??lamalarla ay?rt edilebilen bir olgudur.

PERHAPS IN SOME FORMAL SENSE every book begins by considering its own impossibility, but this book's completion has depended on a way of working with that impossibility without a clear resolution. Even so, something of that impossibility has to be sustained within the writing, even if it continually threatens to bring the project to a halt.

El "sexo", la categoría, obliga al "sexo", la configuración social de los cuerpos, a través de lo que Wittig denomina un contrato forzoso. Así pues, la categoría de "sexo" es un nombre que esclaviza. El lenguaje "arroja manojos de realidad sobre el cuerpo social", pero estos manojos no se desechan con facilidad y añade: al formarlo y configurarlo de forma violenta.

EÄŸer toplumsal cinsiyet transvestit ise, ve eÄŸer bu, yaklaÅŸmay? denediÄŸi ideali düzenli olarak doÄŸuran bir taklitse, o zaman toplumsal cinsiyet, bir içsel cinsiyet ya da öz ya da psiÅŸik toplumsal cinsiyet çekirdeÄŸi yan?lsamas?n? doÄŸuran bir temsildir; içsel derinlik yan?lsamas?n? tende, jestle, hareketle, yürüyüÅŸle (cinsiyetin takdimi olarak anla??lan bedensel temsiller silsilesiyle) doÄŸurur.

Ä°çin fiilen d??a dönüÅŸtüÄŸü d??k? geçitleri iç ile d?? aras?ndaki s?n?r? bulan?klaÅŸt?r?r, d??k?lama iÅŸlevi böylece baÅŸka kimlik farkl?laÅŸt?rma türleri için model teÅŸkil eder. Neticede Ötekilerin boklaÅŸmas? bu ÅŸekilde olur.

It seems that every text has more sources than it can reconstruct within its own terms.

Thus the successful bid to gain access to marriage effectively strengthens marital status as a state-sanctioned condition for the exercise of certain kinds of rights and entitlements; it strengthens the hand of the state in the regulation of human sexual behavior; and it emboldens the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of partnership and kinship.

Hence, it is not that one cannot get outside of language in order to grasp materiality in and of itself; rather, every effort to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which, in its phenomenality, is always already material. In this sense, then, language and materiality are not opposed, for language both is and refers to that which is material, and what is material never fully escapes from the process by which it is signified.

I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.

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.

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

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

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.

My parents were practicing Jews. My mother grew up in an orthodox synagogue, and after my grandfather died, she went to a conservative synagogue and a little later ended up in a reform synagogue. My father was in reform synagogues from the beginning.

We need to be I think equally sensitive to the injurious power of certain kinds of speech acts but also to the subversive and possibly liberatory effects of certain kinds of play.

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.