Quotes by Judith Butler

About Judith Butler:

Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and literary theory. Since 1993, she has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is now Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. She is also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.

Judith Butler

Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.

Judith Butler

In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their pare...

Judith Butler

The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.

Judith Butler

I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.

Judith Butler

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.

Judith Butler

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.

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

It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.

Judith Butler

Sexual harassment law is very important. But I think it would be a mistake if the sexual harassment law movement is the only way in which feminism is known in the media.

Judith Butler

To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

Judith Butler

There is a new venue for theory, necessarily impure, where it emerges in and as the very event of cultural translation. This is not the displacement of theory by historicism, nor a simple historicization of theory that exposes the contingent limits o...

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 name of the Jews. So the allegation of anti-Semitism is actually a cover for an intra-Jewish quarrel.

Judith Butler

It will not do to say that international law is the enemy of the Jewish people, since the Jewish people surely did not as a whole oppose the Nuremburg trials, or the development of human rights law.

Judith Butler

Honestly, what can really be said about 'the Jewish people' as a whole? Is it not a lamentable stereotype to make large generalizations about all Jews, and to presume they all share the same political commitments?

Judith Butler

A man who reads effeminate may well be consistently heterosexual, and another one might be gay. We can't read sexuality off of gender.

Judith Butler

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 fem...

Judith Butler

Events that get covered in the U.S. one way are not very important elsewhere or are given a completely different slant ,and one needs to have a kind of comparative way of thinking in order to arrive at a judgment that is not completely provincial, th...

Judith Butler

When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that we've taken on a role or we're acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.

Judith Butler

Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements.

Judith Butler

Obama was late to affirm the Egyptian revolution as a democratic movement, and even then he was eager to have installed those military leaders who were known for their practices of torture.

Judith Butler

Author Bio

  • NameJudith Butler
  • Descriptionphilosopher and gender theorist
  • BornFebruary 24, 1956
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Author
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Theodor W. Adorno Award