127 Quotes by 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.

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

Keiner dieser Aufsätze beabsichtigt, die Materialität des Körpers zu bestreiten; sie stellen vielmehr partielle und sich überschneidende genealogische Bemühungen dar, die normativen Bedingungen zu klären, unter denen die Materialität des Körpers gestaltet und gebildet wird, und insbesondere, wie sie durch differentielle Kategorien des Geschlechts gebildet wird.

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

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.

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 the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation.

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.

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 its a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.