110+ Judith Butler Quotes On Gender, Feminism

Judith Butler is an American philosopher, best known for her contributions to the fields of feminism, queer theory, and political philosophy. She is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler's work has had a major influence on contemporary thought, particularly in the fields of gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and the humanities. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Judith Butler on gender, feminism, gender.

Top 10 Judith Butler Quotes

1. Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.
2. Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.
3. 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.
4. To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.
5. 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 of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.
6. I do think it's important that we experiment with new vocabularies. That new words help us conceptualize our social existence in a different way.
7. 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.
8. Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
9. Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.
10. Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.

Judith Butler Short Quotes

• Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.
• Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war.
• I must say, I feel the reception of my work is none of my business.
• I was off to Yale to be a lesbian
• We have to have a very strong criticism of modes of cooperation that entrench inequality.
• The critical image... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure.
• It wasn't possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.
• I want my arguments to be good arguments on the basis of what I actually have to say.
• I think it's important to live with a certain danger and a certain risk.
• The life doesn't simply get erased. It gets imprinted and remembered.

Judith Butler Quotes About Gender

... 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, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today. — Judith Butler

When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that weve taken on a role or were 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

I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are. — Judith Butler

If gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood. — Judith Butler

Everyone has a set of presuppositions: what gender is, what it's not. And they may not write them out or they may not be in theoretical books published by Routledge, but they have a theory. — 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

Every taxi driver I have ever spoken to has a theory of gender. — Judith Butler

I have also been invited to talk to psychologists and psychoanalysts and I liked that very much. Because, they are the ones who are bringing a lot of very, you know, problematic ideas about sexuality and gender into psychiatric and psychological settings. And I like having some influence there. — 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

The important thing is to think about theory in life in that way. And I think we don't have to be theorists, we don't have to have gone to the academy, or to the university to learn theory and to be a theorist of gender. — Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes About Discourse

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 discourse produces the effects that it names — Judith Butler

What we need is a political and joyous alternative to the behaviorist discourse, the Christian discourse on evil or sin, and the convergence of the two in forms of gender policing that [is] tyrannical and destructive. — Judith Butler

We set the actors on the scene through the banal discourse of "conflict" in ways that fully deflect from the history and struggle of colonial resistance, refusing as well by that means to link the resistance to other forms of colonial resistance, their rationale, and their tactics. — Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes About Position

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

All of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions - or norms - that help to form us. — Judith Butler

Let me say one thing to clarify my position. I think we can take distance from norm but I think we are also mired in norm, "empêtrés", I think you say in French. And I think the choices we can make are only in a certain struggle with the norms out of which we're constituted. — Judith Butler

I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic. — Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes About Sexual

I think maybe it's more important to know the traditional concepts we have for thinking about how bodies are feminine or masculine or how sexuality is, straight or gay. These categories very often fail to describe the complexity of who we are. — Judith Butler

Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other. A different dynamic it seems to me is at work in the critique of new sexuality studies. — Judith Butler

If we think about sexual life for a gender life, it seems to me that we have to allow for certain kinds of changes or certain kinds of ways of reconceptualizing ourselves. — Judith Butler

Judith Butler Quotes About Produce

We need a legal and political understanding of the right of the refugee, whereby no solution for one group produces a new class of refugees - you can't solve a refugee problem by producing a new, potentially greater refugee problem. — Judith Butler

War begets war. It produces outraged and humiliated and furious people. That is almost invariably the case. — Judith Butler

For instance, when "Gender trouble " is translated into Japanese, it produces a problem of vocabulary and a way of thinking about a quality for instance that is somewhat controversial in academic circles and also outside of the academy. In other places, "Gender trouble" is old. — 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

Judith Butler Famous Quotes And Sayings

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, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony — Judith Butler

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. — 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 femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality. — Judith Butler

You're an evolving and transforming person, right? And how do we capture that dynamics of sexuality in that complex sense? There may be times when someone feels oneself more overly masculine or maybe more feminine, or where the terms themselves become confused, where passivity and activity also don't maintain their usual meaning. — Judith Butler

I think there is a demand. The demand is for a radical economic and political restructuring of the world. And most people would say that's impossible. And it may or may not be achieved, but I think that's less important than articulating what a just and fair world can be. — Judith Butler

Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war. It’s a commitment to living with a certain kind of vulnerability to others and susceptibility to being wounded that actually gives our individual lives meaning. — Judith Butler

Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity. — Judith Butler

If we are trying to account for mobilization, we have to ask, under what conditions do outraged forms of knowing lead to social mobilizations and movements? So awareness alone does not suffice, and neither does outrage. — Judith Butler

Where is democratic process or popular sovereignty for the endangered population? It cannot be "given" or "allocated" by some other power without that same power claiming the right to withdraw what it gives. — Judith Butler

I think we need a politics that allows us to risk what is intelligible. To be maybe slightly unintelligible, too be slightly "illisible". To take the risk of suggesting that the human form might take another form. — Judith Butler

Perhaps we have to remember that there are forms of outrage that do not lead to any sort of mobilization, and there are ways of "registering the facts" that do not lead to outrage. — Judith Butler

What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation. — Judith Butler

It seems to me that responsiveness is a better source for understanding what moral claims are and how they work upon us. — Judith Butler

It is true that non-governmental organisations working within strong human rights frameworks are now confounded by securitarian forms of logic and power that extend the paternalistic bias of their work in new ways. — Judith Butler

Neoliberalism has taken new forms since the demise of the Fordist concept of labor and with the emergence of what is understood as flexible labor. This has really come to be the dominant form for about the last 20 years. — Judith Butler

I think something happens only when people find that they are moved with others, find themselves linked or allied in new ways, showing up or speaking out in ways that resonate with one another. That resonating can be very compelling and lead to moving and speaking more emphatically and with sharper focus. — Judith Butler

Popular sovereignty has to be given by a people to itself, and this is the important meaning of self-determination. — Judith Butler

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 elusive for language to operate as a living thing. — Judith Butler

People who have been made stateless by military occupation are entitled to repatriation, and then the question is to which state, or to what polity or area? Those who have had their goods taken away are entitled to compensation of some kind. These are basic international laws. — Judith Butler

There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said we "should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge." It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability. — Judith Butler

So there might be a kind of collective effort that allows for those risks to be taken, pose a certain danger but not a suicidal one. — Judith Butler

Although the history of dispossession and exile for Jews is very different from the history of dispossession and exile for Palestinians, they both have recent and searing experiences which might allow them to come to a common understanding on the rights of refugees, or what it might mean to live together with resonant histories of that kind. — 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 disappointed homosexuality? — Judith Butler

I think, what I want to say is that yes, my ideas have travelled into popular culture they also emerged from popular culture in a way, or from the general public as you put it. But not as a program. — Judith Butler

We should all have greater freedoms to define and pursue our lives without pathologization, de-realization, harassment, threats of violence, violence, and criminalization. I join in the struggle to realize such a world. — Judith Butler

Not all bodies are born in male or female. There is a continuum of bodies and it seems to me that trying to persuade medical and psychiatrist establishments to deal with the intersex involves critique of the binary gender system. Similarly there continues to be extreme, sometimes very extreme violence against transgender people. — Judith Butler

What would it mean if we lived in a world in which no one held out for the possibility of substantial political equality, or for a full cessation of colonial practices - if no one held out for those things because they were impossible? — Judith Butler

The real question is how do you survive at the same time you pose those risks? Because you need to survive. And it seems to me that you survive in community or in solidarity, with others who are taking the risk with you. — Judith Butler

Indeed, even if one believed that criticisms of Israel are by and large heard as anti-semitic (by Jews, anti-semites, or people who could be described as neither), it would become the responsibility of all of us to change the conditions of reception so that the public might begin to distinguish between criticism of Israel and a hatred of Jews. — Judith Butler

Whether one wants to be free to live out a "hard-wired" sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization - and with full institutional and community support. That is most important in my view. — Judith Butler

I do not follow closely anymore, since there is a limit to how much heartsickness one can bear. — 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

We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman. — Judith Butler

When some people rejoin with “All Lives Matter” they misunderstand the problem, but not because their message is untrue. It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter which is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered, and are struggling to matter in the way they deserve. — Judith Butler

Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way. — Judith Butler

Surely binationalism is not love, but there is, we might say, a necessary and impossible attachment that makes a mockery of identity, an ambivalence that emerges from the decentering of the nationalist ethos and that forms the basis of a permanent ethical demand. — Judith Butler

Very often, if you just get the question: "Well, are you a Zionist?" if you say no, it's assumed that you want the destruction of the state of Israel and that you're involved in some actual or potential violent attack. But actually, you could say: "Not on this basis". — Judith Butler

The pleasurable part of public mourning can also lead to a sense of self-sanctification that justifies in advance any war effort, whether or not the target and destruction are in any way related to the initial event. — Judith Butler

Maybe one of the jobs of theory or philosophy is to elevate principles that seem impossible, or that have the status of the impossible, to stand by them and will them, even when it looks highly unlikely that they'll ever be realised. But that's ok, it's a service. — Judith Butler

We're trying to divide groups or decide that some of them are truly victims and some of them are truly aggressors. — Judith Butler

I never did like the assertion of the "innate" inferiority or women or Blacks, and I understood that when people tried to talk that way, they were trying to "fix" a social reality into a natural necessity. And yet, sometimes we do need a language that refers to a basic, fundamental, enduring, and necessary dimension of who we are, and the sense of sexed embodiment can be precisely that. — Judith Butler

When I was twelve, I was interviewed by a doctoral candidate in education and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I either wanted to be a philosopher or a clown, and I understood then, I think, that much depended on whether or not I found the world worth philosophizing about, and what the price of seriousness might be. — Judith Butler

I do know that some people believe that I see gender as a "choice" rather than as an essential and firmly fixed sense of self. My view is actually not that. No matter whether one feels one's gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives. — Judith Butler

There is a rather huge ethical difference between electing surgery and being faced with transphobic condemnation and diagnoses. I would say that the greatest risk of mutilation that trans people have comes directly from transphobia. — Judith Butler

I do think we need to allow for there to be room for subversive and ironic speech. We need to be able to put out plays in which we make fun of ourselves or in which we interrogate the words that injure us. And maybe give them another meaning. — Judith Butler

I think there is no one answer. It is still a struggle, there are tensions and I'm sure there are many people who would like to see these questions laid to rest or cease to be posed altogether. — Judith Butler

The state or global forms of power that seek to protect populations considered in danger may well extend their own power through those acts of protection. — Judith Butler

I do situate myself in this problem of being a Jew who doesn't want to be represented by the state of Israel, a state that claims to represent all Jewish people and make me into a potential citizen. — Judith Butler

Genocide is not a legitimate option. It's not ok to decide that an entire population has no right to live in the world. No matter whether these relationships are very proximate or very distant, there is no entitlement to expunge a population or to demean its basic humanity. — Judith Butler

I consider both the West Bank and Gaza to be colonised, even though Gaza is not occupied in the same way that the West Bank is. The Israeli government and military control all goods that pass in or out of that area, and they have restricted employment and building material that would allow Palestinians to rebuild homes and structures that were destroyed by bombardment. — Judith Butler

Obama's failure to close Guantanamo is yet another instance where the rhetoric of democratic and constitutional rights proved not useful for his international relations, relations which are always pursued in ways that continue to link and fortify securitarian power with the opening of new markets. — Judith Butler

A certain kind of permission is given to live differently, to conceptualize and to act according to a new conceptualization. — Judith Butler

What does it mean then to live with one another? It can be unhappy, it can be wretched, it can be ambivalent, it can even be full of antagonism, but all of that can play out in the political sphere without recourse to expulsion or genocide. And that is our obligation, to stay in the sphere with whatever murderous rage we have, without acting on it. — Judith Butler

I wonder about economic sanctions, though, since that is a way that states engage in boycotts against one another. — Judith Butler

We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones. — 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

Because Al-Qaeda has been a non-state centered organisation, many of these scenarios do not exactly apply. These are not wars between states. And yet, it seems to me that we make a mistake if we accept the view that states are fighting terrorism, since we have abundant evidence for accepting the idea of state terrorism, and what is most urgent is to track and expose how state terrorism operates under the rubric of "democracy." — Judith Butler

Some Israeli politicians have proposed the transfer of Palestinians out of what is currently called Israel, either into the occupied territories, into Jordan or out into other Arab lands, with the idea that there would be no intermixing of Palestinian and Jewish Israelis or Palestinian and Jewish communities. But the idea of an absolute segregation is one that I find lamentable. — Judith Butler

People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from. — Judith Butler

Look, "Gender trouble" includes a critique of the idea that there are two ideal bodily forms, two ideal morphologies: the masculine and the feminine. I want to suggest that today the intersex movement is very engaged with criticizing that idea. — Judith Butler

Visual renditions of war not only establish what can be seen, and the audio-track established what can be heard, but the photographs also "train" us in ways of focusing on targets, ways of regarding suffering and loss. — Judith Butler

In the meantime, what is lost is any sense that the Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonial rule is waged from a situation of occupation or expulsion, that there is a military order that controls the boundaries of what would be a sovereign Palestinian state, that the land on which that state is now thinkable has been radically diminished by an ongoing practice of land confiscation and appropriation. — Judith Butler

It's not like it's a brand new vocabulary that permits to have a new reality. It's rather a new vocabulary that lets us see that our lives have always been more complex than traditional categories allow. So, I think, you know, maybe the introduction of new words permits us to rethink what we've taken for granted about what forms bodies take, what the name is for certain kinds of sexual, intimate relations, how we think of a life. — Judith Butler

Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so that they no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves. — Judith Butler

There are ordinary spaces where people do, more or less, share neighbourhoods. In Haifa, there are whole communities that are more or less integrated. But of course that is with Palestinian Israelis who have, for the most part, accepted certain kinds of cooperative models, and also accept second-class citizenship. — Judith Butler

I did not mean to argue that gender is fluid and changeable (mine certainly is not). I only meant to say that we should all have greater freedoms to define and pursue our lives without pathologization, de-realization, harassment, threats of violence, violence, and criminalization. I join in the struggle to realize such a world. — 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 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. — Judith Butler

We're not in control [of circumstances], but that does not mean we don't exercise a certain kind of conditioned agency. That's what it means to live in a community. That's what it means to live in society. — Judith Butler

Gender assignment is a "construction" and yet many genderqueer and trans people refuse those assignments in part or in full. That refusal opens the way for a more radical form of self-determination, one that happens in solidarity with others who are undergoing a similar struggle. — Judith Butler

Life Lessons by Judith Butler

1. Judith Butler's work emphasizes the importance of recognizing the power dynamics of gender, sexuality, and identity, and understanding how these dynamics shape our understanding of ourselves and our relationships with others.
2. Butler's work encourages us to challenge traditional notions of identity and to think critically about the ways in which our identities are shaped by social and cultural forces.
3. Through her work, Butler encourages us to think deeply about our own beliefs and values, and to consider how we can create a more equitable and inclusive society.