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Quotes by Judith Butler

A challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people only if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive or that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of Israel in its current or traditional forms.
– Judith Butler
I have always been very worried about hops of feminism who are highly regulative or repressive towards. I am against normativities and for sexual freedom. I always hated this saying that feminism is the theory and lesbianism must be the practice.
– Judith Butler
I think politically it is the bankrupcy of the politics of identity and the showing that we have to think coalitionally to get things done. That it doesn't matter with whom we sleep with. The queer movement was anti institutional with a critique to normalization: that you don't have to get normal to become legitimate.
– Judith Butler
I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.
– Judith Butler
I wanted to work out how a norm actually materialises a body, how we might understand the materiality of the body to be not only invested with a norm, but in some sense animated by a norm, or contoured by a norm.
– 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
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
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
Lesbians make themselves into a more frail political community by insisting on the radical irreducibility of their desire. I don't think any of us have irreducibly distinct desires.
– Judith Butler
Like such miraculously resilient characters of the Saturday morning cartoons. Hegel's protagonists always reassemble themselves, prepare a new scene, enter the stage armed with a new set of ontological insights - and fail again.
– Judith Butler
Perhaps a new sort of feminist politics is now desirable to contest the very reifications of gender and identity, one that will take the variable construction of identity as both a methodological and normative prerequisite, if not a political goal.
– 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
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
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
The question of the subject is crucial for politics, and for feminist politics in particular, because juridical subjects are invariably produced through certain exclusionary practices that do not show once the juridial structure of politics has been established.
– 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
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
What is at stake is less a theory of cultural construction than a consideration of the scenography and topography of construction. This scenography is orchestrated by and as a matrix of power that remains disarticulated if we presume constructedness and materiality as necessarily oppositional notions.
– Judith Butler
What is ironic is that equating Zionism with Jewishness, is adopting the very tactic favoured by anti-semites.
– Judith Butler
When the woman in the audience at my talk said I survived lesbian feminism and still desire women, I thought that was a really great line, because one of the problems has been the normative requirement that has emerged within some lesbian-feminist communities to come up with a radically specific lesbian sexuality.
– Judith Butler