Judith Butler
Judith Butler
Judith Butleris 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth24 February 1956
CityCleveland, OH
CountryUnited States of America
Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive?
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.
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.
The critical image... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure.
Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.
The life doesn't simply get erased. It gets imprinted and remembered.
I think we are affected by others in all kinds of ways. I do understand what it's like to wish to control the conditions under which we can be affected by other human beings, but none of us really are.
Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.
You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity.
Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination.
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.
I was off to Yale to be a lesbian
I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.