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
Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.
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.
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?
You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity.
Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.
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, that doesn't end up ratifying one's own national perspective and hence, one's own national agendas.
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.
What is ironic is that equating Zionism with Jewishness, is adopting the very tactic favoured by anti-semites.
Only if we accept the proposition that the state of Israel is the exclusive and legitimate representative of the Jewish people would a movement calling for divestment, sanctions and boycott against that state be understood as directed against the Jewish people as a whole.
A man who reads effeminate may well be consistently heterosexual, and another one might be gay. We can't read sexuality off of gender.
The principle of academic freedom is designed to make sure that powers outside the university, including government and corporations, are not able to control the curriculum or intervene in extra-mural speech.
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.
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?