Judith Butler

The very act of speaking is a performative act, bringing into being what it names.

To be a subject is to be subjected to power, but also to have the capacity for agency and resistance.

Gender is a stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts that produce the illusion of an inner core.

The ethical is not a set of rules, but a way of being in the world, a responsiveness to the demands of others.

The body is a public thing, always already exposed to the gaze and judgment of others.

The political is about the struggle over who gets to define reality, who gets to name what counts as a life.

To be free is to be able to act in ways that are not fully determined by existing norms, to open up new possibilities.

The subject is not a singular entity, but a complex and contradictory site of multiple identifications.

Gender is a social construct, but it is also a lived reality, with profound effects on our lives.

The ethical demand is not to be invulnerable, but to acknowledge our shared vulnerability and to respond to it with care.

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results.

Gender is a kind of impersonation that passes as the real.

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure.

Bodies are not simply objects or subjects; they are materializations of regulatory norms.

The body is not a site of stable meaning; it is a process of ongoing interpretation.

To be a body is to be at risk of losing one's life.

Grief furnishes the touch of the outside to the inside, the shock of the other to the self.

What is the status of the 'I' that speaks? Who is this 'I' that is said to be prior to the law?

Power not only operates on subjects but also constitutes them.

We are used to thinking of freedom in purely personal terms, as a possession of the autonomous individual.