Judith Butler
An American philosopher and gender theorist whose work on performativity, gender, and power has significantly influenced feminist and queer theory.
Quotes by Judith Butler
The 'I' has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation to others.
When we lose certain others, we do not simply lose them but we lose our hold on who we are.
The task is not one of representation, but of intervention.
To claim that all lives have equal value is not to say that all lives are equally grievable.
War sustains its own narrative, and the narrative sustains the war.
The struggle for recognition is the struggle for life itself.
Norms are not fixed; they are reproduced through repetition.
The violence of the norm is that it makes life unlivable for those who do not conform.
To live is to be exposed to the other, to be vulnerable.
Language is a condition of possibility for the subject, but it also wounds.
Hate speech works to injure; it is a form of social death.
The censorial act is itself performative; it produces the very speech it seeks to control.
Sovereignty is always in the process of being undone by its own violence.
The ethical relation is one of non-violence, but violence is constitutive of the social.
We are all ethically bound to one another.
The right to appear is the right to live.
Bodies in the street are making claims for livability.
Assembly is a practice of freedom.
Grief is a form of social practice.
The loss of others exposes the limits of the self.