Judith Butler

Judith Butler (born 24 February 1956) is an American post-structuralist philosopher who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics.

Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act.^{[citation needed]}

Quotes

• 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 Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" (1990)

• If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.
  • "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" (1990)

• Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.
  • "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Inside/Out (1991) edited by Diana Fuss

• Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
  • Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)

• Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
  • "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary" (1993), later published in The Judith Butler Reader (2004) edited by Sarah Salih with Judith Butler

• 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, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
  • "Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time" (1997), which received first place in the Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest

• 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.
  • Interview with Judith Butler. in: The Believer. May 2003

• I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men.
  • "As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up" in Haaretz. February 24, 2010

• Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.

External links

• Berkeley Faculty Biography - Judith Butler
• European Graduate School Faculty Website - Judith Butler
• Judith Butler. Israel/Palestine and the Paradoxes of Academic Freedom in Radical Philosophy
• Judith Butler. Teach in Against the Israeli war on Lebanon 2006. Video Lecture