Judith Butler

We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it's a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.

I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.

To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.

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 point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.

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.

I would say that I'm a feminist theorist before I'm a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist.

Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.

Gender is not something that one is it is something one does an act a doing rather than a being.

Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other. A different dynamic it seems to me is at work in the critique of new sexuality studies.

It's my view that gender is culturally formed, but it's also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation.

Sexual harassment law is very important. But I think it would be a mistake if the sexual harassment law movement is the only way in which feminism is known in the media.

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.

When one set of Jews labels another set of Jews 'anti-Semitic,' they are trying to monopolize the right to speak in the name of the Jews. So the allegation of anti-Semitism is actually a cover for an intra-Jewish quarrel.

In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, 'I have just lost the love of my life.'

It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.

I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.

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.

That gender is a choice or that gender is a role or that gender is a construction that one puts on as one puts on clothes in the morning that there is a one who is prior to this gender a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.

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.

Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the existence of the small but important post-Zionist movement in Israel, including the philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram, the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet Yitzhak Laor.

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.

I'm a professor of comparative literature, among other things, so I'm able to read in a couple of other languages, and I understand that not everyone is, not everyone can, although it is quite stunning how many people do read Spanish in the United States, but moving between languages is also extremely helpful.

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.

Cameras help to minimize collateral damage, and very often, without a camera a missile cannot fire. Certainly, without a camera a drone can't function, which means that the very ways in which we wage war are determined in part by how cameras work and whether they work at all.

When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that we've taken on a role or we're acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.

A man who reads effeminate may well be consistently heterosexual, and another one might be gay. We can't read sexuality off of gender.

You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity.

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

Until we learn that other lives are equally grievable and have an equal demand on us to be grieved especially the ones that weve helped to eliminate Im not sure well really be on the way to overcoming the problem of dehumanization.

Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.

Genocide is not a legitimate option. Its not ok to decide that an entire population has no right to live in the world. No matter whether these relationships are very proximate or very distant there is no entitlement to expunge a population or to demean its basic humanity.