Judith Butler Short Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

View all Judith Butler Quotes
Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of slave morality.

Judith Butler
Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.

Judith Butler
Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.

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

Judith Butler
To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.

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

Judith Butler
Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination.

Judith Butler
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.

Judith Butler
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?

Judith Butler
What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.

Judith Butler
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.

Judith Butler
I'm no great fan of the phallus, and have made my own views known on this subject before, so I do not propose a return to a notion of the phallus as the third term in any and all relations of desire.

Judith Butler