Judith Butler quotes

Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist, renowned for her work on gender performativity. Her influential books have transformed contemporary debates about gender, identity, and power. She is considered one of the most important thinkers in feminist and queer theory. Here are 51 of her quotes:

Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.

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

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

We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.

Judith Butler

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

Judith Butler

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

Judith Butler

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

Judith Butler

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.

Judith Butler

Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.

Judith Butler

I do think it's important that we experiment with new vocabularies. That new words help us conceptualize our social existence in a different way.

Judith Butler

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.

Judith Butler

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

Judith Butler

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.

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.

Judith Butler

If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?

Judith Butler

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.

Judith Butler

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

Judith Butler

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.

Judith Butler

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.

Judith Butler

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.

Judith Butler

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

Judith Butler

When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that weve taken on a role or were 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.

Judith Butler