Judith Butler: Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a...

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

expression character sex

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

Judith Butler

masculine-and-feminine fixed roles

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

Judith Butler

gender-identity gender doe

We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones.

Judith Butler

vocabulary form sometimes

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 its 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.

Judith Butler

men reality facts

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

Judith Butler

loses return world

All of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions - or norms - that help to form us.

Judith Butler

construction body helping

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

agency important views

... 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.

Judith Butler

clothes choices morning

We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

Judith Butler

speak men way

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

vision feelings love-is

When some people rejoin with “All Lives Matter” they misunderstand the problem, but not because their message is untrue. It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter which is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered, and are struggling to matter in the way they deserve.

Judith Butler

struggle names people

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

Judith Butler

luxury possibility bread

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

imitation kind facts

If we are looking for signs of democratization, then surely we are looking as well for forms of living on equal terms in and among cultural differences.

Judith Butler

equal term

As we interpret ourselves differently, we also live ourselves differently.

Judith Butler

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

Judith Butler

replicate domination relation

I think maybe it's more important to know the traditional concepts we have for thinking about how bodies are feminine or masculine or how sexuality is, straight or gay. These categories very often fail to describe the complexity of who we are.

Judith Butler

gay important thinking

Our notions of what a human being is problematically depend on there being two coherent genders. And if someone doesn't comply with either the masculine norm or the feminine norm, their very humaness is called into question.

Judith Butler

feminine gender two

Genocide is not a legitimate option. It's 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.

Judith Butler

humanity matter world

Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony