“I think that public grieving is a good thing. People need to be grieved; loss needs to be acknowledged publicly, because it helps to confer a sense of reality on the loss but also because it makes it known that this was a real life.” PeopleThinkingNeedsRealHelpingRealityLossKnownGood ThingsReal LifeGrieving Author:Judith Butler
“I think we need a politics that allows us to risk what is intelligible. To be maybe slightly unintelligible, too be slightly "illisible". To take the risk of suggesting that the human form might take another form.” ThinkingNeedsHumansMightFormRiskSuggestingHuman Form Author:Judith Butler
“The real question is how do you survive at the same time you pose those risks? Because you need to survive. And it seems to me that you survive in community or in solidarity, with others who are taking the risk with you.” NeedsRealSeemsCommunityRiskSolidarityReal Questions Author:Judith Butler
“I do think we need to allow for there to be room for subversive and ironic speech. We need to be able to put out plays in which we make fun of ourselves or in which we interrogate the words that injure us. And maybe give them another meaning.” ThinkingNeedsGivingPlayAbleFunRoomsSpeechIronicSubversive Author:Judith Butler
“We need to be I think equally sensitive to the injurious power of certain kinds of speech acts but also to the subversive and possibly liberatory effects of certain kinds of play.” ThinkingNeedsKindPlayCertainEffectsSpeechSensitiveSubversive Author:Judith Butler
“Maybe we need to start with the rethinking of what is "west" and what is "non-west." It seems to me that there are any number of populations who already cross that divide, and we could probably point to several existing states that belong exclusively neither to one category nor to the other. Do we use these terms to designate geographical realities, geopolitical ones, or perhaps sites of power, exploitation, orientalism that move through space and time in ways that have to be tracked historically.” WayNeedsStatesUseRealitySeemsMovingTermSpaceNumbersCrossesWestPopulationCategoriesDividesExploitationSiteTime And SpaceGeopoliticalOrientalismRethinking Author:Judith Butler
“We have to be able track the ways in which fear, for instance, is monopolized by state and media institutions, ways in which fear is actually promoted and distributed as a way of bolstering the need for greater security and militarization.” WayNeedsStatesAbleGreaterSecurityMediaInstitutionsTrackInstance Author:Judith Butler
“People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from.” PeopleKnowsNeedsWho I Am Author:Judith Butler
“We need a legal and political understanding of the right of the refugee, whereby no solution for one group produces a new class of refugees - you can't solve a refugee problem by producing a new, potentially greater refugee problem.” NeedsProblemPoliticalUnderstandingClassGreaterGroupsProduceSolutionsSolveRefugeeNew Class Author:Judith Butler
“Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs - it is also not always what a trans person needs. Either way, one should be free to determine the course of one's gendered life.” WayNeedsShouldPersonsCoursesDetermineInterventionTrans Author:Judith Butler
“I never did like the assertion of the "innate" inferiority or women or Blacks, and I understood that when people tried to talk that way, they were trying to "fix" a social reality into a natural necessity. And yet, sometimes we do need a language that refers to a basic, fundamental, enduring, and necessary dimension of who we are, and the sense of sexed embodiment can be precisely that.” PeopleWayNeedsTryingSometimesRealityLanguageSocialNaturalUnderstoodFundamentalsEndureWho We AreDimensionsInnateAssertionInferiorityEmbodiment Author:Judith Butler
“My sense is that we may not need the language of innateness or genetics to understand that we are all ethically bound to recognize another person's declared or enacted sense of sex and/or gender. We do not have to agree upon the "origins" of that sense of self to agree that it is ethically obligatory to support and recognize sexed and gendered modes of being that are crucial to a person's well-being.” NeedsWellsMayPersonsSelfLanguageSexSupportAgreeBoundsGenderWell BeingCrucialGeneticsSense Of SelfAgree Upon Author:Judith Butler
“What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation.” WorldNeedsSelfFormLanguageSupportPossibilityAffirmationPronounsSelf Affirmation Author:Judith Butler
“What we need is a political and joyous alternative to the behaviorist discourse, the Christian discourse on evil or sin, and the convergence of the two in forms of gender policing that [is] tyrannical and destructive.” NeedsTwoChristianFormPoliticalEvilSinGenderAlternativesDestructiveDiscourseJoyousConvergence Author:Judith Butler
“We have to find a way of understanding how one category of sex can be "assigned" from both and another sense of sex can lead us to resist and reject that sex assignment. How do we understand that second sense of sex? It is not the same as the first - it is not an assignment that others give us. But maybe it is an assignment we give ourselves? If so, do we not need a world of others, linguistic practices, social institutions, and political imaginaries in order to move forward to claim precisely those categories we require, and to reject those that work against us?” IfsWorldWayNeedsGivingFirstsMovingPoliticalOrderSocialSexUnderstandingPracticeClaimsInstitutionsMoving ForwardRejectsCategoriesAssignmentsSocial Institutions Author: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?” NeedsStatesLawOrderIdentityRelationProductionsGenderContemporaryRecourseGender Identity Book:Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity Source: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
