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.
Judith ButlerIt seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.
Judith ButlerWe have to ask how we can stretch and how sometimes we can break the norms that determine what's intelligible and readable and what is not.
Judith ButlerIt seems to me that responsiveness is a better source for understanding what moral claims are and how they work upon us.
Judith ButlerI do not mean to say that such institutions act unilaterally on psychic life, or that they determine certain psychic outcomes. Rather, they exploit forms of fear and insecurity that are there for any population - no political organisation of life could ever fully do away with fear and insecurity; but some work to intensify, accelerate, and make more acute forms of fear, and to provide ideological focus for such intensified fears, at which point critical thinking has a fierce rival. The critical analysis that shows precisely how those forms of fear are promulgated, and for what purpose.
Judith Butler