A different kind of pleasure surfaced in the aftermath, the pleasure of seeing the towers fall time and again, the experience of being entranced by the visual spectacle, and then also the very graphic forms of public mourning for exemplary citizens (taking place at the same time as the refusal to mourn the undocumented, the foreign, gay and lesbian lives lost there, for example). I am not sure that the guilt over the pleasure re-installed the good citizen.
Judith ButlerNeoliberalism has taken new forms since the demise of the Fordist concept of labor and with the emergence of what is understood as flexible labor. This has really come to be the dominant form for about the last 20 years.
Judith ButlerThe United States are such a large place. And there are some states and some cities where the questions of gender or sexuality would not be asked, or where scholars or academics are working in small little corners of the universities trying to raise these questions and being told that either that they're strange or not appropriate or being actively opposed. There are other places where there is very active scholarship going on. Certainly on gender.
Judith ButlerGender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.
Judith ButlerIndeed, it would be great if we could all be liberated through reason, but I think it only gets us part of the way. After all, someone may have a very logical view, but for other reasons we may still fail to hear what that person says, or we may turn their words around so that they are understood to say the opposite. The task is really to find ways of addressing deep-seated forms of fear and aggression that make it possible to hold to manifestly inconsistent views without quite acknowledging them.
Judith Butler