Photographs can be forms of recruitment, ways of bringing the viewer into the military, as it were. In this way, they prepare us for war, even enlist us in war, at the level of the senses, establishing a sensate regime of war.
Judith ButlerWe are more often than not asked, for instance, to regard Israel and Palestine as in a conflict of this kind, a framing that sets each of them on equal footing, and implicitly analogies the political situation to a fist fight, a soccer match, or a domestic quarrel. So if, then, the only two intelligible political positions are "pro-Palestinian" or "pro-Israeli," the presumption is that one's position is determined by a sentiment that wants one side to win over the other.
Judith ButlerI wonder whether I might have meant "terrify us" but perhaps as well there was a less than conscious effort to show that the suppression of debate about Palestine and about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement - within many academic circles - does seek to establish those who would address such issues in speech as already collaborating with "terrorist" regimes, although now only Hamas is officially terrorist according to the US government and its allies.
Judith ButlerWe should all have greater freedoms to define and pursue our lives without pathologization, de-realization, harassment, threats of violence, violence, and criminalization. I join in the struggle to realize such a world.
Judith ButlerIt is always brave to insist on undergoing transformations that feel necessary and right even when there are so many obstructions to doing so, including people and institutions who seek to pathologize or criminalize such important acts of self-definition. I know that for some feels less brave than necessary, but we all have to defend those necessities that allow us to live and breathe in the way that feels right to us. Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs – it is also not always what a trans person needs.
Judith ButlerMy 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.
Judith Butler