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?

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.

The problem with Antigone is that she stood up to the despot Creon, but in such a way that she ended up dying. So she bought her defiance with her death. The real question I ended up asking was, "What would it mean for Antigone to have stood up to Creon and lived?" And the only way she could have lived is if she had had a serious social movement with her. If she arrived with a social movement to take down the despot, maybe it would have taken 18 days only, like in Egypt. It's really important to be able to re-situate one's rage and destitution in the context of a social movement.

It is clear that whatever language of democracy Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests.

We 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.

Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person's felt sense of gender was therefore "unreal." That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be. But I think I needed to pay more attention to what people feel, how the primary experience of the body is registered, and the quite urgent and legitimate demand to have those aspects of sex recognized and supported.

Law itself is either suspended, or regarded as an instrument that the state may use in the service of constraining and monitoring a given population; the state is not subject to the rule of law, but law can be suspended or deployed tactically and partially to suit the requirements of a state that seeks more and more to allocate sovereign power to its executive and administrative powers. The law is suspended in the name of "sovereignty" of the nation, where "sovereignty" denotes the task of any state to preserve and protect its own territoriality.