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.
Judith ButlerWhat does it mean then to live with one another? It can be unhappy, it can be wretched, it can be ambivalent, it can even be full of antagonism, but all of that can play out in the political sphere without recourse to expulsion or genocide. And that is our obligation, to stay in the sphere with whatever murderous rage we have, without acting on it.
Judith ButlerPerhaps we have to remember that there are forms of outrage that do not lead to any sort of mobilization, and there are ways of "registering the facts" that do not lead to outrage.
Judith ButlerThere are ordinary spaces where people do, more or less, share neighbourhoods. In Haifa, there are whole communities that are more or less integrated. But of course that is with Palestinian Israelis who have, for the most part, accepted certain kinds of cooperative models, and also accept second-class citizenship.
Judith ButlerI think that many of the mobilizations against the wars waged by the US and its allies since 2001 have been non-violent and massive. We have seen them throughout European capitals and in the US, and in many other parts of the world as well. So it is not only imaginable, but already actual.
Judith ButlerI consider both the West Bank and Gaza to be colonised, even though Gaza is not occupied in the same way that the West Bank is. The Israeli government and military control all goods that pass in or out of that area, and they have restricted employment and building material that would allow Palestinians to rebuild homes and structures that were destroyed by bombardment.
Judith Butler