Top 50 Judith Butler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.”

— Judith Butler

2. “Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.”

— Judith Butler

3. “To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.”

— Judith Butler

4. “I was off to Yale to be a lesbian.”

— Judith Butler

5. “Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.”

— Judith Butler

6. “We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.”

— Judith Butler

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7. “Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.”

— Judith Butler

8. “We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.”

— Judith Butler

9. “To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.”

— Judith Butler

10. “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”

— Judith Butler

11. “Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.”

— Judith Butler

12. “Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.”

— Judith Butler

13. “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 Butler

14. “I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.”

— Judith Butler

15. “When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that weve taken on a role or were acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.”

— Judith Butler

16. “Peace is a resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war .”

— Judith Butler

17. “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact.”

— Judith Butler

18. “In the first instance, performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”

— Judith Butler

19. “Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war. It’s a commitment to living with a certain kind of vulnerability to others and susceptibility to being wounded that actually gives our individual lives meaning.”

— Judith Butler

20. “Sexual harassment law is very important. But I think it would be a mistake if the sexual harassment law movement is the only way in which feminism is known in the media.”

— Judith Butler

21. “What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.”

— Judith Butler

22. “Destruction is thus always restoration – that is, the destruction of a set of categories that introduce artificial divisions into an otherwise unified ontology.”

— Judith Butler

23. “Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.”

— Judith Butler

24. “I think we are affected by others in all kinds of ways. I do understand what it’s like to wish to control the conditions under which we can be affected by other human beings, but none of us really are.”

— Judith Butler

25. “One might wonder what use ‘opening up possibilities’ finally is, but no one who has understood what it is to live in the social world as what is ‘impossible’, illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose that question.”

— Judith Butler

26. “Until we learn that other lives are equally grievable and have an equal demand on us to be grieved – especially the ones that we’ve helped to eliminate – I’m not sure we’ll really be on the way to overcoming the problem of dehumanization.”

— Judith Butler

27. “The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.”

— Judith Butler

28. “The exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the subject.”

— Judith Butler

29. “Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.”

— Judith Butler

30. “If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.”

— Judith Butler

31. “I think that public grieving is a good thing. People need to be grieved; loss needs to be acknowledged publicly, because it helps to confer a sense of reality on the loss but also because it makes it known that this was a real life.”

— Judith Butler

32. “We must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are.”

— Judith Butler

33. “Irigaray remarks in such a vein that “the masquerade... is what women do... in order to participate in man’s desire, but at the cost of giving up their own”.”

— Judith Butler

34. “Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other. A different dynamic it seems to me is at work in the critique of new sexuality studies.”

— Judith Butler

35. “The anticipation of an authoritative disclosure of meaning is the means by which that authority is attributed and installed: the anticipation conjures its object.”

— Judith Butler

36. “It seems to me that responsiveness is a better source for understanding what moral claims are and how they work upon us.”

— Judith Butler

37. “Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.”

— Judith Butler

38. “The life doesn’t simply get erased. It gets imprinted and remembered.”

— Judith Butler

39. “Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology of ‘evil’.”

— Judith Butler

40. “The mobilization of identity categories for the purposes of politicization always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes.”

— Judith Butler

41. “That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility.”

— Judith Butler

42. “Perhaps also part of what dialogic understanding entails is the acceptance of divergence, breakage, splinter, and fragmentation as part of the often tortuous process of democratisation.”

— Judith Butler

43. “The task thus becomes to track the patterned ways that violence seeks to name as violent that which resists it, and how the violent character of a legal regime is exposed as it forcibly quells dissent, punishes workers who refuse the exploitative terms of contracts, sequesters minorities, imprisons its critics, and expels its potential rivals.”

— Judith Butler

44. “Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony.”

— Judith Butler

45. “War begets war. It produces outraged and humiliated and furious people. That is almost invariably the case.”

— Judith Butler

46. “The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality.”

— Judith Butler

47. “If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?”

— Judith Butler

48. “We can understand this conclusion to be the necessary result of a heterosexualized and masculine observational point of view that takes lesbian sexuality to be a refusal of sexuality per se only because sexuality is presumed to be heterosexual, and the observer, here constructed as the heterosexual male, is clearly being refused.”

— Judith Butler

49. “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?”

— Judith Butler

50. “Wittig appears to take issue with genitally organized sexuality per se and to call for an alternative economy of pleasures which would both contest the construction of female subjectivity marked by women’s supposedly distinctive reproductive function.”

— Judith Butler