30 phrases by Judith Butler to honor this great feminist philosopher

Whatever freedom we fight for must be a freedom based on equality.

Gender is not cultivating what sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural medium through which a sexed nature or a natural sex is formed and established as pre-discursive, before culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.

The category of sex is neither invariable nor natural, but an especially political use of the category of nature that obeys the purposes of reproductive sexuality.

Categories tell us more about the need to categorize bodies than the bodies themselves.

I think public mourning gives value to lives. It allows for a kind of growing awareness of the precariousness of these lives and the need to protect them.

Social movements must unite people’s creative and affirmative energies, not just reiterate harm and produce an identity as subjects of harm.

Journalism is a place of political struggle… Inevitably.

I’m much more open about gender categories and my feminism has been about women’s safety from violence, increased literacy, reduced poverty and more equality.

We get lost in what we read, to come back to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.

Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.

In a way, every war is a war over the senses. Without altering the senses, no state could make war.

I certainly do not deny that there are extreme, persistent and malignant forms of victimization, but adopting this perspective in a social movement is counterproductive.

Intellectual work is a way to connect with people, to be part of an ongoing conversation.

Let’s face it. We are torn apart by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.

After all, the justification for the struggle is in the sensory field, sound and image are used to recruit us to a reality and make us participate in it.

I have always been a feminist. I oppose discrimination against women, all forms of gender inequality, but it also means that I demand a policy that takes into account the constraints imposed by gender on human development.

If the immutable character of sex is challenged, perhaps this construction called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender.

If Lacan recognizes that a woman’s homosexuality comes from a disappointed heterosexuality, is it not equally evident to the observer that heterosexuality comes from a disappointed homosexuality?

Intersex activists work to correct the erroneous assumption that every body harbors an “innate truth” about its sex.

The critique of gender norms must be placed in the context of lives as they are lived and must be guided by the question of: what maximizes the possibilities of a livable life, what minimizes the possibility of an unbearable life or even death.

Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, unequal, full of history, of ghosts, of yearnings that are more or less legible for those who try to see themselves with their own defective vision.

I also don’t believe that literature can teach us how to live, but people who have doubts about how to live tend to turn to literature.

Sometimes a normative conception of gender can break down, undermining the ability to continue living a tolerable life.

The belief structure is so strong that it allows some types of violence to be justified or even considered violence. Thus, we see that there is no mention of murders, but of casualties, and that war is not mentioned, but the struggle for freedom.

Differences in position and desire mark the limits of universality as an ethical reflection.

Perhaps the promise of the phallus is always unsatisfactory in some way.

For me, philosophy is a way of writing.

Undoubtedly, marriage and same-sex family alliances should be available options.

Is there a good way to categorize bodies? What do the categories tell us? Categories tell us more about the need to categorize bodies than they do about bodies themselves.