Butler, Judith

"Gender is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results."

"There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the expressions themselves."

"If one 'is' a woman, that is surely not all one is."

"The body is not a being, but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated."

"Performativity is not a single act, but a repetition and a ritual."

"We are not born with a gender; we perform our gender."

"What I would propose, then, is a way of understanding performativity as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains."

"The heterosexual matrix is not a monolithic structure but a hegemonic one that can be contested."

"Subversion is not the same as transgression."

"To 'do' the doing of one's gender is not an act of pure creativity."

"Melancholia is the price of the failure to grieve."

"The abject is what we must expel to establish ourselves as subjects."

"Precariousness is not merely an existential condition but a political one."

"Violence is accomplished through the selective production of grievability."

"To make a life livable, we must make certain lives grievable."

"Some lives are marked as lives, others are not."

"The frame determines what will be visible and what will remain obscured."

"We live our lives as precarious creatures dependent on social conditions we do not control."

"The question of who counts as human requires a political answer."

"Vulnerability is not something to overcome but something to acknowledge."

"We are undone by other people, and I'm not sure we can ever fully do otherwise."

"To be undone is not to be destroyed but to be opened up to a new way of being."

"Grieving is a way of acknowledging the value of what we have lost."

"The recognition of another's humanity depends on the recognition of their vulnerability."

"Agency is not simply something that resides in the subject."

"The subject is not sovereign but is constantly being constituted through discourse."

"Power is not simply a constraint on freedom but the very condition of freedom."

"We must learn to live with the impossibility of perfect justice."

"Repetition is what allows for the possibility of change."

"The norm establishes itself through repetition."