Butler, Judith

"To deviate from the norm is already to perform a kind of resistance."

"Language is not an individual possession but a social and political practice."

"The subject is not prior to culture but is produced through it."

"To be addressed is to be called into being."

"Identity is a repeated stylization of the body."

"There is no escape from the constitutive effects of power."

"Resistance must come from within the structures that constrain us."

"The heteronarrative is not inevitable but contingent."

"We are always already implicated in the systems we seek to critique."

"To mourn is to acknowledge our dependence on others."

"Precarity is not equally distributed across populations."

"Some bodies are made to appear more vulnerable than others."

"The question of recognition is a question of justice."

"We must contest the frames that determine whose lives count as grievable."

"The body is never simply one's own."

"Survival is not simply a biological fact but a social and political one."

"To live is to be bound to others in ways we cannot fully control."

"Dependency is not a sign of weakness but a condition of life."

"The ethics of cohabitation must begin with an acknowledgment of our mutual vulnerability."

"We are never fully self-sufficient and should not aspire to be."

"The political is personal, and the personal is political."

"Kinship is not simply a biological category but a social and legal one."

"To grieve is to acknowledge the value of the lost other."

"The frames of war make some deaths count and others not."

"Photographs do not simply document reality but frame it."

"To be precarious is to be dependent on social support systems."

"The archive is never complete; it is always selective."

"History is not what happened but what can be narrated."

"The past haunts the present in ways we cannot fully escape."

"To do justice to the other is to allow them to exceed our categories."