Butler, Judith

"Cohabitation requires a kind of ongoing negotiation and accommodation."

"The question of how to live together is the fundamental political question."

"We are bound to others in ways that exceed our conscious intention."

"The bonds that tie us together are both enabling and constraining."

"To acknowledge our interdependence is to acknowledge our vulnerability."

"Strength lies not in self-sufficiency but in the capacity to be affected."

"Gender is not something one is, but something one does—a repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being."

"There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results."

"The heterosexual matrix is a regime of power-knowledge that institutes and sustains the regulatory fiction of heterosexuality as natural and inevitable."

"Performativity is not a singular act used by a subject, but a reiterative and citational practice by which subjects are formed."

"We are not born with a gender; we are compelled to perform it constantly."

"The body is not an independent variable, but is always already caught up in the matrices of power that constitute and reconstitute it."

"Precarity is not a condition only of some populations but a general condition that requires a theory of justice capable of apprehending it."

"To claim that all lives matter is to ignore the specific vulnerabilities and precarities that structure some lives more than others."

"Grievability is unequal; some lives are marked as livable and worth grieving while others are not."

"Ethics begins when we acknowledge the Other as someone whose life matters, whose death would constitute a loss."

"We are all implicated in systems of power and violence; there is no position of innocence from which to speak."

"Vulnerability is not weakness; it is the fundamental condition of being human."

"The subject is not sovereign; it emerges through relations of dependency and precarity."

"We must learn to live together with our differences and conflicts; consensus is neither possible nor desirable."

"Performativity reveals that identity is not an essence but an effect of repeated bodily citations."

"The regulatory norms that govern gender are not fixed but are continuously being challenged and rearticulated."

"To challenge gender norms is to challenge the very foundations of how we understand personhood and rights."

"Abjection is the process by which the subject comes to be constituted through the exclusion and disavowal of the Other."

"Subversion is possible only through the repetition and rearticulation of the norms that constitute us."

"The category of the human is not universal but is produced through exclusions and silencings."

"Language does not simply describe reality; it performs and produces reality through its utterances."

"We are always already interpellated by the structures and discourses that surround us; there is no outside to power."

"To be ethical is to recognize the alterity of the Other and to resist the reduction of difference to sameness."

"The production of the 'normal' subject requires the simultaneous production of the abject Other."