Butler, Judith

"To grieve together is to affirm a shared vulnerability and a commitment to each other's continued existence."

"The category of 'woman' is not a natural or stable identity but a politically contested and contingent construction."

"Language binds us to norms even as it offers the possibility of rearticulating those norms."

"The question of who counts as human, whose lives are worth protecting, is always a political question."

"To be human is to be subjected to norms of intelligibility that exceed any individual will or choice."

"Power is not something that some people have and others lack; it circulates and operates through all of us."

"The performative constitution of gender reveals that we are all implicated in the reproduction of normative orders."

"Ethics emerges not from abstract principles but from concrete encounters with the alterity of the Other."

"To acknowledge precarity is to recognize that we are all fundamentally dependent on others and on social structures."

"The naturalization of heterosexuality requires the constant reiteration and enforcement of heteronormative norms."

"To resist is to perform otherwise, to enact different repetitions of the norms that constitute us."

"Vulnerability is not something to be overcome or transcended; it is the ground of ethical responsibility."

"The specter of the Other haunts the constitution of the self; the self is always already divided and dependent."

"What we understand as natural is always already inscribed within a field of power relations and historical contingencies."

"To create new forms of life is to rearticulate the norms that govern livability and recognizability."

"The question of becoming is not a question of transcending our subjection but of rearticulating it."

"We are bound to others not by choice but by a fundamental condition of interdependency and exposure."

"The norm is not external to the subject; it inhabits and constitutes the subject from within."

"To speak of liberation is to presume an escape from power that may be impossible and undesirable."

"The body is not a thing to be possessed by a subject; the subject is constituted through repeated bodily acts."

"Mourning is a public and political act; to mourn is to refuse the erasure of the other."

"The concept of performativity challenges the distinction between appearance and reality, surface and depth."

"We must develop forms of critique and resistance that do not presume a position outside the structures we seek to challenge."

"The regulatory frame of heterosexuality produces certain lives as possible and others as impossible."

"To acknowledge the performative nature of gender is to open up the possibility of performing it otherwise."

"Precarity and vulnerability are not conditions of abjection but the common condition of all human life."

"The question of how to live ethically together with radical difference remains urgent and unresolved."

"What we understand as the natural or the given is always the product of naturalization, a process that conceals its own contingency."

"To be grievable is to be recognized as someone whose life mattered, whose death constitutes a loss."

"The political task is not to overcome norms but to work within and against them simultaneously."