Butler, Judith

"Subjectivity itself is the effect of power relations; there is no subject prior to or independent of power."

"To resist normative intelligibility is to risk abjection, erasure, and the refusal of recognition."

"What counts as a life worth living is determined by hegemonic norms that exceed any individual's control."

"The future is not foreclosed; it remains open to contestation and rearticulation."

"To acknowledge our implication in power structures is the beginning of ethical and political responsibility."

"Gender is a repeated performance; each iteration offers the possibility of subversion and resistance."

"The human is not a given category but is continually produced and contested through exclusionary practices."

"We must learn to grieve collectively for those whose deaths have been rendered ungrievable by social hierarchies."

"To speak of rights presumes a subject and a frame of intelligibility that may themselves be contested and contingent."

"Performance is not a singular act for Judith Butler, but rather a repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance."

"We are not born with a gender; we are born with a sex, and gender is constructed through repeated performances."

"The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is produced, because signification is not a founding act but rather a regulated process of repetition."

"Vulnerability is not a weakness but a fundamental condition of human life and social being."

"We need to question what we think we already know about the categories we use to describe ourselves."

"Gender is an accomplishment, an achievement, rather than an essential identity."

"The possibility of change lies in the gap between what is performed and what could be performed otherwise."

"Precarity is not equally distributed; some lives are rendered more vulnerable than others."

"We are implicated in the world we seek to understand; there is no view from nowhere."

"Language does not simply describe the world; it actively constitutes reality through its uses."

"The body is not a thing but a process, continually constructed through social practices."

"Resistance begins with the recognition that things could be otherwise."

"We must learn to live with ambiguity rather than seeking false certainty."

"The norm is not neutral; it actively excludes and marginalizes."

"Interdependence, not independence, is the human condition."

"We are always already caught in relations of power that constitute us as subjects."

"Recognize the humanity of those we consider other or dangerous."

"The possibility of livable lives depends on social and political transformation."

"Frames of war determine which lives are grievable and which are not."

"To be human is to be constituted through relations with others."

"We must resist the illusion that we can escape the social matrices that form us."