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Because Al-qaeda Has Been A Non-state Centered Organisation, Many Of These Scenarios Do Not Exactly Apply. These Are Not Wars Between States. And Yet, It Seems To Me That We Make A Mistake If We Accept The View That States Are Fighting Terrorism, Since We Have Abundant Evidence For Accepting The Idea Of State Terrorism, And What Is Most Urgent Is To Track And Expose How State Terrorism Operates Under The Rubric Of "democracy."

-Judith Butler

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Because Al-qaeda Has Been

Judith Butler

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Because Al-qaeda Has Been A Non-state Centered Organisation, Many Of These Scenarios Do Not Exactly Apply. These Are Not Wars Between States. And Yet, It Seems To Me That We Make A Mistake If We Accept The View That States Are Fighting Terrorism, Since We Have Abundant Evidence For Accepting The Idea Of State Terrorism, And What Is Most Urgent Is To Track And Expose How State Terrorism Operates Under The Rubric Of "democracy."

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Masculine And Feminine

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Heterosexuality Is

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Heterosexuality

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I Think Maybe It's More Important To Know The Traditional Concepts We Have For Thinking About How Bodies Are Feminine Or Masculine Or How Sexuality Is, Straight Or Gay. These Categories Very Often Fail To Describe The Complexity Of Who We Are.

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I Want My Arguments To Be Good Arguments On The Basis Of What I Actually Have To Say.

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Economic Sanctions

Let's Face It. We're Undone By Each Other. And If We're Not, We're Missing Something.

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It Seems To Me That Responsiveness Is A Better Source For Understanding What Moral Claims Are And How They Work Upon Us.

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It Is Clear That Whatever Language Of Democracy [barack] Obama And His Administration Use Is Very Tactically Deployed, And Has As Its Main Aim The Extension Of Us Power And Interests.

If We Think About Sexual Life For A Gender Life, It Seems To Me That We Have To Allow For Certain Kinds Of Changes Or Certain Kinds Of Ways Of Reconceptualizing Ourselves.

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What Is Most Important Is To Cease Legislating For All Lives What Is Liveable Only For Some, And Similarly, To Refrain From Proscribing For All Lives What Is Unlivable For Some.

Indeed, It Would Be Great If We Could All Be Liberated Through Reason, But I Think It Only Gets Us Part Of The Way. After All, Someone May Have A Very Logical View, But For Other Reasons We May Still Fail To Hear What That Person Says, Or We May Turn Their Words Around So That They Are Understood To Say The Opposite. The Task Is Really To Find Ways Of Addressing Deep-seated Forms Of Fear And Aggression That Make It Possible To Hold To Manifestly Inconsistent Views Without Quite Acknowledging Them.

I Do Not Mean To Say That Such Institutions Act Unilaterally On Psychic Life, Or That They Determine Certain Psychic Outcomes. Rather, They Exploit Forms Of Fear And Insecurity That Are There For Any Population - No Political Organisation Of Life Could Ever Fully Do Away With Fear And Insecurity; But Some Work To Intensify, Accelerate, And Make More Acute Forms Of Fear, And To Provide Ideological Focus For Such Intensified Fears, At Which Point Critical Thinking Has A Fierce Rival. The Critical Analysis That Shows Precisely How Those Forms Of Fear Are Promulgated, And For What Purpose.

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We Need A Legal And Political Understanding Of The Right Of The Refugee, Whereby No Solution For One Group Produces A New Class Of Refugees - You Can't Solve A Refugee Problem By Producing A New, Potentially Greater Refugee Problem.

I Reject Totally The Characterization Of A Transwoman As A Mutilated Man. First, That Formulation Presumes That Men Born Into That Sex Assignment Are Not Mutilated. Second, It Once Again Sets Up The Feminist As The Prosecutor Of Trans People. If There Is Any Mutilation Going On In This Scene, It Is Being Done By The Feminist Police Force Who Rejects The Lived Embodiment Of Transwomen. That Very Accusation Is A Form Of "mutilation" As Is All Transphobic Discourse Such As These.

You Could Protect A Religious Minority Against Gays And Lesbians. Or You Could Protect Gays And Lesbians Against A Religious Minority. And Then, It Seems To Me Something Political Is Happening. Because We're Not Really Looking At The Kind Of Speech That Is Injurious.

I Think We Have To Accept A Wide Variety Of Positions On Gender. Some Want To Be Gender-free, But Others Want To Be Free Really To Be A Gender That Is Crucial To Who They Are.

I Have Simply Taken Some Of The Same Questions And Reposed Them In New Ways. But, You See, I Must Live. Right? I Mean I Can't Stay The Same For Everyone To Be Consumed As The Author Of "gender Trouble". I Have To Continue To Live And That Means I Have To "reposer Les Questions".

I Do Not Deny Certain Kinds Of Biological Differences. But I Always Ask Under What Conditions, Under What Discursive And Institutional Conditions, Do Certain Biological Differences - And They're Not Necessary Ones, Given The Anomalous State Of Bodies In The World - Become The Salient Characteristics Of Sex.

We Have To Find A Way Of Understanding How One Category Of Sex Can Be "assigned" From Both And Another Sense Of Sex Can Lead Us To Resist And Reject That Sex Assignment. How Do We Understand That Second Sense Of Sex? It Is Not The Same As The First - It Is Not An Assignment That Others Give Us. But Maybe It Is An Assignment We Give Ourselves? If So, Do We Not Need A World Of Others, Linguistic Practices, Social Institutions, And Political Imaginaries In Order To Move Forward To Claim Precisely Those Categories We Require, And To Reject Those That Work Against Us?

There Are Ordinary Spaces Where People Do, More Or Less, Share Neighbourhoods. In Haifa, There Are Whole Communities That Are More Or Less Integrated. But Of Course That Is With Palestinian Israelis Who Have, For The Most Part, Accepted Certain Kinds Of Cooperative Models, And Also Accept Second-class Citizenship.

People Who Have Been Made Stateless By Military Occupation Are Entitled To Repatriation, And Then The Question Is To Which State, Or To What Polity Or Area? Those Who Have Had Their Goods Taken Away Are Entitled To Compensation Of Some Kind. These Are Basic International Laws.

I Do Know That Some People Believe That I See Gender As A "choice" Rather Than As An Essential And Firmly Fixed Sense Of Self. My View Is Actually Not That. No Matter Whether One Feels One's Gendered And Sexed Reality To Be Firmly Fixed Or Less So, Every Person Should Have The Right To Determine The Legal And Linguistic Terms Of Their Embodied Lives.

Gender Assignment Is A "construction" And Yet Many Genderqueer And Trans People Refuse Those Assignments In Part Or In Full. That Refusal Opens The Way For A More Radical Form Of Self-determination, One That Happens In Solidarity With Others Who Are Undergoing A Similar Struggle.

The State Or Global Forms Of Power That Seek To Protect Populations Considered In Danger May Well Extend Their Own Power Through Those Acts Of Protection.

I Think That Many Of The Mobilizations Against The Wars Waged By The Us And Its Allies Since 2001 Have Been Non-violent And Massive. We Have Seen Them Throughout European Capitals And In The Us, And In Many Other Parts Of The World As Well. So It Is Not Only Imaginable, But Already Actual.

To Say That Gender Is Performative Is A Little Different Because For Something To Be Performative Means That It Produces A Series Of Effects. We Act And Walk And Speak And Talk In Ways That Consolidate An Impression Of Being A Man Or Being A Woman.

We Cannot Choose With Whom We Cohabit The World.

People Who Expect Enmity To Suddenly Convert Into Love Are Probably Using The Wrong Model.

The Violence Of Language Consists In Its Effort To Capture The Ineffable And, Hence, To Destroy It, To Seize Hold Of That Which Must Remain Elusive For Language To Operate As A Living Thing.

I Think We Are Affected By Others In All Kinds Of Ways. I Do Understand What It's Like To Wish To Control The Conditions Under Which We Can Be Affected By Other Human Beings, But None Of Us Really Are.

I Think It's Important To Live With A Certain Danger And A Certain Risk.

There Are Doubtless All Kinds Of Ways Of Explaining Why People Want Security, But I Do Not Think We Can Start With The Psychological Explanations. Even Psychological States Like Fear Or Desire For Safety Are Conditioned By Social And Political Forms Of Intimidation And Scare-mongering That Intensify Those Emotions, And Even Work To Persuade People That Nothing Less Than Their Survival Is At Stake.

I Think We Need A Politics That Allows Us To Risk What Is Intelligible. To Be Maybe Slightly Unintelligible, Too Be Slightly "illisible". To Take The Risk Of Suggesting That The Human Form Might Take Another Form.

We Are More Often Than Not Asked, For Instance, To Regard Israel And Palestine As In A Conflict Of This Kind, A Framing That Sets Each Of Them On Equal Footing, And Implicitly Analogies The Political Situation To A Fist Fight, A Soccer Match, Or A Domestic Quarrel. So If, Then, The Only Two Intelligible Political Positions Are "pro-palestinian" Or "pro-israeli," The Presumption Is That One's Position Is Determined By A Sentiment That Wants One Side To Win Over The Other.

All Of Us, As Bodies, Are In The Active Position Of Figuring Out How To Live With And Against The Constructions - Or Norms - That Help To Form Us.

I Think We Have To Ask, Not, What "gender Trouble" Is Today But Where "gender Trouble" Is Today.

Whether Or Not We Continue To Enforce A Universal Conception Of Human Rights At Moments Of Outrage And Incomprehension, Precisely When We Think That Others Have Taken Themselves Out Of The Human Community As We Know It, Is A Test Of Our Very Humanity.

Not All Bodies Are Born In Male Or Female. There Is A Continuum Of Bodies And It Seems To Me That Trying To Persuade Medical And Psychiatrist Establishments To Deal With The Intersex Involves Critique Of The Binary Gender System. Similarly There Continues To Be Extreme, Sometimes Very Extreme Violence Against Transgender People.

Bound To Seek Recognition Of Its Own Existence In Categories, Terms, And Names That Are Not Of Its Own Making, The Subject Seeks The Sign Of Its Own Existence Outside Itself, In A Discourse That Is At Once Dominant And Indifferent. Social Categories Signify Subordination And Existence At Once. In Other Words, Within Subjection The Price Of Existence Is Subordination.

Obama's Failure To Close Guantanamo Is Yet Another Instance Where The Rhetoric Of Democratic And Constitutional Rights Proved Not Useful For His International Relations, Relations Which Are Always Pursued In Ways That Continue To Link And Fortify Securitarian Power With The Opening Of New Markets.

We Have To Ask How We Can Stretch And How Sometimes We Can Break The Norms That Determine What's Intelligible And Readable And What Is Not.

It Wasn't Possible Just To Rid Oneself, Simply, Of The Norms Through Which One Is Constituted.

Where Is Democratic Process Or Popular Sovereignty For The Endangered Population? It Cannot Be "given" Or "allocated" By Some Other Power Without That Same Power Claiming The Right To Withdraw What It Gives.

The United States Are Such A Large Place. And There Are Some States And Some Cities Where The Questions Of Gender Or Sexuality Would Not Be Asked, Or Where Scholars Or Academics Are Working In Small Little Corners Of The Universities Trying To Raise These Questions And Being Told That Either That They're Strange Or Not Appropriate Or Being Actively Opposed. There Are Other Places Where There Is Very Active Scholarship Going On. Certainly On Gender.

It Is Clear That Whatever Language Of Democracy Obama And His Administration Use Is Very Tactically Deployed, And Has As Its Main Aim The Extension Of Us Power And Interests.

I Wonder Whether I Might Have Meant "terrify Us" But Perhaps As Well There Was A Less Than Conscious Effort To Show That The Suppression Of Debate About Palestine And About The Boycott, Divestment, And Sanctions Movement - Within Many Academic Circles - Does Seek To Establish Those Who Would Address Such Issues In Speech As Already Collaborating With "terrorist" Regimes, Although Now Only Hamas Is Officially Terrorist According To The Us Government And Its Allies.

I Was Born A Zionist, Because I Didn't Have A Choice About That. It Was The Ether Of My Family Life, But I Certainly Broke With It As I Asked More Questions About It. And That Doesn't Mean I Want To See The Destruction Of A People, It Means I Want To See A State Structure That Might Embody More Substantially The Basic Principles Of Democracy.

Parody By Itself Is Not Subversive, And There Must Be A Way To Understand What Makes Certain Kinds Of Parodic Repetitions Effectively Disruptive, Truly Troubling, And Which Repetitions Become Domesticated And Recirculated As Instruments Of Cultural Hegemony

It's Important That If One Opposes Discriminatory Speech, One Opposes All Kinds. That Is That One Decides On A Principle That It Will Include All Minorities. But If The Protection Of One Minority Against Another Minority Is What Is Happening, Then I Worry About That.

We Form Ourselves Within The Vocabularies That We Did Not Choose, And Sometimes We Have To Reject Those Vocabularies, Or Actively Develop New Ones.

A Certain Kind Of Permission Is Given To Live Differently, To Conceptualize And To Act According To A New Conceptualization.

War Begets War. It Produces Outraged And Humiliated And Furious People. That Is Almost Invariably The Case.

Gender Is Not Something That One Is, It Is Something One Does, An Act… A Doing Rather Than A Being.

Gender Identity

Maybe One Of The Jobs Of Theory Or Philosophy Is To Elevate Principles That Seem Impossible, Or That Have The Status Of The Impossible, To Stand By Them And Will Them, Even When It Looks Highly Unlikely That They'll Ever Be Realised. But That's Ok, It's A Service.

Sometimes There Are Ways To Minimize The Importance Of Gender In Life, Or To Confuse Gender Categories So That They No Longer Have Descriptive Power. But Other Times Gender Can Be Very Important To Us, And Some People Really Love The Gender That They Have Claimed For Themselves.

Nothing Is More Important For Transgender People Than To Have Access To Excellent Health Care In Trans-affirmative Environments, To Have The Legal And Institutional Freedom To Pursue Their Own Lives As They Wish, And To Have Their Freedom And Desire Affirmed By The Rest Of The World. This Will Happen Only When Transphobia Is Overcome At The Level Of Individual Attitudes And Prejudices And In Larger Institutions Of Education, Law, Health Care, And Kinship.

To Operate Within The Matrix Of Power Is Not The Same As To Replicate Uncritically Relations Of Domination.

When We Say Gender Is Performed, We Usually Mean That Weve Taken On A Role Or Were Acting In Some Way And That Our Acting Or Our Role Playing Is Crucial To The Gender That We Are And The Gender That We Present To The World.

My Sense Is That We May Not Need The Language Of Innateness Or Genetics To Understand That We Are All Ethically Bound To Recognize Another Person's Declared Or Enacted Sense Of Sex And/or Gender. We Do Not Have To Agree Upon The "origins" Of That Sense Of Self To Agree That It Is Ethically Obligatory To Support And Recognize Sexed And Gendered Modes Of Being That Are Crucial To A Person's Well-being.

It Is True That One Was Not Allowed At The Time To Really Ask, What Would Lead People To Do This, From What Sense Of Political Outrage Or Injury? And In That Way, The Possibility Of Sympathetic Identification Was Foreclosed. That Does Not Mean That Some People Took Quiet Pleasure In Certain Icons Of Us Capitalism Coming Down, Even Though They Would Oppose Such Action On Moral And Political Grounds.

There Was A Brief Moment After 9/11 When Colin Powell Said We "should Not Rush To Satisfy The Desire For Revenge." It Was A Great Moment, An Extraordinary Moment, Because What He Was Actually Asking People To Do Was To Stay With A Sense Of Grief, Mournfulness, And Vulnerability.

Extraordinary Moments

The Critical Image... Must Not Only Fail To Capture Its Referent, But Show Its Failure.

There Are Surely Many Ways That [media Select And Contextualise Events Determine The Boundaries Of Public Thinking] Happens, But We Can Note At The Most Obvious Level The Way In Which Forms Of Resistance Or Violence Get Cast As "conflicts" That Assume Two Sides That Are Fighting Only Against One Another.

Perhaps The Promise Of Phallus Is Always Dissatisfying In Some Way.

Intersectionality Has Made An Important Contribution To Social And Political Analysis, Asking All Of Us To Think About What Assumptions Of Race And Class We Make When We Speak About "women" Or What Assumptions Of Gender And Race We Make When We Speak About "class." It Allows Us To Unpack Those Categories And See The Various Kinds Of Social Formations And Power Relations That Constitute Those Categories.

I Think Maybe The Destructive Pleasure Got Turned Into The Destructive Pleasure Of War (something We See Still In The Images Of Us Soldiers Urinating On The Dead Bodies Of Taliban Soldiers). Something Of The Pleasure In Destruction Gets Unleashed, And Then Becomes Part Of War Effort Rationalised First As Revenge (or Justice Defined As Revenge). But Then It Takes New Forms, As We See Now.

Revenge Tries To Solve The Problem Of Vulnerability. If I Strike Back, I Transfer Vulnerability From Myself To The Other. And Yet By Striking Back I Produce A World In Which My Vulnerability To Injury Is Increased By The Likelihood Of Another Strike. So It Seems As If I'm Getting Rid Of My Vulnerability And Instead Locating It With The Other, But Actually I'm Heightening The Vulnerability Of Everyone And I'm Heightening The Possibility Of Violence That Happens Between Us.

There Is A Rather Huge Ethical Difference Between Electing Surgery And Being Faced With Transphobic Condemnation And Diagnoses. I Would Say That The Greatest Risk Of Mutilation That Trans People Have Comes Directly From Transphobia.

If You Look At Some Of The Language In The Basic Writings Of Hamas, There Is That Famous Call To Push The Israelis Into The Sea. Now, I Would Say That Most Palestinian Politicians On The Ground Say, Of Course That's Not What We Want, And Even Within Hamas There Is Some Published Debate About That Claim, But Until The Claim Is Removed, It's Still Noxious.

I Agree Completely That Nothing Is More Important For Transgender People Than To Have Access To Excellent Health Care In Trans-affirmative Environments, To Have The Legal And Institutional Freedom To Pursue Their Own Lives As They Wish, And To Have Their Freedom And Desire Affirmed By The Rest Of The World. This Will Happen Only When Transphobia Is Overcome At The Level Of Individual Attitudes And Prejudices And In Larger Institutions Of Education, Law, Health Care, And Kinship.

I Certainly Don't Mean To Suggest That All Investigative Journalism Prior To 9/11 In The Us Was Praiseworthy. But There Were More Examples To Which One Could Point, And There Were At Last Some Activist Photographers Who Understood That Getting Information Into The Public Sphere In Spite Of Military Censorship Was A Right And Obligation Within Democracy. That Strain In War Journalism Did Nearly Vanish During That Time.

I Am Much More Open About Categories Of Gender, And My Feminism Has Been About Women's Safety From Violence, Increased Literacy, Decreased Poverty And More Equality.

I Do Think We Need To Allow For There To Be Room For Subversive And Ironic Speech. We Need To Be Able To Put Out Plays In Which We Make Fun Of Ourselves Or In Which We Interrogate The Words That Injure Us. And Maybe Give Them Another Meaning.

Maybe We Need To Start With The Rethinking Of What Is "west" And What Is "non-west." It Seems To Me That There Are Any Number Of Populations Who Already Cross That Divide, And We Could Probably Point To Several Existing States That Belong Exclusively Neither To One Category Nor To The Other. Do We Use These Terms To Designate Geographical Realities, Geopolitical Ones, Or Perhaps Sites Of Power, Exploitation, Orientalism That Move Through Space And Time In Ways That Have To Be Tracked Historically.

No Matter Whether One Feels One's Gendered And Sexed Reality To Be Firmly Fixed Or Less So, Every Person Should Have The Right To Determine The Legal And Linguistic Terms Of Their Embodied Lives. So Whether One Wants To Be Free To Live Out A "hard-wired" Sense Of Sex Or A More Fluid Sense Of Gender, Is Less Important Than The Right To Be Free To Live It Out, Without Discrimination, Harassment, Injury, Pathologization Or Criminalization - And With Full Institutional And Community Support.

Race And Class Are Rendered Distinct Analytically Only To Produce The Realization That The Analysis Of The One Cannot Proceed Without The Other. A Different Dynamic It Seems To Me Is At Work In The Critique Of New Sexuality Studies.

So For Instance In Rap Music, You Very Often Hear Words That Would Seem Very Racist, Or Very Misogynous Or Very Homophobic But In Some Of Those Instances, The Words Are Being Taken Back Or Redefined So That They Lose Their Injurious Quality.

All Of Those Who Inhabit The World Have A Right To Be Here By Virtue Of Their Being Here At All. To Be Here Means You Have A Right To Be Here.

You're An Evolving And Transforming Person, Right? And How Do We Capture That Dynamics Of Sexuality In That Complex Sense? There May Be Times When Someone Feels Oneself More Overly Masculine Or Maybe More Feminine, Or Where The Terms Themselves Become Confused, Where Passivity And Activity Also Don't Maintain Their Usual Meaning.

I Do Think It's Important That We Experiment With New Vocabularies. That New Words Help Us Conceptualize Our Social Existence In A Different Way.

What Would It Mean If We Lived In A World In Which No One Held Out For The Possibility Of Substantial Political Equality, Or For A Full Cessation Of Colonial Practices - If No One Held Out For Those Things Because They Were Impossible?

The Real Question Is How Do You Survive At The Same Time You Pose Those Risks? Because You Need To Survive. And It Seems To Me That You Survive In Community Or In Solidarity, With Others Who Are Taking The Risk With You.

In The First Instance, Performativity Must Be Understood Not As A Singular Or Deliberate ‘act,’ But, Rather, As The Reiterative And Citational Practice By Which Discourse Produces The Effects That It Names

Law Itself Is Either Suspended, Or Regarded As An Instrument That The State May Use In The Service Of Constraining And Monitoring A Given Population; The State Is Not Subject To The Rule Of Law, But Law Can Be Suspended Or Deployed Tactically And Partially To Suit The Requirements Of A State That Seeks More And More To Allocate Sovereign Power To Its Executive And Administrative Powers. The Law Is Suspended In The Name Of "sovereignty" Of The Nation, Where "sovereignty" Denotes The Task Of Any State To Preserve And Protect Its Own Territoriality.

We Have To Be Able Track The Ways In Which Fear, For Instance, Is Monopolized By State And Media Institutions, Ways In Which Fear Is Actually Promoted And Distributed As A Way Of Bolstering The Need For Greater Security And Militarization.

Popular Sovereignty Has To Be Given By A People To Itself, And This Is The Important Meaning Of Self-determination.

Because Al-qaeda Has Been A Non-state Centered Organisation, Many Of These Scenarios Do Not Exactly Apply. These Are Not Wars Between States. And Yet, It Seems To Me That We Make A Mistake If We Accept The View That States Are Fighting Terrorism, Since We Have Abundant Evidence For Accepting The Idea Of State Terrorism, And What Is Most Urgent Is To Track And Expose How State Terrorism Operates Under The Rubric Of "democracy."

As We Interpret Ourselves Differently, We Also Live Ourselves Differently.

If Gender Is Eradicated, So Too Is An Important Domain Of Pleasure For Many People. And Others Have A Strong Sense Of Self Bound Up With Their Genders, So To Get Rid Of Gender Would Be To Shatter Their Self-hood.

We Act And Walk And Speak And Talk In Ways That Consolidate An Impression Of Being A Man Or Being A Woman.

When I Was Twelve, I Was Interviewed By A Doctoral Candidate In Education And Asked What I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up. I Said That I Either Wanted To Be A Philosopher Or A Clown, And I Understood Then, I Think, That Much Depended On Whether Or Not I Found The World Worth Philosophizing About, And What The Price Of Seriousness Might Be.

Photography Has A Relation To Intervention, But Photographing Is Not The Same As An Intervening.

Some Israeli Politicians Have Proposed The Transfer Of Palestinians Out Of What Is Currently Called Israel, Either Into The Occupied Territories, Into Jordan Or Out Into Other Arab Lands, With The Idea That There Would Be No Intermixing Of Palestinian And Jewish Israelis Or Palestinian And Jewish Communities. But The Idea Of An Absolute Segregation Is One That I Find Lamentable.

The Pleasurable Part Of Public Mourning Can Also Lead To A Sense Of Self-sanctification That Justifies In Advance Any War Effort, Whether Or Not The Target And Destruction Are In Any Way Related To The Initial Event.

I Don't Think There's Any Way That War Can Have A Place In Peace. I Think That Peace Is The Active And Difficult Resistance To The Temptation Of War; It Is The Prerogative And The Obligation Of The Injured. Peace Is Something That Has To Be Vigilantly Maintained; It Is A Vigilance, And It Involves Temptation, And It Does Not Mean We As Human Beings Are Not Aggressive. This Is A Mistaken Way Of Understanding Non-violence.

Sexual Harassment Law Is Very Important. But I Think It Would Be A Mistake If The Sexual Harassment Law Movement Is The Only Way In Which Feminism Is Known In The Media.

The Problem With Antigone Is That She Stood Up To The Despot Creon, But In Such A Way That She Ended Up Dying. So She Bought Her Defiance With Her Death. The Real Question I Ended Up Asking Was, "what Would It Mean For Antigone To Have Stood Up To Creon And Lived?" And The Only Way She Could Have Lived Is If She Had Had A Serious Social Movement With Her. If She Arrived With A Social Movement To Take Down The Despot, Maybe It Would Have Taken 18 Days Only, Like In Egypt. It's Really Important To Be Able To Re-situate One's Rage And Destitution In The Context Of A Social Movement.

Photographs Can Be Forms Of Recruitment, Ways Of Bringing The Viewer Into The Military, As It Were. In This Way, They Prepare Us For War, Even Enlist Us In War, At The Level Of The Senses, Establishing A Sensate Regime Of War.

The Gulf War Was A Clear Precedent As Well, And It Let Us Begin To Understand How The Us Government Would Go To War To Secure Strategic Oil Reserves And Potential Markets.

Our Notions Of What A Human Being Is Problematically Depend On There Being Two Coherent Genders. And If Someone Doesn't Comply With Either The Masculine Norm Or The Feminine Norm, Their Very Humaness Is Called Into Question.

I Think We Won't Be Able To Understand The Operations Of Trans-phobia, Homophobia, If We Don't Understand How Certain Kinds Of Links Are Forged Between Gender And Sexuality In The Minds Of Those Who Want Masculinity To Be Absolutely Separate From Femininity And Heterosexuality To Be Absolutely Separate From Homosexuality.

Heterosexuality

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