Background Image

...

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.

-Judith Butler

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

I Wonder Whether I

Judith Butler

...

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.

Views: 5

Topic

More From Judith Butler

If We Are Trying To Account For Mobilization, We Have To Ask, Under What Conditions Do Outraged Forms Of Knowing Lead To Social Mobilizations And Movements? So Awareness Alone Does Not Suffice, And Neither Does Outrage.

Every Taxi Driver I Have Ever Spoken To Has A Theory Of Gender.

We Have To Be Able Track The Ways In Which Fear, For Instance, Is Monopolised 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 Militarisation.

Neoliberalism Has Taken New Forms Since The Demise Of The Fordist Concept Of Labor And With The Emergence Of What Is Understood As Flexible Labor. This Has Really Come To Be The Dominant Form For About The Last 20 Years.

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.

The Important Thing Is To Think About Theory In Life In That Way. And I Think We Don't Have To Be Theorists, We Don't Have To Have Gone To The Academy, Or To The University To Learn Theory And To Be A Theorist Of Gender.

The Idea That Speaking At All On The Topic, Demanding Public Space In Which To Have That Debate, Is Itself An Act Of Complicity With Violence, And Violence Against Israelis, Understood As Synonymous With Jews, And So Violence Against Jews, Clearly Stops The Speech With An Unspeakable Allegation.

I Think There Is No One Answer. It Is Still A Struggle, There Are Tensions And I'm Sure There Are Many People Who Would Like To See These Questions Laid To Rest Or Cease To Be Posed Altogether.

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.

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

I Am Not Sure That I Know Enough About The Pre-history Of 9/11 To Agree Or Disagree. But I Did Think At The Time That The [george W.] Bush Administration Took A Number Of Cues From The Israeli Government, Not Only By Drawing On And Intensifying Anti-arab Racism, But By Insisting That The Attack On Us Government And Financial Buildings Was An Attack On "democracy" And By Invoking "security At All Costs" To Wage War Without A Clear Focus (why The Taliban?), And By Suspending Both Constitutional Rights And The Regular Protocol For Congressional Approval For Declaring War.

If You Have A Conversation "why Is It You Think Masculinity Is Linked With Heterosexuality? Or Why Is It You Think Masculinity Is Linked With Sexual Dominance Or The Sexually Active Position In The Sex Act?" If You Start To Ask People Those Questions, Then They Realize "maybe Gender Is Not One Thing. Maybe I Have Collected A Number Of Things Under One Category And I've Made A Mistake".

"gender Trouble" Is Old. I Mean, You Know, In New York, It Is Old. I Mean It's Sweet. I Mean People Are Really Kind About It But It's Like A Former Love Affair You Had And You're Done.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If Lacan Presumes That Female Homosexuality Issues From A Disappointed Heterosexuality, As Observation Is Said To Show, Could It Not Be Equally Clear To The Observer That Heterosexuality Issues From A Disappointed Homosexuality?

Heterosexuality Is

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.

Peace Is A Certain Resistance To The Terrible Satisfactions Of War.

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?

Although The History Of Dispossession And Exile For Jews Is Very Different From The History Of Dispossession And Exile For Palestinians, They Both Have Recent And Searing Experiences Which Might Allow Them To Come To A Common Understanding On The Rights Of Refugees, Or What It Might Mean To Live Together With Resonant Histories Of That Kind.

Some Trans People Thought That In Claiming That Gender Is Performative That I Was Saying That It Is All A Fiction, And That A Person's Felt Sense Of Gender Was Therefore "unreal." That Was Never My Intention. I Sought To Expand Our Sense Of What Gender Realities Could Be. But I Think I Needed To Pay More Attention To What People Feel, How The Primary Experience Of The Body Is Registered, And The Quite Urgent And Legitimate Demand To Have Those Aspects Of Sex Recognized And Supported.

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.

Look, "gender Trouble" Includes A Critique Of The Idea That There Are Two Ideal Bodily Forms, Two Ideal Morphologies: The Masculine And The Feminine. I Want To Suggest That Today The Intersex Movement Is Very Engaged With Criticizing That Idea.

It Seems, Though, That Historically We Have Now Reached A Position In Which Jews Cannot Legitimately Be Understood Always And Only As Presumptive Victims.

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

Surgical Intervention Can Be Precisely What A Trans Person Needs - It Is Also Not Always What A Trans Person Needs. Either Way, One Should Be Free To Determine The Course Of One's Gendered Life.

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.

What Does It Mean Then To Live With One Another? It Can Be Unhappy, It Can Be Wretched, It Can Be Ambivalent, It Can Even Be Full Of Antagonism, But All Of That Can Play Out In The Political Sphere Without Recourse To Expulsion Or Genocide. And That Is Our Obligation, To Stay In The Sphere With Whatever Murderous Rage We Have, Without Acting On It.

Indeed It May Be Only By Risking The Incoherence Of Identity That Connection Is Possible.

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.

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.

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.

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

If You Are Asking Whether States And State Actors Can Only Respond Through Revenge, Then You Are Suggesting That Diplomatic Solutions Are Hopeless.

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.

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.

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

Gender Is A Kind Of Imitation For Which There Is No Original; In Fact, It Is A Kind Of Imitation That Produces The Very Notion Of The Original As An Effect And Consequence Of The Imitation Itself.

In Fact In Politics, Sometimes The Thing That Will Never Happen Actually Starts To Happen. And There Have To Be People Who Hold Out For That, And Who Accept That They Are Idealists And That They Are Operating On Principle As Opposed To Realpolitik.

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.

Very Often, If You Just Get The Question: "well, Are You A Zionist?" If You Say No, It's Assumed That You Want The Destruction Of The State Of Israel And That You're Involved In Some Actual Or Potential Violent Attack. But Actually, You Could Say: "not On This Basis".

I Am Sorry To Be So Blunt, But I Do Not See Much Ambiguity Here. [barack] Obama Was Late To Affirm The Egyptian Revolution As A Democratic Movement, And Even Then He Was Eager To Have Installed Those Military Leaders Who Were Known For Their Practices Of Torture. And Now He Is Quick To Make Allies With The Muslim Brotherhood For Tactical Reasons As Well (though Earlier That Same Administration Stoked Islamophobic Fear About That Very Political Party).

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. That Is Most Important In My View.

Perhaps We Have To Remember That There Are Forms Of Outrage That Do Not Lead To Any Sort Of Mobilization, And There Are Ways Of "registering The Facts" That Do Not Lead To Outrage.

I Think That Every Sexual Position Is Fundamentally Comic.

Surely Binationalism Is Not Love, But There Is, We Might Say, A Necessary And Impossible Attachment That Makes A Mockery Of Identity, An Ambivalence That Emerges From The Decentering Of The Nationalist Ethos And That Forms The Basis Of A Permanent Ethical Demand.

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.

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.

I Think, What I Want To Say Is That Yes, My Ideas Have Travelled Into Popular Culture They Also Emerged From Popular Culture In A Way, Or From The General Public As You Put It. But Not As A Program.

I Wonder About Economic Sanctions, Though, Since That Is A Way That States Engage In Boycotts Against One Another.

Economic Sanctions

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

One Of The Things That Neoliberalism Does Is, It Relies On Flexible Workforces Who Are Hired And Fired At Will And Who Are Basically Disposable Labor. You Can Use Them. You Can Get Rid Of Them. They Have No Rights; They Have No Security. Their Lives And Well-being Are Made And Unmade At The Whim Of Those Who Are Exercising The Calculus. So, Instead Of Looking At The Institution And Objecting To That Kind Of Organization, People Just Go, "i'm A Failure;"; "i'm Not Working Hard Enough"; Or, "i'm Not As Smart As The Next Person."

We Act As If That Being Of A Man Or That Being Of A Woman Is Actually An Internal Reality Or Something That Is Simply True About Us, A Fact About Us, But Actually Its A Phenomenon That Is Being Produced All The Time And Reproduced All The Time, So To Say Gender Is Performative Is To Say That Nobody Really Is A Gender From The Start.

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.

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

Genocide Is Not A Legitimate Option. It's Not Ok To Decide That An Entire Population Has No Right To Live In The World. No Matter Whether These Relationships Are Very Proximate Or Very Distant, There Is No Entitlement To Expunge A Population Or To Demean Its Basic Humanity.

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.

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.

We Lose Ourselves In What We Read, Only To Return To Ourselves, Transformed And Part Of A More Expansive World.

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.

We Set The Actors On The Scene Through The Banal Discourse Of "conflict" In Ways That Fully Deflect From The History And Struggle Of Colonial Resistance, Refusing As Well By That Means To Link The Resistance To Other Forms Of Colonial Resistance, Their Rationale, And Their Tactics.

We Cannot Choose With Whom We Cohabit The World.

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.

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

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.

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

Gender Identity

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

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.

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.

Lacanian Theory Must Be Understood As A Kind Of “slave Morality.

There Is No Gender Identity Behind The Expressions Of Gender... Identity Is Performatively Constituted By The Very 'expressions' That Are Said To Be Its Results.

Let's Face It. We're Undone By Each Other. And If We're Not, We're Missing Something. If This Seems So Clearly The Case With Grief, It Is Only Because It Was Already The Case With Desire. One Does Not Always Stay Intact.

We're Trying To Divide Groups Or Decide That Some Of Them Are Truly Victims And Some Of Them Are Truly Aggressors.

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.

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

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

For Instance, When "gender Trouble " Is Translated Into Japanese, It Produces A Problem Of Vocabulary And A Way Of Thinking About A Quality For Instance That Is Somewhat Controversial In Academic Circles And Also Outside Of The Academy. In Other Places, "gender Trouble" Is Old.

I'm No Great Fan Of The Phallus, And Have Made My Own Views Known On This Subject Before, So I Do Not Propose A Return To A Notion Of The Phallus As The Third Term In Any And All Relations Of Desire.

When Some People Rejoin With “all Lives Matter” They Misunderstand The Problem, But Not Because Their Message Is Untrue. It Is True That All Lives Matter, But It Is Equally True That Not All Lives Are Understood To Matter Which Is Precisely Why It Is Most Important To Name The Lives That Have Not Mattered, And Are Struggling To Matter In The Way They Deserve.

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.

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.

In The Us The Problem Has Been, For Instance, That Nazis Have Rights Of Free Expression, Right? But Other Kinds Of Racist Speech Is Not Protected. And You Have To Link The Speech To Conduct Or To A Certain Kind Of Threat Against Minority Population. I Know That In Europe, This Kind Of Framework Doesn't Exist In The Same Way So It's Very Difficult To Make The Analogy.

There Is No Original Or Primary Gender A Drag Imitates, But Gender Is A Kind Of Imitation For Which There Is No Original.

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.

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

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 Never Did Like The Assertion Of The "innate" Inferiority Or Women Or Blacks, And I Understood That When People Tried To Talk That Way, They Were Trying To "fix" A Social Reality Into A Natural Necessity. And Yet, Sometimes We Do Need A Language That Refers To A Basic, Fundamental, Enduring, And Necessary Dimension Of Who We Are, And The Sense Of Sexed Embodiment Can Be Precisely That.

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.

What We Need Is A Political And Joyous Alternative To The Behaviorist Discourse, The Christian Discourse On Evil Or Sin, And The Convergence Of The Two In Forms Of Gender Policing That [is] Tyrannical And Destructive.

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.

Peace Is A Certain Resistance To The Terrible Satisfactions Of War. It’s A Commitment To Living With A Certain Kind Of Vulnerability To Others And Susceptibility To Being Wounded That Actually Gives Our Individual Lives Meaning.

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."

I Know That Some Subjective Experiences Of Sex Are Very Firm And Fundamental, Even Unchangeable. They Can Be So Firm And Unchanging That We Call Them "innate". But Given That We Report On Such A Sense Of Self Within A Social World, A World In Which We Are Trying To Use Language To Express What We Feel, It Is Unclear What Language Does That Most Effectively. I Understand That "innate" Is A Word That Conveys The Sense Of Something Hired-wired And Constitutive. I Suppose I Would Be Inclined To Wonder Whether Other Vocabularies Might Do The Job Equally Well.

I Think Something Happens Only When People Find That They Are Moved With Others, Find Themselves Linked Or Allied In New Ways, Showing Up Or Speaking Out In Ways That Resonate With One Another. That Resonating Can Be Very Compelling And Lead To Moving And Speaking More Emphatically And With Sharper Focus.

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.

It's My View That Gender Is Culturally Formed, But It's Also A Domain Of Agency Or Freedom And That It Is Most Important To Resist The Violence That Is Imposed By Ideal Gender Norms, Especially Against Those Who Are Gender Different, Who Are Nonconforming In Their Gender Presentation.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Indeed, Even If One Believed That Criticisms Of Israel Are By And Large Heard As Anti-semitic (by Jews, Anti-semites, Or People Who Could Be Described As Neither), It Would Become The Responsibility Of All Of Us To Change The Conditions Of Reception So That The Public Might Begin To Distinguish Between Criticism Of Israel And A Hatred Of Jews.

A Different Kind Of Pleasure Surfaced In The Aftermath, The Pleasure Of Seeing The Towers Fall Time And Again, The Experience Of Being Entranced By The Visual Spectacle, And Then Also The Very Graphic Forms Of Public Mourning For Exemplary Citizens (taking Place At The Same Time As The Refusal To Mourn The Undocumented, The Foreign, Gay And Lesbian Lives Lost There, For Example). I Am Not Sure That The Guilt Over The Pleasure Re-installed The Good Citizen.

I Think I Never Expected "gender Trouble" To Have Any Particularly Revolutionary Effect So Whatever Effects It Has, I'm Always Surprised.

If We Are Looking For Signs Of Democratization, Then Surely We Are Looking As Well For Forms Of Living On Equal Terms In And Among Cultural Differences.

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.

Do We Need Recourse To A Happier State Before The Law In Order To Maintain That Contemporary Gender Relations And The Punitive Production Of Gender Identities Are Oppressive?

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.

No Matter What Someone Else Has Done, It Still Matters How We Treat People. It Matters To Our Humanity That We Treat Offenders According To Standards That We Recognize As Just. Justice Is Not Revenge - It's Deciding For A Solution That Is Oriented Towards Peace, Peace Being The Harder But More Human Way Of Reacting To Injury. That Is The Very Basis Of The Idea Of Rights.

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

We're Not In Control [of Circumstances], But That Does Not Mean We Don't Exercise A Certain Kind Of Conditioned Agency. That's What It Means To Live In A Community. That's What It Means To Live In Society.

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 Want To Say That The Way In Which We Understand Gender Actually Changes The Way We Live Gender.

It Is Always Brave To Insist On Undergoing Transformations That Feel Necessary And Right Even When There Are So Many Obstructions To Doing So, Including People And Institutions Who Seek To Pathologize Or Criminalize Such Important Acts Of Self-definition. I Know That For Some Feels Less Brave Than Necessary, But We All Have To Defend Those Necessities That Allow Us To Live And Breathe In The Way That Feels Right To Us. Surgical Intervention Can Be Precisely What A Trans Person Needs – It Is Also Not Always What A Trans Person Needs.

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'm Trying To Think Of What Happens If We Take Expulsion Off The Table For Everyone, And Instead Think About The Rights Of Those Who Have Been Expelled Already, Which Would Include The Various Rights Of Refugees Who Came To Israel In The Aftermath Of Wwii, But Also Those From Other Countries, And What Rights The Palestinians Have Who Have Been Dispossessed Of Their Lands And Homes.

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.

I Consider Both The West Bank And Gaza To Be Colonised, Even Though Gaza Is Not Occupied In The Same Way That The West Bank Is. The Israeli Government And Military Control All Goods That Pass In Or Out Of That Area, And They Have Restricted Employment And Building Material That Would Allow Palestinians To Rebuild Homes And Structures That Were Destroyed By Bombardment.

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.

I Think There Is A Demand. The Demand Is For A Radical Economic And Political Restructuring Of The World. And Most People Would Say That's Impossible. And It May Or May Not Be Achieved, But I Think That's Less Important Than Articulating What A Just And Fair World Can Be.

It's Not Like It's A Brand New Vocabulary That Permits To Have A New Reality. It's Rather A New Vocabulary That Lets Us See That Our Lives Have Always Been More Complex Than Traditional Categories Allow. So, I Think, You Know, Maybe The Introduction Of New Words Permits Us To Rethink What We've Taken For Granted About What Forms Bodies Take, What The Name Is For Certain Kinds Of Sexual, Intimate Relations, How We Think Of A Life.

It Is True That Non-governmental Organisations Working Within Strong Human Rights Frameworks Are Now Confounded By Securitarian Forms Of Logic And Power That Extend The Paternalistic Bias Of Their Work In New Ways.

I Do Not Follow Closely Anymore, Since There Is A Limit To How Much Heartsickness One Can Bear.

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.

We Have To Have A Very Strong Criticism Of Modes Of Cooperation That Entrench Inequality.

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

Masculine And Feminine Roles Are Not Biologically Fixed But Socially Constructed.

Masculine And Feminine

I Did Not Mean To Argue That Gender Is Fluid And Changeable (mine Certainly Is Not). I Only Meant To Say That We Should All Have Greater Freedoms To Define And Pursue Our Lives Without Pathologization, De-realization, Harassment, Threats Of Violence, Violence, And Criminalization. I Join In The Struggle To Realize Such A World.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I Was Young There Were Lesbians Who Said "oh, I Will Free Myself Of All Norms Of Masculinity, All Norms Of Heterosexuality ". And Then, They Ended Up In Very Complex Relationships That Were Maybe Full Of Heterosexual Power Dynamics Or Full Of Lesbian Forms Of Masculinity And They Became Very Confused.

Heterosexuality

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

Visual Renditions Of War Not Only Establish What Can Be Seen, And The Audio-track Established What Can Be Heard, But The Photographs Also "train" Us In Ways Of Focusing On Targets, Ways Of Regarding Suffering And Loss.

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.

Love Is Not A State, A Feeling, A Disposition, But An Exchange, Uneven, Fraught With History, With Ghosts, With Longings That Are More Or Less Legible To Those Who Try To See One Another With Their Own Faulty Vision.

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

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 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.

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.

I Must Say, I Feel The Reception Of My Work Is None Of My Business.

It's Not My Concern. It's Your Concern. I Just Keep Working. I Keep Posing Certain Questions And I Think There Are Times When People Think "what Happened To The Judith Butler I Used To Know?" Or "she's Not Doing Gender Trouble. Does That Mean She Refuses It Or She's Disavowed It?" And I Would Say No. I Have Not Refused Or Disavowed Anything.

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.

Until We Learn That Other Lives Are Equally Grievable And Have An Equal Demand On Us To Be Grieved - Especially The Ones That We've Helped To Eliminate - I'm Not Sure We'll Really Be On The Way To Overcoming The Problem Of Dehumanization.

One Struggles Always With These Norms. So One Doesn't Construct Oneself Freely Without Respect To Norm But One Works With One's Historical Situation And Sees Where There Might Be Some Play. Where There Might Be Some Freedom To Move.

We Should All Have Greater Freedoms To Define And Pursue Our Lives Without Pathologization, De-realization, Harassment, Threats Of Violence, Violence, And Criminalization. I Join In The Struggle To Realize Such A World.

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 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

Everyone Has A Set Of Presuppositions: What Gender Is, What It's Not. And They May Not Write Them Out Or They May Not Be In Theoretical Books Published By Routledge, But They Have A Theory.

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.

... That Gender Is A Choice, Or That Gender Is A Role, Or That Gender Is A Construction That One Puts On, As One Puts On Clothes In The Morning, That There Is A 'one' Who Is Prior To This Gender, A One Who Goes To The Wardrobe Of Gender And Decides With Deliberation Which Gender It Will Be Today.

You Only Trust Those Who Are Absolutely Like Yourself, Those Who Have Signed A Pledge Of Allegiance To This Particular Identity.

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.

In The Meantime, What Is Lost Is Any Sense That The Palestinian Resistance To Israeli Colonial Rule Is Waged From A Situation Of Occupation Or Expulsion, That There Is A Military Order That Controls The Boundaries Of What Would Be A Sovereign Palestinian State, That The Land On Which That State Is Now Thinkable Has Been Radically Diminished By An Ongoing Practice Of Land Confiscation And Appropriation.

We Need To Be I Think Equally Sensitive To The Injurious Power Of Certain Kinds Of Speech Acts But Also To The Subversive And Possibly Liberatory Effects Of Certain Kinds Of Play.

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.

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.

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

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.

Let Me Say One Thing To Clarify My Position. I Think We Can Take Distance From Norm But I Think We Are Also Mired In Norm, "empêtrés", I Think You Say In French. And I Think The Choices We Can Make Are Only In A Certain Struggle With The Norms Out Of Which We're Constituted.

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.

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

The Question Is Whether Ngos That Bring Protection Or Aid Or Reparation Therapies Are Furthering The Possibility Of Self-determination Or Extending A Form Of Managerial Power And Paternalism.

I Was Off To Yale To Be A Lesbian

I Think That Public Grieving Is A Good Thing. People Need To Be Grieved; Loss Needs To Be Acknowledged Publicly, Because It Helps To Confer A Sense Of Reality On The Loss But Also Because It Makes It Known That This Was A Real Life.

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.

What We Need Are Poems That Interrogate The World Of Pronouns, Open Up Possibilities Of Language And Life; Forms Of Politics That Support And Encourage Self-affirmation.

Gender Is Not Something That One Is, It Is Something One Does, An Act... A "doing" Rather Than A "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. If The Immutable Character Of Sex Is Contested, Perhaps This Construct Called 'sex' Is As Culturally Constructed As Gender; Indeed, Perhaps It Was Always Already Gender, With The Consequence That The Distinction Between Sex And Gender Turns Out To Be No Distinction At All.

Possibility Is Not A Luxury; It Is As Crucial As Bread.

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.

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.

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.

Gender Is An Identity Tenuously Constituted In Time, Instituted In An Exterior Space Through A Stylized Repetition Of Acts.

The Life Doesn't Simply Get Erased. It Gets Imprinted And Remembered.

If You Speak [ About Violence Against Israelis], You Are In An Unspeakable Place, Have Become A Nazi Or Its Moral Equivalent (if There Is A Moral Equivalent). It Certainly Terrifies, But Perhaps Also It Is A Linguistic Permutation Of State Terrorism, An Assault That Stops One In One's Tracks, And Secures The Continuing Operation Of The Regime And Its Monopoly On Politically Intelligible Speech.

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.

So There Might Be A Kind Of Collective Effort That Allows For Those Risks To Be Taken, Pose A Certain Danger But Not A Suicidal One.

Collective Effort

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.

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

I Have Also Been Invited To Talk To Psychologists And Psychoanalysts And I Liked That Very Much. Because, They Are The Ones Who Are Bringing A Lot Of Very, You Know, Problematic Ideas About Sexuality And Gender Into Psychiatric And Psychological Settings. And I Like Having Some Influence There.

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.

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.

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

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.

People Need To Know Who I Am And Where I'm Coming From.

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.

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.

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".

It Seems To Me That "gender Trouble" Will Always Be Important To Try And Open Up Our Ideas Of What Gender Is. So, I Don't Know If It's Revolutionary, But Maybe It Still Has Something To Say To Those Issues.

I Do Situate Myself In This Problem Of Being A Jew Who Doesn't Want To Be Represented By The State Of Israel, A State That Claims To Represent All Jewish People And Make Me Into A Potential Citizen.

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

Trending Author

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Category