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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.

-Judith Butler

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In The Meantime, What

Judith Butler

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Masculine And Feminine

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I Think That Every Sexual Position Is Fundamentally Comic.

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

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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Collective Effort

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Heterosexuality Is

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We Cannot Choose With Whom We Cohabit The World.

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.

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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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Extraordinary Moments

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

... 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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

"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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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