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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.
-Judith Butler
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So There Might Be

Judith Butler
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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.

Understanding the Quote: "so there might be a kind of collective effort that allows for..."

This quote by Judith Butler reflects deeply on the theme of taken. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Taken, Suicidal, Collective Effort, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Judith Butler interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Judith Butler

Judith Butler is celebrated for insightful thoughts on taken and suicidal. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Taken
Suicidal
Collective Effort
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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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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.
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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.
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Circles
Issues
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Space
People
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Way
Gender
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Morality
Kind
Slave
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World
Virtue
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Ideas
Culture
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Reality
Thinking
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Reality
Numbers
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Military
Home
Government
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.
People
Important
Way
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.
Race
Class
Different
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Attitude
Law
People
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Refrain
Cease
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Masculine And Feminine
Roles
Fixed
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Expression
Europe
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.
Mean
People
Choices
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.
Soccer
Fighting
Winning
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.
Reality
People
Trying
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.
Reality
Support
Community
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.
Grief
Missing
Desire
I Must Say, I Feel The Reception Of My Work Is None Of My Business.
Reception
Feels
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.
Taken
Thinking
Rights
Gender Is Not Something That One Is, It Is Something One Does, An Act… A Doing Rather Than A Being.
Doe
Gender
Gender Identity
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.
Fun
Thinking
Play
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.
Mean
Thinking
Psychics
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?
Mean
Practice
Political
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.
Sex
Reality
Thinking
You Only Trust Those Who Are Absolutely Like Yourself, Those Who Have Signed A Pledge Of Allegiance To This Particular Identity.
Identity
Allegiance
Particular
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.
Body
Helping
Construction
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.
Fall
Gay
Mourning
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.
Love Is
Feelings
Vision
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.
War
Thinking
Allies
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.
Real
Community
Risk
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.
War
Mean
Thinking
I Was Off To Yale To Be A Lesbian
Yale
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.
People
Principles
Facts
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".
Taken
Mean
Way
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.
Military
Order
Land
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.
Sex
Men
People
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.
Sex
Self
Agree Upon
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
Practice
Names
Firsts
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.
Knowing
Trying
Doe
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.
Determination
Struggle
Self
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.
Giving
Population
Process
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.
Way
Facts
Remember
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.
Gay
Thinking
Important
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.
Military
War
Levels
We Form Ourselves Within The Vocabularies That We Did Not Choose, And Sometimes We Have To Reject Those Vocabularies, Or Actively Develop New Ones.
Vocabulary
Sometimes
Form
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.
Mean
Icons
People
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.
War
Commitment
Giving
I Think It's Important To Live With A Certain Danger And A Certain Risk.
Thinking
Risk
Important
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.
Strong
Self
People
As We Interpret Ourselves Differently, We Also Live Ourselves Differently.
We Lose Ourselves In What We Read, Only To Return To Ourselves, Transformed And Part Of A More Expansive World.
Return
World
Loses
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.
Thinking
Twelve
World
If You Are Asking Whether States And State Actors Can Only Respond Through Revenge, Then You Are Suggesting That Diplomatic Solutions Are Hopeless.
Revenge
Asking
Actors
People Who Expect Enmity To Suddenly Convert Into Love Are Probably Using The Wrong Model.
People
Enmity
Models
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.
Struggle
Mean
Actors
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.
Thinking
Risk
Needs
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.
Mean
Thinking
People
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.
Mean
Rights
Understanding
War Begets War. It Produces Outraged And Humiliated And Furious People. That Is Almost Invariably The Case.
War
People
Produce
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.
Safety
Feminism
Poverty
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.
Reality
Men
Facts
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.
Agency
Views
Important
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.
Track
Security
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.
Struggle
Thinking
People
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.
Fighting
Thinking
Media
People Need To Know Who I Am And Where I'm Coming From.
Who I Am
People
Needs
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.
Facts
Kind
Imitation
Possibility Is Not A Luxury; It Is As Crucial As Bread.
Luxury
Bread
Possibility
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.
Jobs
Sex
Vocabulary
It Wasn't Possible Just To Rid Oneself, Simply, Of The Norms Through Which One Is Constituted.
Norm
Oneself
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.
War
Self
Mourning
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.
Views
Desire
Fans
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.
War
Thinking
Rights
I Think We Have To Ask, Not, What "gender Trouble" Is Today But Where "gender Trouble" Is Today.
Thinking
Today
Trouble
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.
Revenge
Trying
Violence
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.
Taken
Years
Neoliberalism
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.
Mistake
Thinking
Media
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.
Thinking
Way
Kind
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.
Thinking
Circles
Vocabulary
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.
Sex
Views
Support
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.
Moving
Thinking
People
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.
Believe
Reality
Self
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
Hegemony
Way
Kind
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.
Thinking
Important
Gone
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).
Sorry
Military
Party
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
War
Thinking
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.
Thinking
Want
Gender
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.
Thinking
Vocabulary
Important
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.
Mean
Exercise
Agency
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
Government
Oil
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."
Mistake
War
Fighting
Photography Has A Relation To Intervention, But Photographing Is Not The Same As An Intervening.
Photography
Relation
Intervention
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.
Rap
Taken
Quality
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.
Ideas
Two
Looks
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.
People
Trying
Violence
We Cannot Choose With Whom We Cohabit The World.
World
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.
Law
Names
Population
It Seems To Me That Responsiveness Is A Better Source For Understanding What Moral Claims Are And How They Work Upon Us.
Understanding
Moral
Source
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.
Thinking
People
Political
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