Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was off to Yale to be a lesbian
We cannot choose with whom we cohabit the world.
People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from.
Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.
I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.
Every taxi driver I have ever spoken to has a theory of gender.
Lacanian theory must be understood as a kind of “slave morality.
Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war.
I must say, I feel the reception of my work is none of my business.
The life doesn't simply get erased. It gets imprinted and remembered.
I think it's important to live with a certain danger and a certain risk.
As we interpret ourselves differently, we also live ourselves differently.
Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.
Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.
I want my arguments to be good arguments on the basis of what I actually have to say.
The critical image... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure.
We have to have a very strong criticism of modes of cooperation that entrench inequality.
Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
People who expect enmity to suddenly convert into love are probably using the wrong model.
It wasn't possible just to rid oneself, simply, of the norms through which one is constituted.
I do not follow closely anymore, since there is a limit to how much heartsickness one can bear.
I think we have to ask, not, what "Gender trouble" is today but where "Gender trouble" is today.
Photography has a relation to intervention, but photographing is not the same as an intervening.
I want to say that the way in which we understand gender actually changes the way we live gender.
I would say that I'm a feminist theorist before I'm a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist.
Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.
We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.
To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.
War begets war. It produces outraged and humiliated and furious people. That is almost invariably the case.
We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.
I wonder about economic sanctions, though, since that is a way that states engage in boycotts against one another.
We're trying to divide groups or decide that some of them are truly victims and some of them are truly aggressors.
Popular sovereignty has to be given by a people to itself, and this is the important meaning of self-determination.
It seems to me that responsiveness is a better source for understanding what moral claims are and how they work upon us.
There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.
Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.
A certain kind of permission is given to live differently, to conceptualize and to act according to a new conceptualization.
You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity.
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.
A man who reads effeminate may well be consistently heterosexual, and another one might be gay. We can't read sexuality off of gender.
Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.
I think I never expected "Gender trouble" to have any particularly revolutionary effect so whatever effects it has, I'm always surprised.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you are asking whether states and state actors can only respond through revenge, then you are suggesting that diplomatic solutions are hopeless.
We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones.
The argument that all Jews have a heartfelt investment in the state of Israel is untrue. Some have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches.