The 18 best quotes by feminist Judith Butler

The American philosopher leaves us famous quotes to reflect on.

Judith Butler (Cleveland, United States, 1961) is an American philosopher who has devoted her life to the study of feminism.

Among her main contributions to the field of gender and women's studies, Judith Butler is recognized as one of the main representatives and ideologists of Queer Theory.

• Recommended article: "100 feminist phrases of great thinkers of History".

Judith Butler's famous phrases and reflections.

However, Butler is also a prestigious author in the fields of sociology and sexology. Her ideas are based on renowned authors such as Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.

In today's article we are going to know phrases from Judith Butler that will allow us to approach this essential thinker.

1. After all, the justification for the fight is given in the sensory field, sound and image are used to enlist us in a reality and to make us participate in it. In a sense, all war is a war on the senses. Without the alteration of the senses, no state could wage war.

On the manipulation and populism with which power seduces the population and presents war as something desirable.

2. The structure of beliefs is so strong that it allows some types of violence to be justified or not even considered as violence. Thus, we see that there is no mention of those killed but of casualties, and that there is no mention of war but of the struggle for freedom.

On the different types of violence and the manipulation of language. A phrase that refers us to the contributions of another brilliant thinker: Noam Chomsky.

3. Intellectual work is a way to connect with people, to be part of an ongoing conversation. Intellectuals do not lead the way, nor are they indispensable. I believe that theoretical reflection is part of any good policy.

Encouraging critical and academic thinking.

4. Journalism is a place of political struggle... Inevitably.

Whether we want it or not, journalistic objectivity is not feasible.

5. I don't think literature can teach us how to live either, but people who have questions about how to live tend to turn to literature.

Another of those famous quotes about books and literature.

6. For me philosophy is a form of writing.

His view of philosophy can be paradoxical.

7. If Lacan recognizes that the woman's homosexuality proceeds from a disappointed heterosexuality - as the observation is claimed to show - would it not be just as evident to the observer that heterosexuality proceeds from a disappointed homosexuality?

Dismantling one of the French psychoanalyst's assertions.

8. I have always been a feminist. This means that I oppose discrimination against women, against all forms of inequality based on gender, but it also means that I call for a politics that takes into account the constraints imposed by gender on human development.

A way of defining the struggle for gender equality.

9. The category of sex is neither invariable nor natural, rather it is a particularly political use of the category of nature that obeys the purposes of reproductive sexuality.

A heterodox view of the definition of the concept of 'sex'.

10. Undoubtedly, same-sex marriage and family partnerships should be available options, but to make them the model for sexual legitimacy is precisely to constrain the sociality of the body in an acceptable way.

Reflections on the social contract that marriage signifies.

11. Differences in position and desire mark the limits of universality as an ethical reflex. The critique of gender norms must be placed in the context of lives as they are lived and must be guided by the question of what maximizes the possibilities of a livable life, what minimizes the possibility of an unbearable life or even social or literal death.

Other aspects that perhaps we do not usually analyze when we talk about gender and interpersonal relationships.

12. Intersex activists are working to rectify the erroneous assumption that every body harbors an 'innate truth' about its sex that medical professionals alone can discern and bring to light.

Another thought-provoking reflection on the not-so-direct relationship between Biological sex and psychological sex.

13. Sometimes a normative conception of gender can undo a person by undermining his or her ability to continue to inhabit a livable life.

It is at this point that this conception oppresses and reduces us as human beings.

14. Whatever freedom we strive for, it must be a freedom based on equality.

Feminism cannot be conceived without equality of opportunity and treatment.

15. As a consequence, gender is not to culture what sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural medium through which sexed nature or a natural sex is formed and established as prediscursive, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface upon which culture acts.

Another Judith Butler phrase in which she reflects on the cultural patterns that need to be questioned.

16. For me, public mourning is not limited to the need to personally mourn the dead. That need certainly exists. I think that public mourning gives value to lives. It allows for a kind of heightened awareness of the precariousness of those lives and the need to protect them, and perhaps also to understand that this precariousness is understood across borders.

On mourning and its value in our culture.

17. Is there a good way to categorize bodies? What do categories tell us? Categories tell us more about the need to categorize bodies than about the bodies themselves.

Labels cannot properly define that which constantly transforms and transforms us.

18. Social movements must unite the creative and affirmative energies of people, not just reiterate harms and produce an identity as subjects of harm. I would certainly not deny that there are extreme, persistent and malignant forms of victimization, but adopting this perspective in a social movement is counterproductive.

Fleeing victimhood and looking to the future, joining forces: that is the scenario to which Judith Butler aspires.