Bodies That Matter Quotes

“The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: 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.”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“In other words, "sex" is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize 'sex' and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms.”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection,”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative. In this sense, what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“...identification is always an ambivalent process. Identifying with a gender under contemporary regimes of power involves identifying with a set of norms that are and are not realizable, and whose power and status precede the identifications by which they are insistently approximated.”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“Keiner dieser Aufsätze beabsichtigt, die Materialität des Körpers zu bestreiten; sie stellen vielmehr partielle und sich überschneidende genealogische Bemühungen dar, die normativen Bedingungen zu klären, unter denen die Materialität des Körpers gestaltet und gebildet wird, und insbesondere, wie sie durch differentielle Kategorien des Geschlechts gebildet wird.”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter

“On the one hand, any analysis which foregrounds one vector of power over another will doubtless become vulnerable to criticisms that it not only ignores or devalues the others, but that its own constructions depend on the exclusion of the others in order to proceed. On the other hand, any analysis which
pretends to be able to encompass every vector of power runs the risk of a certain epistemological imperialism which consists in the presupposition
that any given writer might fully stand for and explain the complexities of contemporary power. No author or text can offer such a reflection of the world, and those who claim to offer such pictures become suspect by virtue of that very claim.”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“los cuerpos nunca acatan enteramente las normas mediante las cuales se impone su
materialización”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“los cuerpos viven y mueren; comen y duermen; sienten dolor y placer; soportan la enfermedad y la violencia”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“The patronym secures its own rigidity, fixity, and universality within a set of kinship lines that designate wives and daughters as the sites of its self-perpetuation. In the patronymic naming of women, and in the exchange and extension of patronymic authority that is the event of marriage, the paternal law "performs" the identity and authority of the patronym. This performative power of the name, therefore, cannot be isolated from the paternal economy within which it operates, and the power-differential between the sexes that it institutes and serves.”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“Hence, it is not that one cannot get outside of language in order to grasp materiality in and of itself; rather, every effort to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which, in its phenomenality, is always already material. In this sense, then, language and materiality are not opposed, for language both is and refers to that which is material, and what is material never fully escapes from the process by which it is signified.”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“Es gibt kein Ich vor der Annahme eines Geschlechts.”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? –Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

“But if there is no subject who decides on its gender, and if, on the contrary, gender is part of what decides the subject, how might one formulate a project that preserves gender practices as sites of critical agency? If gender is constructed through relations of power and, specifically, normative constraints that not only produce but also regulate various bodily beings, how might agency be derived from this notion of gender as the effect of productive constraint?”
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"