Quote collection
194 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I have also been invited to talk to psychologists and psychoanalysts and I liked that very much. Because, they are the ones who are bringing a lot of very, you know, problematic ideas about sexuality and gender into psychiatric and psychological settings. And I like having some influence there."
"We should all have greater freedoms to define and pursue our lives without pathologization, de-realization, harassment, threats of violence, violence, and criminalization. I join in the struggle to realize such a world."
"If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?"
"A certain kind of permission is given to live differently, to conceptualize and to act according to a new conceptualization."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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)."