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“... is accompanied by a fantastic vision of the ‘new androgyny’. She quotes approvingly from Judith Butler that gender is ‘fundamentally phantasmatic’, has little to do with biology, and is really ‘an act’, ‘a performance’. ‘It will not be that many decades,’ she believes, ‘before men may be able to gestate, and themselves feed, a ...”

“... naturalness of categories like ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ have recognised the utility of what Judith Butler describes as ‘necessary errors of identity’. Saying homosexuals don’t exist wasn’t very helpful to men and women fighting hateful prejudice.Comfort had experienced group sex at Sandstone, the quasi-intentional community founded by John ...”

“... to justify themselves. And who, exactly, decides what we are allowed to understand as violence? As Judith Butler has long maintained, the exercise of such decisions is in itself a form of violence. Binding migrants into the legal process with no hope of exit (other than prison or return) obfuscates the violence of the state. It is the perfect way to ...”

“... length – as well as answered in detail – by the very theorists whom Bersani criticises. Thus, Judith Butler, one of his prime targets, wondered as early as 1989 whether it isn’t ‘politically ... crucial to insist on lesbian and gay identities precisely because they are threatened with erasure and obliteration from homophobic quarters?’ Isn’t ...”

“... bombs aren’t such a huge joke any more.’ The main session over, we were offered Judith Chernaik on Shelley’s feminism or Elma Dangerfield on Byron and Shelley or Marilyn Butler on the background to the politics of the Romantic poets. I had heard Judith a few times ...”

“... something that exposes gender as a masquerade for all of us), verges on ‘critical perversity’. Judith Butler was the target, charged with celebrating as transgressive the hovering, unsettled condition, which, as Teleford, Jacques and Kaveney testify, places transsexual people at risk of violence. There is another distinction at work here, a division ...”

“... immediacy, disbelief, the suffering of animals – none of these realities ‘falls into place’. Judith Butler in a recent essay, looking for a basis on which a future politics might be built, asks her readers to consider the idea of a collectivity founded on weakness. ‘Vulnerability, affiliation and collective resistance’: these, she argues, are ...”

“... already a body modification technology,’ as Lewis puts it, in the footsteps of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler: the home, the wedding ring, even the binary sexuation, are only there by convention, honoured – or not – by time. ‘Natural’ childbirth, with pools and music and aromatic midwives, is ‘a regimen full of carefully stylised gestational ...”

“... transfer to a psychiatric ward. He died a few days later in hospital.‘An ungrievable life,’ Judith Butler has argued, ‘is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.’ Butler was talking about people on the ‘wrong’ side of a conflict, but the same ...”

“... towards domination. ‘Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed,’ Judith Butler wrote recently in relation to trans rights, ‘you’re operating within a fascist logic.’ Others see it as an inherent feature of unjust, oppressive societies. Fascism, Langston Hughes wrote in 1936, ‘is a new name for that kind of terror ...”

“... the Guildford Four, but for the closely related cases of the Maguire family, the Birmingham Six, Judith Ward? What did it mean for the system of justice in England? Some years earlier, in a judgment in the Birmingham Six case, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, had summed up the broader significance of such a reversal. If the six men win, it will mean ...”

“... Everyone communes with the Bible,’ wrote Marilyn Butler recently in her Cambridge inaugural lecture, commenting on the recent re-inclusion of the Biblical canon in the canon of English literature. Northrop Frye celebrated the literary rediscovery of Scripture in The Great Code, and now Frank Kermode and Robert Alter, two critics who have given a new rigour and seriousness to the ‘Bible as literature’ movement, have brought together a constellation of literary and Biblical specialists, from both sides of the Atlantic, to explain the Bible from a literary standpoint for what the blurb calls ‘cultivated general readers ...”

“... has attracted the attention of various political scientists, including the psephologist David Butler and his collaborator the German émigré Europhile Uwe Kitzinger, who published a fascinating ‘instant’ study of the campaign in 1976, but Robert Saunders offers something different: a comprehensive historical account, which relates debates about ...”

“... consider themselves liberated, and their negative and destructive attitude towards books, Dorothy Butler’s Babies need books comes as marvellous relief. Her theme is that nobody is too young for books, that parents can create a close relationship with their babies from the start of their lives, and lay the foundations of lasting delight. She lists the books ...”

“... which is true – but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing. As Judith Butler has argued, the performative is always melancholic, since the performer knows the role they are enacting is no more than skin deep (‘melancholic’ also because of all the other buried and unconsciously grieved sexual lives one might have ...”