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If we accept that there are sexual and gender norms that condition who will be recognizable and "legible" and who will not, we can begin to see how the "illegible" may form as a group, developing forms of becoming legible to one another, how they are exposed to differential forms of living gender violence, and how this common exposure can become the basis for resistance. To understand, for instance, that they are misrecognized or re­ main unrecognizable precisely, it may be necessary to understand how they exist and persist at the limits of established norms for thinking, embodiment, and even personhood. Are there forms of sexuality for which there is no good vocabulary precisely because the powerful logics that determine how we think about desire, orientation, sexual acts, and pleasures do not allow them to become legible? Is there not a critical demand to rethink our existing vocabularies, or revalorize devalued names and forms of address precisely to open up the norms that limit not only what is think­ able, but the thinkability of gender nonconforming lives?

— Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly by Judith Butler (Page 38)

As much as we need to under­ stand that norms of gender are relayed through psychosocial fantasies that are not first of our own making, we can see that norms of the human are formed by modes of power that seek to normalize certain versions ofthe human over others, either distin­ guishing among humans, or expanding the field of the nonhuman at will. To ask how these norms are installed and normalized is the beginning of the process of not taking the norm for granted, of not failing to ask how it has been installed and enacted, and at whose expense. For those effaced or demeaned through the norm they are expected to embody, the struggle becomes an embodied one for recognizability, a public insistence on existing and mattering.

— Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly by Judith Butler (Page 37)

Although there are authoritative discourses on gender -the law, medicine, and psychiatry, to name a few- and they seek to launch and sustain human life within discrete gendered terms, they do not always succeed in containing the effects of those discourses of gender they bring into play. Moreover, it turns out that there can be no reproduction of gendered norms without the bodily enact­ ment of those norms, and when that field of norms breaks open, even if provisionally, we see that the animating aims of a regula­ tory discourse, as it is enacted bodily, give rise to consequences that are not always foreseen, making room for ways of living gender that challenge prevailing norms ofrecognition.

— Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly by Judith Butler (Page 31 - 32)

In the neo­ liberal morality, each ofus is only responsible for ourselves, and not for others, and that responsibility is first and foremost a re­ sponsibility to become economically self-sufficient under condi­ tions when self-sufficiency is structurally undermined.

— Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly by Judith Butler (Page 28)

The more one complies with the demand of "responsibility" to become self-reliant, the more socially isolated one becomes and the more precarious one feels; and the more supporting social structures fall away for "economic" reasons, the more isolated one feels in one's sense of heightened anxiety and "moral failure." It involves an escalation of anxiety about one's future and those who may be dependent on one; it imposes a frame of individual responsibility on the person suffering that anxiety; and it redefines responsibility as the demand to become an entrepreneur of oneself under conditions that make that dubious vocation impossible.

— Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly by Judith Butler (Page 17)

we are morally pushed to become precisely the kind ofsubjects who are structurally fore­ closed from realizing that norm. Neoliberal rationality demands self-sufficiency as a moral ideal at the same time that neoliberal forms ofpower work to destroy that very possibility at an eco­ nomic level, establishing every member ofthe population as po­ tentially or actually precarious, even using the ever-present threat ofprecarity tojustify its heightened regulation ofpublic space and its deregulation ofmarket expansion. The minute one proves one­ self to be incapable of conforming to the norm of self-sufficiency (for instance when one cannot pay health care or take advantage ofprivatized care), one becomes potentially dispensable. And then, this dispensable creature is addressed by a political morality that demands individualistic responsibility or that operates on a model of the privatization of "care."

— Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly by Judith Butler (Page 14)

A feminist history is affective: we pick up those feelings that are not supposed to be felt because they get in the way of an expectation of who we are and what life should be. No wonder feminism acquires such a negative charge: being against happiness, being against life. It is not simply that we first become feminists and later become killjoys. Rather, to become feminist is to kill other people’s joy; to get in the way of other people’s investments. In living a feminist life, we learn about judgments. We learn from how they fall. Words surround us, thick with meaning and intensity. We hear these words. We learn from what we are called. It is a feminist calling.

— Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed (Page 65)

A baby is born: we might say, “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” Even before birth: we might watch on the screen to see whether it’s a girl or boy, where that is decided by virtue of the absence or presence of a penis. The attachment to gender rests from the very beginning on phallocen- trism: on the penis as the decider of the future, two sexes as two paths: the sex- ual binary as fate, as fated, as fatalism. Even when we critique the sex-gender distinction, even when we learn from feminist critiques of this distinction (Gatens 1983; Butler 1990), we know that that distinction works as a form of sequencing: as if from sex, gender follows. We could call this sequencing “gen- der fatalism,” as implied by the assumption that “boys will be boys.” I remem- ber that utterance “boys will be boys” as one often made by adults, often with a nod of the head and an intonation of forgiveness: an unruliness explained as boys being boys; aggression, violence, even. Gender fatalism rests on ideas about nature as well as time: what “will be” is decided by “what is.” This is what boys are like; girls, too. But likeness becomes not only an explanation (he is being such boy; what a boy he is being) but an expectation. The “will be” in “boys will be boys” acquires the force of prediction. A prediction becomes a command. You will be boy. When you have fulfilled that command, you are agreeable; you have lived up to an expectation.

— Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed (Page 25)

Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we ac- knowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.

— Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed (Page 15 - 16)

Colonialism is justified as necessary not only to increase human happiness but to teach the natives how to be happy. They must learn “good habits” by un- learning what is custom or customary. The general end of happiness translates into the particular end of the individual: the creation of “individuals” becomes the purpose of colonial education or training. To become happy in these terms requires the individual be liberated from custom, to become an end-in-itself. (...) To turn others into individuals is to turn them around, by turning them toward the norms, values and practices of the colonizer.

— The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (Page 128)