"People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me"
About this Quote
Butler slices through identity politics with the calm precision of someone who’s watched the argument misfire for decades. The first sentence is almost disarmingly permissive: self-naming is framed as a basic liberty, not a trend to be policed. Then she pivots. The real violence, she implies, isn’t in what anyone claims for themselves, but in the social machinery that assigns, confines, and broadcasts labels onto others. “Other people doing the calling” isn’t a mere annoyance; it’s the sound of hierarchy at work.
The line works because it refuses the bait of the usual culture-war binary. Butler doesn’t romanticize identity as pure self-expression, and she doesn’t mock it as vanity. She’s interested in power: who gets to define whom, under what conditions, and with what consequences. Naming becomes an instrument of control, a soft technology of coercion that can look like common sense. In her fiction, categories like race, gender, species, and “human” itself are never neutral descriptors; they’re weapons, passports, or cages depending on who’s holding them.
Context matters: Butler wrote as a Black woman in a literary world that routinely misread, re-shelved, and minimized her work, and as a science fiction author who understood how easily societies naturalize domination by renaming it order. The quote’s sting is its accuracy: self-identification is only half the story. The other half is what happens when institutions, media, and everyday strangers insist on a label that serves them more than it serves you.
The line works because it refuses the bait of the usual culture-war binary. Butler doesn’t romanticize identity as pure self-expression, and she doesn’t mock it as vanity. She’s interested in power: who gets to define whom, under what conditions, and with what consequences. Naming becomes an instrument of control, a soft technology of coercion that can look like common sense. In her fiction, categories like race, gender, species, and “human” itself are never neutral descriptors; they’re weapons, passports, or cages depending on who’s holding them.
Context matters: Butler wrote as a Black woman in a literary world that routinely misread, re-shelved, and minimized her work, and as a science fiction author who understood how easily societies naturalize domination by renaming it order. The quote’s sting is its accuracy: self-identification is only half the story. The other half is what happens when institutions, media, and everyday strangers insist on a label that serves them more than it serves you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Respect |
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