Beside Oneself Judith Butler Analysis

In Judith Butler’s essay,” Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy,” she attempts to clarify what is considered human and what defines a human, and how it applies to the different gender roles and human rights. The difficulty that this essay presents, however, is its ambiguity – the fact that she fails to clearly identify what a human is and sort of challenges the readers to look within themselves to search for their own interpretation of what they believe gives them their own moral rights and human integrity. Human integrity is a word that can easily be defined when searched for in any dictionary database. “LawCookies.com” defines it as, “the human right to live without being physically harmed or harassed by others. No one can touch,

What may seem bearable to one person may seem unbearable to another. It is up to the person to decide for himself. She then begins by posing the question, "what makes our life bearable?”, and “what makes other’s lives bearable?", referring to them as the "questions of the human" (114). This deciding what makes life bearable is an ambiguous concept. To me personally, the question of what makes my own life bearable is the fact knowing that I have a close-knit group of family and friends that are always there to support me in anything I do. Now this may not be true to other people, who may have different responses to that question. It should not be, however, up to one person to decide for others what they believe they can or can't live without. "It becomes a question of ethics,” when someone “from a position of power” decides what makes “the lives of others bearable" (Butler 114). I don’t think it works that way. It is different for all of us. Therefore, no one should be in the position to tell other people how to live their