“Any effort at empirical description takes place within a theoretically delimited sphere, and that empirical analysis in general cannot offer a persuasive explanation of its own constitution as a field of enquiry . . . [and] that theory operates on the very level at which the object of inquiry is defined and delimited, and that there is no givenness of the object which is not given within the interpretative field – given to theory, as it were, as the condition of its own appearance and legibility”

— Judith Butler “Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Resignification” in Sara Salih (ed.) The Judith Butler Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) 325-356.