Judith Butler


Judith Butler is an American feminist and queer philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, and the fields of feminist and queer theory, academic freedom, and literary theory.
Butler has held academic appointments at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University where they received tenure in 1992 before joining the faculty in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. There they became the Maxine Elliot Professor in 1998, holding faculty appointments in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory which they cofounded in 2007. They founded the International Consortium of Critical Theory, funded by the Mellon Foundation, in 2015. They also hold the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School.
Butler is best known for the books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, in which they challenge conventional, heteronormative notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship.
Butler has also spoken and written on war and non-violence, ethics, public mourning, democratic theory and other contemporary political questions, including the Palestinian struggles and the limits of Zionism. They have also spoken internationally in support of LGBTQIA rights and against anti-gender ideology.

Early life and education

Judith Butler was born on February 24, 1956, in Cleveland, Ohio, to a family of Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent. Most of their maternal grandmother's family was murdered in the Holocaust. Butler's parents were practicing Reform Jews. Their mother was raised Orthodox, eventually becoming Conservative and then Reform, while their father was raised Reform. As a child and teenager, Butler attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics, where they received their "first training in philosophy". Butler stated in a 2010 interview with Haaretz that they began the ethics classes at the age of 14, and that they were created as a form of punishment by Butler's Hebrew school's rabbi because they were "too talkative in class", and also often even accused of clowning. Butler said they were "thrilled" by the idea of these tutorials. When asked what they wanted to study in these special sessions, Butler responded with three questions preoccupying them at the time: "Why was Spinoza excommunicated from the synagogue? Could German Idealism be held accountable for Nazism? And how was one to understand existential theology, including the work of Martin Buber?"
Butler attended Bennington College before transferring to Yale University, where they studied philosophy and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1978 and a PhD in 1984 with the dissertation Recovery and Invention: The Projects of Desire in Hegel, Kojève, Hyppolite and Sartre. Their studies fell primarily under the traditions of German idealism and phenomenology, and they spent one academic year at Heidelberg University as a Fulbright Scholar in 1979. After receiving their PhD, Butler revised their doctoral dissertation to produce their first book, entitled Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France. Butler went on to teach at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. In 2002, they held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. In addition, they joined the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Visiting Professor of the Humanities in the spring semesters of 2012, 2013 and 2014 with the option of remaining as full-time faculty.
Butler serves on the editorial or advisory board of several academic journals, including Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics and ''Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.''

Overview of major works

''Performative Acts and Gender Constitution'' (1988)

In the essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory", Judith Butler proposes that gender is performative – that is, gender is not so much a static identity or role, but rather comprises a set of acts which can evolve over time. Butler states that because gender identity is established through behavior, there is a possibility to construct different genders via different behaviors.
...if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.
Butler concludes their essay with a personal reflection on the strengths and limitations of widespread feminist theories which function on a solely binary perception of gender. Butler critiques what they call the "reification" of sexual difference within a heterosexual framework, and articulates their concern with how this framework affects the accurate presentation of "femaleness" across a diverse array of experiences, including those of women.
As a corporeal field of cultural play, gender is a basically innovative affair, although it is quite clear that there are strict punishments for contesting the script by performing out of turn or through unwarranted improvisations. Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds.
Throughout this text, Butler derives influence from French philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, particularly de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Merleau-Ponty's "The Body in its Sexual Being". Butler also cites works by Gayle Rubin, Mary Anne Warren, and their own piece "Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex", among others.

''Gender Trouble'' (1990)

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally, in multiple languages. Similar to "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution", Gender Trouble discusses the works of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.
Butler offers a critique of the terms gender and sex as they have been used by feminists. Butler argues that feminism made a mistake in trying to make "women" a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler writes that this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations. Butler believes that feminists should not try to define "women" and they also believe that feminists should "focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement". Finally, Butler aims to break the supposed links between sex and gender so that gender and desire can be "flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors". The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as performative, not an essence, has become one of the foundations of queer theory.

''Imitation and Gender Insubordination'' (1991)

Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories is a collection of writings of gay and lesbian social theorists. Butler's contribution argues that no transparent revelation is afforded by using the terms "gay" or "lesbian" yet there is a political imperative to do so.

''Bodies That Matter'' (1993)

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex seeks to clear up readings and supposed misinterpretations of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice. As such, Butler aims to answer questions of this vein that may have been raised from their previous work Gender Trouble. Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, which is a form of citationality:
Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.
Butler also explores how gender can be understood not only as a performance, but also as a "constitutive constraint", or constructed character. They ask how this conceptualization of an individual's gender contributes to notions of bodily intelligibility, or comprehension, by other individuals. Butler continues to discuss bodily intelligibility by means of sex as a "materialized" entity, upon which cultural, collective ideals of gender can be built. From this angle, Butler interrogates value conscription upon various bodies as determined theories and practices of heterosexual predominance.
If gender consists of the social meanings that sex assumes, then sex does not accrue social meanings as additive properties but, rather, is replaced by the social meanings it takes on; sex is relinquished in the course of that assumption, and gender emerges, not as a term in a continued relationship of opposition to sex, but as the term which absorbs and displaces "sex," the mark of its full substantiation into gender or what, from a materialist point of view, might constitute a full de-substantiation.
While continuing to draw upon sources such as those of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud, Butler also draws upon pieces of documentary film and literature for Bodies That Matter. Such pieces include the film Paris is Burning, short stories by Willa Cather, and the novel Passing by Nella Larsen.