Judith Butler

Judith Butler (b. 1956) is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She also has a professorial appointment at the European Graduate School, where she teaches sometimes.

Related Topics:
1956 - Maxine Elliot - University of California, Berkeley - European Graduate School

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Butler received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984, and her dissertation was subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-80s, between different teaching/research appointments (most notably at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University), she was involved in "poststructuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

Related Topics:
Philosophy - Yale University - 1984 - Johns Hopkins University - Feminism

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To question the very foundational presuppositions of Western feminism meant opening it up to what others would later name queer theory, and critiquing the imperialism of a Western feminist theory that purports to represent "all" women. In 1990, Butler's book Gender Trouble burst onto the scene and became an instant hit, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages. The book critically employs the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. (At the same time, like most of Butler's work, it is regarded by some readers to be written in an unnecessarily complex, dense style). The book was popular enough that it even inspired an intellectual fanzine, Judy!, that poked fun at her academic celebrity status.

Related Topics:
Queer theory - Imperialism - Gender Trouble - Simone de Beauvoir - Julia Kristeva - Sigmund Freud - Jacques Lacan - Luce Irigaray - Jacques Derrida - Michel Foucault - Judy!

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The most widely read and misread move in Gender Trouble is the redeployment of Derrida's reading of (1) J. L. Austin's theory of the "performative statement," and (2) Franz Kafka's story, "Before the Law"; both in convergence with Butler's readings of Foucault's Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, Volume 1. This convergence is the crucible of Butler's famous "performative theory of gender," in which "gender" is a kind of repeated, largely "forced" (Foucault's "discipline") enactment or "performance" that in that very repetitive performance produces the imaginary fiction of a "core gender," as well as the distinction between the surface/exterior of "the body" and the "interior core." Paradoxically, it is a kind of forced, repetitive "doing" of gender that itself produces the fiction that an individual "has a" stable "gender" that "she/he" is just "expressing" in "her/his actions." And this imaginary fiction crucially produces an equally fictive distinction between an "interior" of "the body" and an "exterior" of "the body."

Related Topics:
Derrida - J. L. Austin - Franz Kafka - Foucault's - Discipline and Punish - History of Sexuality, Volume 1

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Butler's next book, Bodies That Matter, seeks to clear up confusions produced by both willful and inadvertent misreadings of both her work in Gender Trouble and poststructuralist feminism in general. To disrupt readings of the gender performative that simplistically view gender enactment as a daily voluntaristic "choice," Butler strengthens the performative theory of gender with a consideration of the status of repetition. Here she cites Derrida's theory of iterability or citationality, and goes on to work out a theory of performativity as citationality.

Related Topics:
Bodies That Matter - Derrida

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