A 1990 book arguing that gender is not an inner truth expressed outwards but an effect produced by repeated acts, with drag as its clearest exposure (1990)
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity — the founding text of queer theory.
Philosophy
Judith Butler
born 1956 · American
Post-structuralist feminism; queer theory; gender performativity
Judith Butler is the American philosopher whose 1990 book Gender Trouble founded much of queer theory by arguing that gender is performative — not the expression of an inner essence but an effect produced by repeated acts, gestures and styles. Butler went on to write on hate speech, mourning after 9/11, precarity, assembly and nonviolence, becoming one of the most cited and most contested humanities scholars alive. Butler teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and uses they/them pronouns.
How to spot them
- ▸Gender performativity: gender as something done, not something one is; drag as parody that exposes the original as a copy
- ▸The 1990 book that gave queer theory its founding text, and its 1993 sequel on bodies and matter
- ▸Berkeley; the Adorno Prize in 2012; the 1998 'Bad Writing' contest prize for a single sentence
- ▸Later work on grievability, precarity, assembly and nonviolence
- ▸Jewish, a critic of Israeli state policy, and on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace
Key works
The 1993 sequel answering the charge that the earlier book had dissolved the body into language, and asking which bodies come to count (1993)
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex.
A 1997 study of hate speech, pornography and military speech rules, warning that handing the state the power to censor is the greater danger (1997)
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.
A 2004 collection written after the September 11 attacks, on mourning, vulnerability, and whose deaths are publicly grievable (2004)
Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.
A 2015 book on crowds occupying squares — Tahrir, the Puerta del Sol, Zuccotti Park — as a bodily form of political claim-making (2015)
Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.
A 2020 book arguing that refusing violence is an active, even aggressive, commitment to an equal social bond rather than a private purity (2020)
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind.
A 2024 book on the phantasm that religious and right-wing movements worldwide have built out of a single contested term (2024)
Who's Afraid of Gender? — on the international panic over so-called 'gender ideology'.
Key ideas
- Performativity: gender is 'a stylized repetition of acts' — there is no doer behind the deed, and the repetition is what produces the appearance of a stable identity
- The heterosexual matrix: the cultural grid that makes bodies intelligible only as a settled sex expressing a matching gender and desire
- Drag does not imitate an original; it reveals that the 'original' was itself an imitation all along
- Sex is no more natural than gender: the supposedly pre-cultural body is already produced by the discourses that describe it
- Grievability: political violence works by sorting lives into those that can be mourned and those whose loss registers as nothing
- Precarity: the shared bodily vulnerability that can either be exploited politically or become the ground of solidarity
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1956; began studying philosophy in the ethics classes of a synagogue after being thrown out of regular Hebrew school
- •Took their PhD at Yale in 1984 on the reception of Hegel in twentieth-century France, published in 1987 as Subjects of Desire
- •Is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and formerly held the Maxine Elliot Chair there
- •Won first prize in the journal Philosophy and Literature's 'Bad Writing Contest' in 1998 for a single sentence about hegemony and structural totalities
- •Was awarded the Theodor W. Adorno Prize by the city of Frankfurt in 2012, provoking public protest over their stance on Israel
- •Announced in 2020 a preference for they/them pronouns
- •Draws heavily on J. L. Austin's speech-act theory — Butler's 'performative' is a philosophical relative of 'I now pronounce you'
- •Holds the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School in Switzerland
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Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender
- Judith Butler — Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity