Judith Butler

Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory.

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 attended Bennington College before transferring to Yale University, where they studied philosophy and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1978 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1984.

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.

Butler also cites works by Gayle Rubin, Mary Anne Warren, and their own piece "Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex" (1986), among others.

After receiving their PhD, Butler revised their doctoral dissertation to produce their first book, entitled Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (1987).

Butler is best known for their books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), 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.

Their work is often studied and debated in film studies courses emphasizing gender studies and performativity.

Butler has spoken on many contemporary political questions, including Israeli politics and in support of LGBT rights.

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" (David Gauntlett).

The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as a performance, not an essence, has become one of the foundations of queer theory.

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.

Butler employs "the concepts of play/performance, drag, and imitation" to describe the formation of gender and sexuality as continually created subjectivities always at risk of dissolution from non-performance."

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.

In 1993 Butler began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where they have served, beginning in 1998, as the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory.

They are also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School (EGS).

Butler went on to teach at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining University of California, Berkeley, in 1993.

In 2002, they held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

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".

Butler also claimed to be "thrilled" by the idea of these tutorials, and when asked what they wanted to study in these special sessions, they 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?"

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.

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 asserts 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 (or lack thereof) 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."