Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist. She is best known for her books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Her work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and literary theory.
Butler was born in 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio. Her family were of Hungarian and Russian Jewish descent, and most of her maternal grandmother’s family had perished in the Holocaust. As a child, she attended Hebrew school and took special classes on Jewish ethics where she was introduced to philosophy. Butler continued her education at Bennington College, followed by Yale University where she studied philosophy. She received her B.A. in 1978, M.A. in 1982 and a Ph.D in 1984. In 1987, a revised version of her Ph.D dissertation was published, entitled Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France.
In 1988 Butler’s essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, in which she proposed her theory of gender performativity was published. She argued that the performance of gender creates gender, and compares this to a performance in a theatre. She suggests that acting in theatre is far less threatening than gender performance because of the distinction of reality. She also uses Freud’s idea of how a person’s identity is modelled around the terms of ’normal but revises his idea that lesbians model their behaviour on men. Instead she states that gender works in a way of performativity in representing internalised notions of gender norms. She states that “The body is … a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities. One is not simply a body, but in some very key sense, one does one’s body, and, indeed, one does one’s body differently from one’s contemporaries and from one’s embodied predecessors and successors as well.”
Butler continued to explore the idea of gender performativity in her best known work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. It is considered to be one of the canonical texts of queer theory and postmodern poststructural feminism and sold over 100,000 copies internationally. In the book, Butler argued that feminism was incorrect in assuming that ‘women’ were a group that shared common characterises and interests. This had caused a binary view of gender which forced people into two groups separated by stereotypical ideas of what men and women are supposed to be. Feminism had closed down options for how people could express their identity, instead of opening up the possibilities. The ideas of masculinity or femininity are presented as a performative social construct, and are acted out in order for people to fit into a heteronormative idea of how they should act and present themselves. She states that “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender… identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results”. She also puts forward the idea that sex (male, female) causes gender (masculine, feminine) which in turn causes desire towards the opposite gender was flawed. She suggested that these links should be destroyed so that gender and desire could be presented as something that is not ‘caused’ by other factors but instead is flexible and can shift and change depending on context. The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as a performance, not an essence, is one of the foundations of Queer theory. Butler also critically discussed the work of philosophers including Simone de Beauvoir, Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault. The books became popular outside of a traditional academic audience and inspired the intellectual fanzine, Judy!
In 1993, Butler published Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex in which she continued to challenge the notions of gender and attempted to clear up any ideas that the enactment of sex/gender was a daily choice. She followed this with Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997) and Undoing Gender (2004). In this collection of essays, Butler states that her “effort was to combat forms of essentialism which claimed that gender is a truth that is somehow there, interior to the body, as a core or as an internal essence, something that we cannot deny, something which, natural or not, is treated as given”. She followed this publication with Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), and Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012).
Butler has taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California, Berkeley where she is currently the Maxine Elliot Professor in the department of comparative literature and the Program of Critical Theory. She is also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School. She has been politically active throughout her career, focusing her attention on feminism, queer and gender-related issues. She has served as the chair of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission board and has written and spoken out on issues including affirmative action and gay marriage. She has also spoken on the atrocities of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine and is an executive member of the Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace in the United States and supported the Boycott movement against Israel. Butler has also been active in the Occupy movement and spoken about the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Butler is considered to be one of the most influential contemporary political voices and has received numerous awards including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2008), a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship (1978) and the Brudner Memorial Prize for Lifetime Achievement for contributions to Lesbian and Gay Studies from Yale University (2004).