Butler, Judith, 1956-

Research Expertise and Interest

critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, comparative literature, 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, social and political thought, philosophy and literature

Research Description

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of several books: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), Excitable Speech (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004), Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak in 2008), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), and Is Critique Secular? (co-written with Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, and Saba Mahmood, 2009) and Sois Mon Corps (2011), co-authored with Catherine Malabou. Her most recent books include: Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (co-authored with Athena Athanasiou 2013), Senses of the Subject and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), and a co-edited volume, Vulnerability in Resistance, with Duke University Press (2015). Her book, The Force of Nonviolence will appear with Verso Press in 2020. Her books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages.

She served as a founding director, with Martin Jay, of the Critical Theory Program and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at UC Berkeley and served as Department Chair of the Department of Rhetoric in 1998-2003 and 2006-7, and the Acting Chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, 2002-3. She also served as the Chair of the Board of the University of California Humanities Research Center in Irvine. She has served on the Executive Council of the Modern Languages Association and chaired its committee on Academic Freedom and will serve as President of the organization in 2020. She is also affiliated faculty with the Psychosocial MA Program at Birkbeck College in London and the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School in Sass Fee, Switzerland.

Butler has been active in several human rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. She was the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13). She received the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of her contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies, and was named the Albertus Magnus Professorship from the City of Cologne, Germany in 2016. She is as well the past recipient of several fellowships including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, American Council of Learned Societies, and was Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. She has given the Wellek Lectures at Irvine, the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, the Watts Lecture at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, the Gauss Lectures at Princeton, the Messenger Lectures at Cornell, the Tanner Lectures at Yale University, and the annual Freud Lecture at the Freud Museum in Vienna. She has received twelve honorary degrees: Université Bordeaux-III, Université Paris-VII, Grinnell College, McGill University, University of St. Andrews, Université de Fribourg, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Liège Université, the Universidad de Costa Rica, Universidad de Guadalajara, Universidad de Chile, and University of Belgrade. In 2014, she was awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry. In 2015, she was made an “honorary geographer” by the American Association of Geographers and was elected as a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.

Judith Butler, in full Judith Pamela Butler, (born February 24, 1956, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.), American academic whose theories of the performative nature of gender and sex were influential within Francocentric philosophy, cultural theory, queer theory, and some schools of philosophical feminism from the late 20th century.

Butler’s father was a dentist and her mother an advocate for fair housing. After attending Bennington College, she studied philosophy at Yale University, receiving B.A. (1978), M.A. (1982), and Ph.D. (1984) degrees. She taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California, Berkeley, where she was appointed Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature in 1998. She also served as Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Butler’s first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), a revised version of her doctoral dissertation, was a discussion of the concept of desire as it figures in G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and its subsequent interpretations by various 20th-century French philosophers.

In her best-known work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), and its sequel, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), Butler built upon the familiar cultural-theoretic assumption that gender is socially constructed (the result of socialization, broadly conceived) rather than innate and that conventional notions of gender and sexuality serve to perpetuate the traditional domination of women by men and to justify the oppression of homosexuals and transgender persons.

One of her innovations was to suggest that gender is constituted by action and speech—by behaviour in which gendered traits and dispositions are exhibited or acted out. In particular, gender is not an underlying essence or nature of which gendered behaviour is the product; it is a series of acts whose constant repetition creates the illusion that an underlying nature exists. Gender, according to Butler, “is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” She stressed, however, that individuals do not exist prior to or independently of the genders they “perform”: “gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed.” Indeed, “the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed.” Individual identity (the subject) is itself performatively constituted. It follows that individuals do not “choose” their genders and cannot assume or discard or radically alter them at will simply by behaving (or not behaving) in certain ways. At the same time, small deviations from established patterns of gendered behaviour are possible and indeed inevitable, and it is through such occasional variations that the socially constructed character of gender is revealed.

Butler contended, somewhat paradoxically, that not only gender but sex itself—the fact of being biologically male or female—is “to some degree” a performative social construct. Sex is performatively constructed in the sense that it represents an essentially arbitrary distinction between individuals that is drawn (at or before birth) and later reinforced through speech acts such as (originally) “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” In heterosexist cultures, the repeated performance of the distinction serves (among other things) to impose a norm of sexual desire based on an artificial association between biological sex and gender (the “law of heterosexual coherence”), thereby sustaining a system of “compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality” (the “heterosexual matrix”).

In Gender Trouble, Butler questioned the validity of much feminist political theorizing by suggesting that the subject whose oppression those theories attempted to explain—“women”—is an exclusionary construct that “achieves stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix.” Her suspicion of the category led her to doubt the wisdom of conventional political activism aimed at protecting women’s rights and interests. She emphasized instead the subversive destabilization of “women” and other categories through consciously deviant gendered behaviour that would expose the artificiality of conventional gender roles and the arbitrariness of traditional correspondences between gender, sex, and sexuality. The most-overt examples of such “gender parody” involve cross-dressing, especially drag (see transvestism). According to Butler:

Part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the [drag] performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender.…In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity.

Butler’s Gender Trouble was one of the founding texts of queer theory, and her work continued to inform much debate within cultural theory, especially in the United States, in the early 21st century. It also attracted significant criticism, however, for both its substance and its style. Even sympathetic readers of Butler’s work, for example, worried that her view of the subject as performatively constituted left her without a coherent account of individual agency. Others complained that her conception of politics as parody was impoverished and self-indulgent, amounting to a kind of moral quietism. Perhaps the most widely voiced criticism concerned her dense, jargon-laden prose and her nonlinear style of argument, both of which were viewed by some readers as rhetorical devices serving to conceal a paucity of original ideas. Butler argued in her defense that radical ideas are often best expressed in writing that challenges conventional standards of lucidity, grammar, and “common sense.”

Butler’s other works include Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1996), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), and Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012).