Butler, Judith,
1956–, American philosopher and political theorist, b. Cleveland,
Ph.D. Yale University, 1984. Holds the Hannah Arendt Chair at The European
Graduate School and is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of
Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University
of California, Berkeley. An interdisciplinary scholar, Butler is noted for
her innovative and critical readings across philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary
theory, queer theory, and other fields. She has written extensively on a
number of subjects and topics, including, but not limited to, gender,
performativity, the production and reproduction of marginality, ethics, alterity, bodily vulnerability,
political collectives, and public assembly. Butler received both academic
and popular attention in 1990 with the book Gender Trouble,
which challenged fundamental assumptions in feminist theory and philosophy. Butler
problematized the seeming fixity of the binary system of gender by making
the key point that the "naturalness" of the female and male sexed bodies is
in fact the effect of repeated performative acts, and thus socially
constructed and open to contestation. In her understanding of the
"performativity" of identity, Butler has been influenced by Lacanian
psychoanalysis, phenomenology, structural anthropologists, and speech-act
theory.
She has been the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including the Research
Lecturer honor at UC Berkeley in 2005, the Andrew Mellon Award for
Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009–13), the
Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012), and the Brudner Prize from
Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies. In 2015
she was elected as a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. She has
received fellowships from Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, and the American
Council of Learned Societies. In 2019 she was elected to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. She served as the President of the Modern
Language Association in from 2020–2021. Her books have been
translated into 27 languages. Beyond the academy, Butler is known for her
popular writings on contemporary politics. She is active in gender and sexual
politics, anti-war politics, human rights, and serves on the
boards of Jewish Voice for Peace, the Advisory Council of The New University
in Exile at the New School University, and the Center for Constitutional
Rights. Butler's preferred pronouns are she or they.
Her books include 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: A Politics of the Performative
(1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
(2000), Undoing Gender (2004), Precarious Life: The
Power of Mourning and Violence (2004), Giving an
Account of Oneself (2005), Frames of War: When Is Life
Grievable? (2009), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the
Critique of Zionism (2012), Senses of the
Subject (2015), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of
Assembly (2015), and The Force of Nonviolence: An
Ethico-Political Bind (2020).
See S. Salih, ed. The Judith Butler Reader (2004); M. Lloyd,
Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics (2007); L.
Silberstein, ed., Postzionism: A Reader (2008); A. Brady
and T. Schirato, Understanding Judith Butler (2011); A.
Kroker, Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway (2012); B.
Schippers, The Political Philosophy of Judith Butler
(2014).
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