Judith Butler

From wikigender.org

Jump to: navigation, search

Judith Butler is an American writer, philosopher and academic. She has contributed to the study of gender with several publications, most notably, “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990) and Undoing Gender (2004).

Early Life and Academic Career

Judith Butler was born in 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio (United States) Judith Butler received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She has taught in several universities including both Wesleyan and John Hopkins. Ms. Butler currently works at the University of California, Berkeley as Maxime Elliot Professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature Departments.

Literary Works

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

Judith Butler sees gender as an attribute in this publication. She questions the need to lump all women into one group, as if their interests could be uniform. She recognizes that sex does not necessarily conscribe gender, and that it’s not constructive to separate human beings into one of two choices. Gender is neither black nor white, but certainly runs into shades of gray that traditional thinking about gender as related to sex is unable to account for. These shades are placed on a continuum which people, she argues, are free to move along it as they please. We have been left with a false narrative on women, she argues, which has greatly distorted our understanding of gender and has sometimes led to oppression. This writing was influenced by Michael Focault, and has contributed to her ideas on queer theory.

Comprehensive list of literary works

Some of Ms. Butler’s prominent writings include:

Is Critique Secular? (co-written in 2009)
Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009)
Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak in 2008),
Undoing Gender (2004)
Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004)
Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000)
Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, (Verso Press, 2000)
Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987)
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990)
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993)
The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997)
Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performance (Routledge, 1997)
Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987)

Activities

Ms. Butler is active in several fields including: gender and sexual politics, anti-war and human rights. She also finds time to be involved with the Jewish Voice for Peace organization.