Judith Pamela Butler (born 1956) is an American
philosopher and gender theorist whose work
has influenced political philosophy, ethics
and the fields of third-wave feminist, queer
and literary theory. Since 1993, she has taught
at the University of California, Berkeley,
where she is now Maxine Elliot Professor in
the Department of Comparative Literature and
the Program of Critical Theory. She is also
the Hannah Arendt Chair at the unaccredited
European Graduate School.Butler is best known
for her books Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies
That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
(1993), in which she challenges conventional
notions of gender and develops her theory
of gender performativity. This theory has
had a major influence on feminist and queer
scholarship. Her works are often implemented
in film studies courses emphasizing gender
studies and the performativity in discourse.
Butler has actively supported lesbian and
gay rights movements and has spoken out on
many contemporary political issues. In particular,
she is a vocal critic of Zionism, Israeli
politics and its effect on the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict, emphasizing that Israel does not
and should not be taken to represent all Jews
or Jewish opinion.
== Early life and education ==
Judith Butler was born on February 24, 1956,
in Cleveland, Ohio, to a family of Hungarian-Jewish
and Russian-Jewish descent. Most of her maternal
grandmother's family perished in the Holocaust.
As a child and teenager, she attended both
Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish
ethics, where she received her "first training
in philosophy". Butler stated in a 2010 interview
with Haaretz that she began the ethics classes
at the age of 14 and that they were created
as a form of punishment by her Hebrew school's
Rabbi because she was "too talkative in class".
Butler also stated that she was "thrilled"
by the idea of these tutorials, and when asked
what she wanted to study in these special
sessions, she responded with three questions
preoccupying her 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?"Butler
attended Bennington College before transferring
to Yale University, where she studied philosophy,
receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978
and her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1984.
She spent one academic year at Heidelberg
University as a Fulbright-Scholar. She taught
at Wesleyan University, George Washington
University, and Johns Hopkins University before
joining University of California, Berkeley,
in 1993. In 2002 she held the Spinoza Chair
of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.
In addition, she 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 board or advisory
board of academic journals including JAC:
A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics
and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society.
== Overview of major works ==
=== "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution"
(1988) ===
In the essay "Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution", Judith Butler proposes that
gender is a performance. She draws on the
phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
the feminism of Simone de Beauvoir, noting
that both thinkers ground their theories in
"lived experience" and view the sexual body
as a historical idea or situation. Butler
distinguishes "between sex, as biological
facticity, and gender, as the cultural interpretation
or signification of that facticity."Butler
argues that gender is best perceived as a
performance, which suggests that it has a
social audience. For Butler, the "script"
of gender performance is effortlessly transmitted
generation to generation in the form of socially
established "meanings": She states, "gender
is not a radical choice ... [nor is it] imposed
or inscribed upon the individual". Given the
social nature of human beings, most actions
are witnessed, reproduced, and internalized
and thus take on a performative or theatric
quality. With Butler's theory, gender is essentially
a performative repetition of acts associated
with the male or female. Currently, the actions
appropriate for men and women have been transmitted
to produce a social atmosphere that both maintains
and legitimizes a seemingly natural gender
binary. Consistently with her acceptance of
the body as a historical idea, she suggests
that our concept of gender is seen as natural
or innate because the body "becomes its gender
through a series of acts which are renewed,
revised, and consolidated through time".Butler
argues that the performance of gender itself
creates gender. Additionally, she compares
the performativity of gender to the performance
of the theater. She brings many similarities,
including the idea of each individual functioning
as an actor of their gender. However, she
also brings into light a critical difference
between gender performance in reality and
theater performances. She explains how the
theater is much less threatening and does
not produce the same fear that gender performances
often encounter because of the fact that there
is a clear distinction from reality within
the theater.
Butler uses Sigmund Freud's notion of how
a person's identity is modeled in terms of
the normal. She revises Freud's notion of
this concept's applicability to lesbianism,
where Freud says that lesbians are modeling
their behavior on men, the perceived normal
or ideal. She instead says that all gender
works in this way of performativity and a
representing of an internalized notion of
gender norms.
=== Gender Trouble (1990) ===
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity was first published in 1990, selling
over 100,000 copies internationally, in multiple
languages. The book's title alludes to the
1974 John Waters film Female Trouble, which
stars the drag queen Divine. Gender Trouble
discusses the works of Freud, de Beauvoir,
Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray,
Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and Michel
Foucault. The book has even inspired an intellectual
fanzine, Judy!The crux of Butler's argument
in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of
the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the
natural-seeming coherence, for example, of
masculine gender and heterosexual desire in
male bodies—is culturally constructed through
the repetition of stylized acts in time. Although
the repeated, stylized bodily acts establish
the appearance of an essential, ontological
"core" gender, Butler understands gender,
along with sex and sexuality, to be performative.
Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts
of binary sex. The performance of gender is
not voluntary, in Butler's opinion, and she
believes the gendered, sexed, desiring subject
must be constructed within what she calls,
borrowing from Foucault's Discipline and Punish,
"regulative discourses." These, also called
"frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary
regimes," determine in advance what possibilities
of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially
permitted to appear as coherent or "natural."
Regulative discourse includes disciplinary
techniques that coerce the stylized actions
and thereby maintain the appearance of "core"
gender, sex and sexuality.The supposed obviousness
of sex as a natural fact attests to how deeply
its production in discourse is concealed.
The sexed body, once established as a natural
fact, is the alibi for constructions of gender
and sexuality, which then purport to be the
just-as-natural expressions or consequences
of sex. In Butler's account, it is on the
basis of the construction of natural binary
sex that binary gender and heterosexuality
are likewise constructed as natural. Butler
claims that without a critique of sex as produced
by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as
a feminist strategy for contesting constructions
of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory
heterosexuality will be ineffective.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 she also believes 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". The idea of identity
as free and flexible and gender as a performance,
not an essence, is one of the foundations
of Queer theory.
=== "Imitation and Gender Insubordination"
(1990) ===
Judith Butler explores the production of identities
such as "homosexual" and "heterosexual" and
the limiting nature of identity categories.
An identity category for her is a result of
certain exclusions and concealments, and thus
a site of regulation. Butler acknowledges,
however, that categorized identities are important
for political action at the present time.
Butler believes that identity forms through
repetition or imitation and is not original.
Imitation fosters the illusion of continuity.
Heterosexual identity, which is set up as
an ideal, requires constant, compulsive repetition
if it is to be safeguarded.
=== Bodies That Matter (1993) ===
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits
of "Sex" seeks to clear up readings and supposed
misreadings of performativity that view the
enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.
Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in
performativity, making use of Derrida's theory
of iterability, which is a form of citationality:
Performativity cannot be understood outside
of a process of iterability, a regularized
and constrained repetition of norms. And this
repetition is not performed by a subject;
this repetition is what enables a subject
and constitutes the temporal condition for
the subject. This iterability implies that
'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event,
but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated
under and through constraint, under and through
the force of prohibition and taboo, with the
threat of ostracism and even death controlling
and compelling the shape of the production,
but not, I will insist, determining it fully
in advance.
This concept is linked to Butler's discussion
of performativity. Iterability, in its endless
undeterminedness as to-be-determinedness,
is thus precisely that aspect of performativity
that makes the production of the "natural"
sexed, gendered, heterosexual subject possible,
while also and at the same time opening that
subject up to the possibility of its incoherence
and contestation.
=== Excitable Speech (1997) ===
In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative,
Butler surveys the problems of hate speech
and censorship. She argues that censorship
is difficult to evaluate, and that in some
cases it may be useful or even necessary,
while in others it may be worse than tolerance.Butler
argues that hate speech exists retrospectively,
only after being declared such by state authorities.
In this way, the state reserves for itself
the power to define hate speech and, conversely,
the limits of acceptable discourse. In this
connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal
scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against
pornography for its unquestioning acceptance
of the state's power to censor.Deploying Foucault's
argument from the first volume of The History
of Sexuality, Butler claims that any attempt
at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily
propagates the very language it seeks to forbid.
As Foucault argues, for example, the strict
sexual mores of 19th century Western Europe
did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality
they sought to control. Extending this argument
using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that
censorship is primitive to language, and that
the linguistic I is a mere effect of an originary
censorship. In this way, Butler questions
the possibility of any genuinely oppositional
discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship,
then the principle that one might seek to
oppose is at once the formative principle
of oppositional speech".
=== Undoing Gender (2004) ===
Undoing Gender collects Butler's reflections
on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis
and the medical treatment of intersex people
for a more general readership than many of
her other books. Butler revisits and refines
her notion of performativity and focuses on
the question of undoing "restrictively normative
conceptions of sexual and gendered life".
Butler discusses how gender is performed without
one being conscious of it, but says that it
does not mean this performativity is "automatic
or mechanical". She argues that we have desires
that do not originate from our personhood,
but rather, from social norms. The writer
also debates our notions of "human" and "less-than-human"
and how these culturally imposed ideas can
keep one from having a "viable life" as the
biggest concerns are usually about whether
a person will be accepted if his or her desires
differ from normality. She states that one
may feel the need of being recognized in order
to live, but that at the same time, the conditions
to be recognized make life "unlivable". The
writer proposes an interrogation of such conditions
so that people who resist them may have more
possibilities of living.In her discussion
of intersex, Butler addresses the case of
David Reimer, a person whose sex was medically
"reassigned" from male to female after a botched
circumcision at eight months of age. Reimer
was "made" female by doctors, but later in
life identified as "really" male, married
and became a stepfather to his wife's three
children, and went on to tell his story in
As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised
as a Girl, which he wrote with John Colapinto.
Reimer committed suicide in 2004.
=== Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) ===
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler develops
an ethics based on the opacity of the subject
to itself; in other words, the limits of self-knowledge.
Primarily borrowing from Theodor Adorno, Michel
Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Laplanche,
Adriana Cavarero and Emmanuel Levinas, Butler
develops a theory of the formation of the
subject. She theorizes the subject in relation
to the social – a community of others and
their norms – which is beyond the control
of the subject it forms, as precisely the
very condition of that subject's formation,
the resources by which the subject becomes
recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in
the first place.
Butler accepts the claim that if the subject
is opaque to itself the limitations of its
free ethical responsibility and obligations
are due to the limits of narrative, presuppositions
of language and projection.
You may think that I am in fact telling a
story about the prehistory of the subject,
one that I have been arguing cannot be told.
There are two responses to this objection.
(1) That there is no final or adequate narrative
reconstruction of the prehistory of the speaking
"I" does not mean we cannot narrate it; it
only means that at the moment when we narrate
we become speculative philosophers or fiction
writers. (2) This prehistory has never stopped
happening and, as such, is not a prehistory
in any chronological sense. It is not done
with, over, relegated to a past, which then
becomes part of a causal or narrative reconstruction
of the self. On the contrary, that prehistory
interrupts the story I have to give of myself,
makes every account of myself partial and
failed, and constitutes, in a way, my failure
to be fully accountable for my actions, my
final "irresponsibility," one for which I
may be forgiven only because I could not do
otherwise. This not being able to do otherwise
is our common predicament (page 78).
Instead she argues for an ethics based precisely
on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits
of responsibility itself. Any concept of responsibility
which demands the full transparency of the
self to itself, an entirely accountable self,
necessarily does violence to the opacity which
marks the constitution of the self it addresses.
The scene of address by which responsibility
is enabled is always already a relation between
subjects who are variably opaque to themselves
and to each other. The ethics that Butler
envisions is therefore one in which the responsible
self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes
the limits of its capacity to give an account
of itself to others, and respects those limits
as symptomatically human. To take seriously
one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation
means then to critically interrogate the social
world in which one comes to be human in the
first place and which remains precisely that
which one cannot know about oneself. In this
way, Butler locates social and political critique
at the core of ethical practice.
== Reception ==
Butler's work has been influential in feminist
and queer theory, cultural studies, and continental
philosophy. Yet her contribution to a range
of other disciplines—such as psychoanalysis,
literary, film, and performance studies as
well as visual arts—has also been significant.
Her theory of gender performativity as well
as her conception of "critically queer" have
not only transformed understandings of gender
and queer identity in the academic world,
but have shaped and mobilized various kinds
of political activism, particularly queer
activism, across the globe. Butler's work
has also entered into contemporary debates
on the teaching of gender, gay parenting,
and the depathologization of transgender people.
Before election to the papacy, Pope Benedict
XVI wrote several pages challenging Butler's
arguments on gender. In several countries,
Butler became the symbol of the destruction
of traditional gender roles for reactionary
movements. This was particularly the case
in France during the anti-gay marriage protests.
Bruno Perreau has shown that Butler was literally
depicted as an "antichrist", both because
of her gender and her Jewish identity, the
fear of minority politics and critical studies
being expressed through fantasies of a corrupted
body.Some academics and political activists
maintain that Butler's radical departure from
the sex/gender dichotomy and her non-essentialist
conception of gender—along with her insistence
that power helps form the subject—revolutionized
feminist and queer praxis, thought, and studies.
Darin Barney of McGill University writes that:
Butler's work on gender, sex, sexuality, queerness,
feminism, bodies, political speech and ethics
has changed the way scholars all over the
world think, talk and write about identity,
subjectivity, power and politics. It has also
changed the lives of countless people whose
bodies, genders, sexualities and desires have
made them subject to violence, exclusion and
oppression.
Others scholars have been more critical. In
1998, Denis Dutton's journal Philosophy and
Literature awarded Butler first prize in its
fourth annual "Bad Writing Competition", which
set out to "celebrate bad writing from the
most stylistically lamentable passages found
in scholarly books and articles." Her unwitting
entry, which ran in a 1997 issue of the scholarly
journal Diacritics, ran thus:
The move from a structuralist account in which
capital is understood to structure social
relations in relatively homologous ways to
a view of hegemony in which power relations
are subject to repetition, convergence, and
rearticulation brought the question of temporality
into the thinking of structure, and marked
a shift from a form of Althusserian theory
that takes structural totalities as theoretical
objects to one in which the insights into
the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate
a renewed conception of hegemony as bound
up with the contingent sites and strategies
of the rearticulation of power.
Some critics have accused Butler of elitism
due to her difficult prose style, while others
claim that she reduces gender to "discourse"
or promotes a form of gender voluntarism.
Susan Bordo, for example, has argued that
Butler reduces gender to language and has
contended that the body is a major part of
gender, in opposition to Butler's conception
of gender as performance. A particularly vocal
critic has been liberal feminist Martha Nussbaum,
who has argued that Butler misreads J. L.
Austin's idea of performative utterance, makes
erroneous legal claims, forecloses an essential
site of resistance by repudiating pre-cultural
agency, and provides no normative ethical
theory to direct the subversive performances
that Butler endorses. Finally, Nancy Fraser's
critique of Butler was part of a famous exchange
between the two theorists. Fraser has suggested
that Butler's focus on performativity distances
her from "everyday ways of talking and thinking
about ourselves. ... Why should we use such
a self-distancing idiom?"Butler responded
to criticisms of her prose in the preface
to her 1999 book, Gender Trouble.More recently,
several critics—most prominently, Viviane
Namaste—have criticised Judith Butler's
Undoing Gender for under-emphasizing the intersectional
aspects of gender-based violence. For example,
Timothy Laurie notes that Butler's use of
phrases like "gender politics" and "gender
violence" in relation to assaults on transgender
individuals in the United States can "[scour]
a landscape filled with class and labour relations,
racialised urban stratification, and complex
interactions between sexual identity, sexual
practices and sex work", and produce instead
"a clean surface on which struggles over 'the
human' are imagined to play out". Nevertheless,
both Namaste and Laurie acknowledge the enduring
importance of Butler's critical contributions
to the study of gender identities.German feminist
Alice Schwarzer speaks of Butler's "radical
intellectual games" that would not change
how society classifies and treats a woman;
thus, by eliminating female and male identity
Butler would have abolished the discourse
about sexism in the queer community. Schwarzer
also accuses Butler of remaining silent about
the oppression of women and homosexuals in
the Islamic world, while readily exercising
her right to same-sex-marriage in the United
States; instead, Butler would sweepingly defend
Islam, including Islamism, from critics.
== Political activism ==
Much of Butler's early political activism
centered around queer and feminist issues,
and she served, for a period of time, as the
chair of the board of the International Gay
and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Over
the years, she has been particularly active
in the gay and lesbian rights, feminist, and
anti-war movements. She has also written and
spoken out on issues ranging from affirmative
action and gay marriage to the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and the prisoners detained
at Guantanamo Bay. More recently, she has
been active in the Occupy movement and has
publicly expressed support for a version of
the 2005 BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions)
campaign against Israel.
On September 7, 2006, Butler participated
in a faculty-organized teach-in against the
2006 Lebanon War at the University of California,
Berkeley. Another widely publicized moment
occurred in June 2010, when Butler refused
the Civil Courage Award (Zivilcouragepreis)
of the Christopher Street Day (CSD) Parade
in Berlin, Germany at the award ceremony.
She cited racist comments on the part of organizers
and a general failure of CSD organizations
to distance themselves from racism in general
and from anti-Muslim excuses for war more
specifically. Criticizing the event's commercialism,
she went on to name several groups that she
commended as stronger opponents of "homophobia,
transphobia, sexism, racism, and militarism".In
October 2011, Butler attended Occupy Wall
Street and, in reference to calls for clarification
of the protesters' demands, she said:
People have asked, so what are the demands?
What are the demands all of these people are
making? Either they say there are no demands
and that leaves your critics confused, or
they say that the demands for social equality
and economic justice are impossible demands.
And the impossible demands, they say, are
just not practical. If hope is an impossible
demand, then we demand the impossible – that
the right to shelter, food and employment
are impossible demands, then we demand the
impossible. If it is impossible to demand
that those who profit from the recession redistribute
their wealth and cease their greed, then yes,
we demand the impossible.
She is currently an executive member of the
Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace in the
United States and The Jenin Theatre in Palestine.
She is also a member of the advisory board
of Jewish Voice for Peace.
=== Adorno Prize affair ===
When Butler received the 2012 Adorno Prize,
the prize committee came under attack from
Israel's Ambassador to Germany Yakov Hadas-Handelsman,
the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
office in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff, and the
German Central Council of Jews. They were
upset at Butler's selection because of her
remarks about Israel and specifically her
"calls for a boycott against Israel". Butler
responded saying that "she did not take attacks
from German Jewish leaders personally". Rather,
she wrote, the attacks are "directed against
everyone who is critical against Israel and
its current policies".In a letter to the Mondoweiss
website, Butler asserted that she developed
strong ethical views on the basis of Jewish
philosophical thought and that it is "blatantly
untrue, absurd, and painful for anyone to
argue that those who formulate a criticism
of the State of Israel is anti-Semitic or,
if Jewish, self-hating".
=== Comments on Hamas and Hezbollah ===
Butler was criticized for statements she had
made about Hamas and Hezbollah. She had described
them as "social movements that are progressive,
that are on the Left, that are part of a global
Left". She was accused of defending "Hezbollah
and Hamas as progressive organizations" and
supporting their tactics.Butler responded
to these criticisms by stating that her remarks
on Hamas and Hezbollah were taken completely
out of context and badly, if not wittingly,
distort her established views on non-violence.
Butler describes the origin of her remarks
on Hamas and Hezbollah in the following way:
I was asked by a member of an academic audience
a few years ago whether I thought Hamas and
Hezbollah belonged to "the global left" and
I replied with two points. My first point
was merely descriptive: those political organizations
define themselves as anti-imperialist, and
anti-imperialism is one characteristic of
the global left, so on that basis one could
describe them as part of the global left.
My second point was then critical: as with
any group on the left, one has to decide whether
one is for that group or against that group,
and one needs to critically evaluate their
stand.
=== Comments on Black Lives Matter ===
In a January 2015 interview with George Yancy
of The New York Times, Butler discussed the
Black Lives Matter movement. The dialogue
draws heavily on her 2004 book Precarious
Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.
== MLA presidency and the Avital Ronell sexual
harassment case ==
On May 11, 2018, Butler led a group of scholars
in writing a letter to New York University
following the sexual harassment suit filed
by a former NYU graduate student against his
advisor Avital Ronell. The signatories acknowledged
not having had access to the confidential
findings of the investigation that followed
the Title IX complaint against Ronell. Nonetheless,
they accused the complainant of waging a "malicious
campaign" against Ronell. The signatories
also wrote that the presumed "malicious intention
has animated and sustained this legal nightmare"
for a highly regarded scholar. "If she were
to be terminated or relieved of her duties,
the injustice would be widely recognized and
opposed." Butler, the chief signatory, invoked
her title as President Elect of the Modern
Language Association. James J. Marino, a professor
at Cleveland State University and a member
of the MLA, started a petition to demand Butler's
resignation or removal from her post. He argued
that "Protesting against one instance of punishment
is only a means to the larger end of preserving
senior faculty's privilege of impunity. ... [Butler]
was standing up for an old, corrupt, and long-standing
way of doing business. The time for doing
business that way is over. We should never
look back." Some three months later, Butler
apologized to the MLA for the letter. "I acknowledged
that I should not have allowed the MLA affiliation
to go forward with my name," she wrote to
the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I expressed
regret to the MLA officers and staff, and
my colleagues accepted my apology. I extend
that same apology to MLA members."
== Personal life ==
Butler lives in Berkeley with her partner
Wendy Brown and son, Isaac.
== Selected honors and awards ==
Butler has had a visiting appointment at Birkbeck,
University of London (2009–).
2015: Elected as a Corresponding Fellow of
the British Academy
2014: Named one of PinkNews's top 11 Jewish
gay and lesbian icons
2018: Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa,
University of Belgrade
2014: Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa,
University of Fribourg
2013: Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa,
University of St. Andrews
2013: Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa,
McGill University
2012: Theodor W. Adorno Award
2010: "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your
World", Utne Reader
2008: Mellon Award for her exemplary contributions
to scholarship in the humanities.
1999: Guggenheim Fellowship
== Publications ==
All of Butler's books have been translated
into numerous languages; Gender Trouble, alone,
has been translated into twenty-seven different
languages. In addition, she has co-authored
and edited over a dozen volumes—the most
recent of which is Dispossession: The Performative
in the Political (2013), coauthored with Athena
Athanasiou. Over the years she has also published
many influential essays, interviews, and public
presentations. Butler is considered by many
as "one of the most influential voices in
contemporary political theory," and as the
most widely read and influential gender theorist
in the world.The following is a partial list
of Butler's publications.
Books
Butler, Judith (1999) [1987]. Subjects of
desire: Hegelian reflections in twentieth-century
France. New York: Columbia University Press.
ISBN 9780231159982. [Her doctoral dissertation.]
Butler, Judith (2006) [1990]. Gender trouble:
feminism and the subversion of identity. New
York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415389556.
Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies that matter:
on the discursive limits of "sex". New York:
Routledge. ISBN 9780415903653.
Butler, Judith; Benhabib, Seyla; Fraser, Nancy;
Cornell, Drucilla (1995). Feminist contentions:
a philosophical exchange. New York: Routledge.
ISBN 9780415910866.
Butler, Judith (1997). Excitable speech: a
politics of the performative. New York: Routledge.
ISBN 9780415915878.
Butler, Judith (1997). The psychic life of
power: theories in subjection. Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804728126.
Butler, Judith (2000). Antigone's claim kinship
between life and death. New York: Columbia
University Press. ISBN 9780231518048.
Butler, Judith; Laclau, Ernesto; Žižek,
Slavoj (2000). Contingency, hegemony, universality:
contemporary dialogues on the left. London:
Verso. ISBN 9781859842782.
Butler, Judith; Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth;
Puigvert, Lídia (2003). Women & social transformation.
New York: P. Lang. ISBN 9780820467085.
Butler, Judith (2004). Precarious life: the
powers of mourning and violence. London New
York: Verso. ISBN 9781844675449.
Butler, Judith (2004). Undoing gender. New
York/London: Routledge. ISBN 9780203499627.
Butler, Judith (2005). Giving an account of
oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.
ISBN 9780823246779.
Butler, Judith; Spivak, Gayatri (2007). Who
sings the nation-state?: language, politics,
belonging. London New York: Seagull Books.
ISBN 9781905422579.
Butler, Judith; Asad, Talal; Brown, Wendy;
Mahmood, Saba (2009). Is critique secular?:
blasphemy, injury, and free speech. Berkeley,
California: Townsend Center for the Humanities,
University of California Distributed by University
of California Press. ISBN 9780982329412.
Butler, Judith (2009). Frames of war: when
is life grievable?. London New York: Verso.
ISBN 9781844673339.
Butler, Judith; Habermas, Jürgen; Taylor,
Charles; West, Cornel (2011). The power of
religion in the public sphere. New York: Columbia
University Press. ISBN 9781283008921.
Butler, Judith; Weed, Elizabeth (2011). The
question of gender Joan W. Scott's critical
feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press. ISBN 9780253001535.
Butler, Judith (2012). Parting ways: Jewishness
and the critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia
University Press. ISBN 9780231517959.
Butler, Judith; Athanasiou, Athena (2013).
Dispossession: the performative in the political.
Cambridge, UK Malden, Massachusetts: Polity
Press. ISBN 9780745653815.
Butler, Judith (2015). Senses of the subject.
New York: Fordham University Press. ISBN 9780823264674.
Butler, Judith (2015). Notes toward a performative
theory of assembly. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674967755.Book
chapters
Butler, Judith (1982), "Lesbian S & M: the
politics of dis-illusion", in Linden, Robin
Ruth, Against sadomasochism: a radical feminist
analysis, East Palo Alto, California: Frog
in the Well, ISBN 9780960362837.
Butler, Judith (1990), "The pleasures of repetition",
in Glick, Robert A.; Bone, Stanley, Pleasure
beyond the pleasure principle: the role of
affect in motivation, development, and adaptation,
New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300047936.
Butler, Judith (1991), "Imitation and gender
insubordination", in Fuss, Diana, Inside/out:
lesbian theories, gay theories, New York:
Routledge, ISBN 9780415902373.
Butler, Judith (1993), "Kierkegaard's speculative
despair", in Solomon, Robert C.; Higgins,
Kathleen M., The age of German idealism, Routledge
History of Philosophy, Volume VI, London New
York: Routledge, pp. 363–395, ISBN 9780415308786.
Butler, Judith (1997), "Imitation and gender
insubordination", in Nicholson, Linda, The
second wave: a reader in feminist theory,
New York: Routledge, pp. 300–316, ISBN 9780415917612.
Butler, Judith (1997), "Gender is burning:
questions of appropriation and subversion",
in McClintock, Anne; Mufti, Aamir; Shohat,
Ella, Dangerous liaisons: gender, nation,
and postcolonial perspectives, Minnesota,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
pp. 381–395, ISBN 9780816626496.
Butler, Judith (2001), "Sexual difference
as a question of ethics", in Doyle, Laura,
Bodies of resistance: new phenomenologies
of politics, agency, and culture, Evanston,
Illinois: Northwestern University Press, ISBN
9780810118478.
Butler, Judith (2001), ""Appearances aside"",
in Post, Robert, Prejudicial appearances:
the logic of American antidiscrimination law,
Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press,
pp. 73–84, ISBN 9780822327134.
Butler, Judith (2005), "Subjects of sex/gender/desire",
in Cudd, Ann; Andreasen, Robin O., Feminist
theory: a philosophical anthology, Oxford,
UK Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing,
pp. 145–153, ISBN 9781405116619.
Butler, Judith (2009), "Ronell as gay scientist",
in Davis, Diane, Reading Ronell, Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, ISBN 9780252076473. A collection
of essays on the work of Avital Ronell.
Blanchet, Nassia; Blanchet, Reginald (3 April
2010). "Interview with Judith Butler". Hurly-Burly:
The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis.
New Lacanian School. 3.
Butler, Judith (2011), "Lecture notes", in
Ronell, Avital; Joubert, Joseph, Georges Perros
(Issue 983 of Collection Europe), Paris: Europe,
ISBN 9782351500385. Details.
Butler, Judith; Hark, Sabine (2018), "Defamation
and 
the Grammar of Harsh Words", in Sweetapple,
Christopher, The Queer Intersectional in Contemporary
Germany, Applied Sexology, Psychosocial-Verlag,
pp. 203–207, ISBN 978383797444-7, ISSN 2367-2420
== References ==
== Further reading ==
== External links ==
Biography – University of California, Berkeley
Works by or about Judith Butler in libraries
(WorldCat catalog)
Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous
on YouTube approach the notion of affinity
through a discussion of "Disruptive Kinship,"
co-sponsored by Villa Gillet and the School
of Writing at The New School for Public Engagement.
Interview of Judith Butler about her new book
"Frames of War" on New Statesman
Review of "Giving an Account of Oneself. Ethical
Violence and Responsibility", by Judith Butler,
Barcelona Metropolis Autumn 2010. (in English)
"Dictionary of Literary Biography on Judith
P. Butler (page 3)"
Interview with Judith Butler about politics,
economy, control societies, gender and identity
(2011)
Judith Butler in conversation with Wesleyan
University president Michael Roth on YouTube
