Judith Butler

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Lore & Background

Judith Butler was born on February 24, 1956, in Cleveland, Ohio, to a family of Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent. Most of their maternal grandmother's family was murdered in the Holocaust. Butler's parents were practicing Reform Jews. As a child and teenager, Butler attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics, which they called their 'first training in philosophy.' At age 14, they began ethics tutorials as a form of punishment by their Hebrew school's rabbi for being 'too talkative in class' and often accused of clowning. Butler asked to study three questions: '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 they studied philosophy and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1978 and a PhD in 1984 with the dissertation *Recovery and Invention: The Projects of Desire in Hegel, Kojève, Hyppolite and Sartre*. They spent one academic year at Heidelberg University as a Fulbright Scholar in 1979. Their first book, *Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France* (1987), revised their doctoral dissertation. Butler has held academic appointments at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University, where they received tenure in 1992 before joining the faculty in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. There they became the Maxine Elliot Professor in 1998, holding faculty appointments in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory which they cofounded in 2007. They founded the International Consortium of Critical Theory, funded by the Mellon Foundation, in 2015. They also hold the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School (EGS). In 2002, they held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Butler has also spoken and written on war, non-violence, ethics, public mourning, democratic theory and other contemporary political questions, including the Palestinian struggles and the limits of Zionism. They have also spoken internationally in support of LGBTQIA rights and against anti-gender ideology.

Reader's Guide

Judith Butler's significance lies in their foundational contributions to feminist and queer theory, particularly through the concept of gender performativity. In their 1988 essay 'Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,' Butler proposed that gender is performative—not a static identity or role, but a set of acts which can evolve over time. They argued that 'if the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.' In *Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity* (1990), which sold over 100,000 copies internationally in multiple languages, Butler critiqued the terms gender and sex as used by feminists, arguing that feminism made a mistake in trying to make 'women' a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. They aimed to break the supposed links between sex and gender so that gender and desire could be 'flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors.' In *Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex* (1993), Butler emphasized the role of repetition in performativity, using Derrida's theory of iterability, stating: '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.' Butler's work extends to political philosophy, ethics, and contemporary issues such as war, non-violence, and LGBTQIA rights.

Did You Know?

• Butler began ethics tutorials at age 14 as a form of punishment for being 'too talkative in class' and often accused of clowning.
• Butler's first book, *Subjects of Desire* (1987), was a revision of their doctoral dissertation on Hegel, Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre.
• Butler cofounded the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley in 2007 and the International Consortium of Critical Theory in 2015.
• Butler held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in 2002.
• Butler's book *Gender Trouble* (1990) sold over 100,000 copies internationally in multiple languages.