Background

Judith P. Butler was born on February 24, 1956 in Cleveland. Ohio, United States. Daughter of Dan and Lois (Lefkowich) Butler, a family of Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent. Most of her maternal grandmother's family perished in the Holocaust.

Education

As a child and teenager, Judith Butler attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics, where she received her "first training in philosophy." Butler 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 attended Bennington College and then Yale University. She received a Bachelor in philosophy degree in 1978, a Master of Arts degree in 1982, a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1984 from Yale University. She also spent one academic year at Heidelberg University as a Fulbright-Scholar.

Career

Butler taught at Wesleyan University (1983-1989), George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University (1989-1993) before joining the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993.

She rose to prominence in 1990 with Gender Trouble, which caused an unexpected stir as it unearthed foundational assumptions both in philosophy and in feminist theory, namely the facticity of sex. Controversial debate on the subject(s) extended far beyond academia to which Butler responded, in part, in Bodies that Matter (1993). Butler’s academic rigor is pursued through innovative and critical readings of a wide range of texts in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, challenging the confines of disciplinary thinking.

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."

Judith Butler taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University and was appointed the Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. An incomplete listing of her works includes: 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), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (co-authored with Athena Athanasiou, 2013), Senses of the Subject (2015), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015).

Achievements

• Butler's work has been influential in feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, and continental philosophy. 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.
  
  She has honorary degrees from the University of Fribourg, the University of St. Andrews, and McGill University. She also won the Mellon Award (2008) and Theodor W. Adorno Award (2012).

Works

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  • Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

    (In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith...)

    2004
  • The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection

    (This work combines social theory, philosophy, and psychoa...)

    1997
  • Senses of the Subject

    (This book brings together a group of Judith Butler’s phil...)

    2015
  • Undoing Gender

    (Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler's recent reflect...)

    2004
  • Giving an Account of Oneself

    (In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith B...)

    2005
  • Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism

    (Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that ...)

    2012
  • Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France

    (Judith Butler plots the French reception of Hegel and the...)

    2012
  • Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex

    (In Bodies That Matter, renowned theorist and philosopher ...)

    1993
  • Antigone's Claim

    (The celebrated author of Gender Trouble here redefines An...)

    2000
  • Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?

    (In Frames of War, Judith Butler explores the media’s port...)

    2009
  • Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly

    (Judith Butler elucidates the dynamics of public assembly ...)

    2015
  • Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

    (One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past ...)

    1990
  • Dispossession: The Performative in the Political

    (Dispossession describes the condition of those who have l...)

    2013

Religion

Judith Butler was raised in a religious Jewish family.

Politics

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."

Views

Judith Butler’s most influential book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity can be read as an intervention into feminism. Unmooring feminism at its basis, the book questions the assumption that there is such a thing as the unity of the experience of women. Women of color, who could not accept the category of women as their privileged one, articulated a critique of a unified subject of feminism and the reductive scheme operating within white feminism. Attuned to that polyphonic discourse, Butler maintained that the construction of the category of women involves a regulation of gender relations, which reverses feminist aims. She demonstrated that feminism premised on the category of women is complicit with compulsory heterosexuality, as heterosexuality is the unreflected condition of a binary-coded system of gender and desire.

Gender Trouble tackles the problem of exclusion yet in another way. The text analyzes the categorical violence that is exercised in the act of naming “men” and “women.” It’s a violence that particularly affects those who cannot or don’t want to conform to a binary system of gender. Judith Butler troubled the seeming fixity of this system by making the major point that the “naturalness” of the female and male sexed bodies is in fact the effect of repeated performative acts and as such culturally constructed and open to contestation. She also criticized the categorical address for representing "totalizing gestures." Later, especially in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Judith Butler would revise her profound suspicion of categories of identity she expressed in this text by admitting the inevitability to make use of them and, in doing so, to become dirtied by the language.

Clearly, the achievement of Gender Trouble was that it launched a more nuanced understanding of identity and its mechanisms of exclusion. However, the radical critique of categories of identity can also be couched in positive terms, as in opening up new political possibilities. In this sense, Gender Trouble also marks the advent of new feminism.

The enormous popularity of Gender Trouble exceeded Judith Butler’s early intentions and not without consequence. All too often, her work gets tethered to notions of gender or performativity, ignoring that Judith Butler hasn’t dwelt upon theorizing within the narrow terms laid out by Gender Trouble. However, Gender Trouble can still be looked at as an overture to her later thinking. Judith Butler remains indebted to an intellectual project that seeks to unsettle common beliefs and sets out to challenge the taken-for-granted through an approach she calls, with reference to Michel Foucault, "politics of troubling." Another continuity in her work is the concern for the constitution, production, and reproduction of marginality, and a desire to show more diverse forms of life have guided her writing throughout the years. While the genealogical analysis of power was central to Judith Butler’s early work, it was later increasingly displaced by the deployment of an ethical framework, which introduced a significant shift.

Undoing Gender is influenced by and contributes to the "New Gender Politics," dealing with issues of "transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory." The title of the book, however, doesn’t herald a post-gender scenario. Instead, the "undoing" is the cipher for the challenge posed by outside and unknown others, limiting volition and self-making. The expression "being undone" seeks to capture that we are, prior to choice, lost in and to the other, and it’s this losing that constitutes our sense of self. However, such openness, porosity, and dispossession of the self do not ring in the death of the subject; rather, it’s the condition of life "essential to the possibility of persisting as human." In Frames of War, Judith Butler exposes the existential dimension of relationality: "If I survive, it is only because my life is nothing without the life that exceeds me, that refers to some indexical you, without whom I cannot be."

The idea of a constitutive relation to alterity is a key motive that underpins all of Judith Butler’s writing. It can be traced back to her very first publication, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflection in Twentieth-Century France, where she locates the ek-static character of being in the Hegelian life and death struggle that transforms into a relationship between Lord and Bondsman. In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler revives this early motive, yet she aspires to displace the dyadic structure of the Hegelian recognition. What surfaces in her later writings is a renewed attention to desire, calling forth a politics prominently featuring corporeality, antagonism, and passion. Simultaneously, dispossession, ekstasis, and relationality gain centrality which are the guiding ideas under which Judith Butler’s later writings can be construed.

In introducing the concept of bodily vulnerability, Judith Butler brings her ontological aspirations linked to the ek-static structure of being on normative grounds. In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), she makes the central assertion that life is essentially precarious and vulnerable. This grounds life negatively in its exposure to violence and death but equally endows life, as a positive feature, with its capacity to be responsive and open towards the world. Whereas precariousness captures the shared condition of all existence, precarity, its complementary figure, is the conceptual lens under which the unequal distribution of vulnerability can be comprehended, namely the unequally assigned disability and the differential access to material resources resulting from neoliberal governmentality and war. By the same token, Judith Butler affirms the idea of global bonds, that is to say, a fundamental dependency that is neither restricted to those we know, nor to the imposition of national or cultural boundaries. From there, Butler concludes, arises the ethical obligation to create political institutions and forms of life that guarantee the persistence of (distant) others.

Butler reconsiders these ideas in a global scenario of war in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? What takes center stage is the epistemological question of how vulnerability can be apprehended given the existence of media frames that preconfigures affective responses and ways of seeing.

In recent lectures and writings, Judith Butler embarks on new terrain. Focusing on political collectives, the coming together of people in public assembly - the people, citizenship, and public space - Butler revives her sentiment for the performative. Expanding beyond the speech act, she offers a new perspective to her concept of the performative as it is the appearance of corporeal life that establishes performatively a field of the political and supports concerted action. It is the appearance of bodies not only being precarious but also resistant and persistent. A first systematic approach to these lines of thought can be found in Judith Butler’s recent publication, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015).

Quotations: "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."

"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."

"Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision."

"There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender... Identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results."

"Sexual harassment law is very important. But I think it would be a mistake if the sexual harassment law movement is the only way in which feminism is known in the media."

"I think that crafting a sexual position, or reciting a sexual position, always involves becoming haunted by what's excluded. And the more rigid the position, the greater the ghost, and the more threatening it is in some way."

"I do not deny certain kinds of biological differences. But I always ask under what conditions, under what discursive and institutional conditions, do certain biological differences - and they're not necessarily ones, given the anomalous state of bodies in the world - become the salient characteristics of sex."

"Why shouldn't it be that a woman who wants to have some part in child-rearing, but doesn't want to have a part in child-bearing, or who wants to have nothing to do with either, can inhabit her gender without an implicit sense of failure or inadequacy?"

"When people ask the question "Aren't these biological differences?", they're not really asking a question about the materiality of the body. They're actually asking whether or not the social institution of reproduction is the most salient one for thinking about gender."

Membership

She was a member of Modern Language Association, International Association Philosophy and Literature (panel organizer 1988-1989), Hegel Society of America, Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (selection committee book review session in continental feminism 1989-1991), Society of Women in Philosophy, Society for Phenomenology and Psychiatry, International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (board directors), Phi Beta Kappa.

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.

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  Modern Language Association , United States

• Hegel Society of America , United States

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  Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy , United States

• International Association Philosophy and Literature

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  Society for Women in Philosophy

• Society for Phenomenology and Psychiatry

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  International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission

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  Phi Beta Kappa

Personality

Judith Butler is known for her critical voice in socio-political discourse and debate. Her qualities as a thinker are reflected in her openness to what is at stake in the present and in her passionate engagement in conversations with contemporaries in and outside academia.

Butler identifies as a lesbian.

Physical Characteristics: Judith Butler has hazel eyes. She wears short hair.

Quotes from others about the person

• Darin Barney: "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".

Interests

• Feminist theory, political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, discourse, embodiment, sexuality, gender theory, jewish philosophy

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Seyla Benhabib, Gadamer and George Schrader, Plato, Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Foucault and Derrida.

Connections

Butler lives in Berkeley with her partner Wendy Brown and son, Isaac.

Father:

Dan Butler

Mother:

Lois (Lefkowich) Butler

Son:

Isaac

Partner:

Wendy Brown

References

• Judith Butler - Facebook