![]() ![]() Butler believes that feminists should not try to define "women" and they also believe 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". Butler writes that this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations. Butler argues that feminism made a mistake in trying to make "women" a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. īutler offers a critique of the terms gender and sex as they have been used by feminists. Gender Trouble discusses the works of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally, in multiple languages. īutler serves on the editorial or advisory board of several academic journals, including Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. In addition, they 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, 20 with the option of remaining as full-time faculty. In 2002, they held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Butler taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. They spent one academic year at Heidelberg University as a Fulbright Scholar. Butler also claimed to be "thrilled" by the idea of these tutorials, and when asked what they wanted to study in these special sessions, they responded with three questions preoccupying them 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?" īutler attended Bennington College before transferring to Yale University, where they studied philosophy and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1978 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1984. Butler stated in a 2010 interview with Haaretz that they began the ethics classes at the age of 14 and that they were created as a form of punishment by Butler's Hebrew school's Rabbi because they were "too talkative in class". As a child and teenager, Butler attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics, where they received their "first training in philosophy". Their mother was raised Orthodox, eventually becoming Conservative and then Reform, while their father was raised Reform. ![]() Butler's parents were practicing Reform Jews. Most of their maternal grandmother's family was murdered in the Holocaust. Judith Butler was born on February 24, 1956, in Cleveland, Ohio, to a family of Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent. Their work is often studied and debated in film studies courses emphasizing gender studies and performativity in discourse.īutler has spoken on many contemporary political issues, including Israeli politics and in support of LGBT rights. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship. īutler is best known for their books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), in which they challenge conventional notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. They are also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School (EGS). In 1993, Butler began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where they have served, beginning in 1998, as the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender studies writer whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. ![]()
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