Judith Butler

Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.) is an American academic whose theories of the performative nature of gender and sex have been influential within Francocentric philosophy, cultural theory, queer theory, and some schools of philosophical feminism from the late 20th century.

Butler’s father was a dentist and their mother an advocate for fair housing. (Butler’s pronouns are they/them.) After attending Bennington College, they studied philosophy at Yale University, receiving B.A. (1978), M.A. (1982), and Ph.D. (1984) degrees. They taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California, Berkeley, where they were appointed Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature in 1998. They also served as Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Butler’s first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), a revised version of their doctoral dissertation, was a discussion of the concept of desire as it figures in G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and its subsequent interpretations by various 20th-century French philosophers.

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In their best-known work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), and its sequel, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), Butler built upon the familiar cultural-theoretic assumption that gender is socially constructed (the result of socialization, broadly conceived) rather than innate and that conventional notions of gender and sexuality serve to perpetuate the traditional domination of women by men and to justify the oppression of homosexuals and transgender persons.

One of Butler’s innovations was to suggest that gender is constituted by action and speech—by behavior in which gendered traits and dispositions are exhibited or acted out. In particular, gender is not an underlying essence or nature of which gendered behavior is the product; it is a series of acts whose constant repetition creates the illusion that an underlying nature exists. Gender, according to Butler, “is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” They stressed, however, that individuals do not exist prior to or independently of the genders they “perform”: “gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed.” Indeed, “the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed.” Individual identity (the subject) is itself performatively constituted. It follows that individuals do not “choose” their genders and cannot assume or discard or radically alter them at will simply by behaving (or not behaving) in certain ways. At the same time, small deviations from established patterns of gendered behavior are possible and indeed inevitable, and it is through such occasional variations that the socially constructed character of gender is revealed.

Butler contended, somewhat paradoxically, that not only gender but sex itself—the fact of being biologically male or female—is “to some degree” a performative social construct. Sex is performatively constructed in the sense that it represents an essentially arbitrary distinction between individuals that is drawn (at or before birth) and later reinforced through speech acts such as (originally) “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” In heterosexist cultures, the repeated performance of the distinction serves (among other things) to impose a norm of sexual desire based on an artificial association between biological sex and gender (the “law of heterosexual coherence”), thereby sustaining a system of “compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality” (the “heterosexual matrix”).

In Gender Trouble, Butler questioned the validity of much feminist political theorizing by suggesting that the subject whose oppression those theories attempted to explain—“women”—is an exclusionary construct that “achieves stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix.” Their suspicion of the category led them to doubt the wisdom of conventional political activism aimed at protecting women’s rights and interests. They emphasized instead the subversive destabilization of “women” and other categories through consciously deviant gendered behavior that would expose the artificiality of conventional gender roles and the arbitrariness of traditional correspondences between gender, sex, and sexuality. The most-overt examples of such “gender parody” involve cross-dressing, especially drag (see transvestism). According to Butler:

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Part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the [drag] performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender.…In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity.

Butler’s Gender Trouble was one of the founding texts of queer theory, and their work continued to inform much debate within cultural theory, especially in the United States, in the early 21st century. It also attracted significant criticism, however, for both its substance and its style. Even sympathetic readers, for example, worried that Butler’s view of the subject as performatively constituted left no room for a coherent account of individual agency. Others complained that Butler’s conception of politics as parody was impoverished and self-indulgent, amounting to a kind of moral quietism. Perhaps the most widely voiced criticism concerned their dense, jargon-laden prose and their nonlinear style of argument, both of which were viewed by some readers as rhetorical devices serving to conceal a paucity of original ideas. Butler argued in response that radical ideas are often best expressed in writing that challenges conventional standards of lucidity, grammar, and “common sense.”

Butler’s other works, many of which expanded their critical theory and performativity ideas from issues of gender into wider matters of political thought, include Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1996), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020), What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022), and Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024)