Life & Background
Butler was born in Cleveland in 1956 into a Jewish family of Hungarian and Russian descent, and began reading philosophy in the synagogue as a teenager, in what they have described as ethics tutorials arranged as a punishment. They studied at Bennington and then Yale, writing a doctorate on Hegelian desire in twentieth-century French philosophy, and spent a year in Heidelberg on a Fulbright. They have taught at Johns Hopkins and, since 1993, at the University of California, Berkeley. Gender Trouble, published in 1990, sold far beyond the academic audience it was written for and made them one of the most cited living theorists. They have written extensively on non-violence, mourning, war, and Israel–Palestine, positions that have drawn organised hostility, including effigy-burning at a protest in Brazil in 2017. Butler uses she and they pronouns.
Gender Trouble
Butler argues against the settled feminist distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender, in which gender is the cultural meaning laid over a natural body. If gender is constructed, they ask, why should sex escape construction — and what work is being done by the assumption of two stable sexes? Reading Beauvoir, Wittig, Kristeva, Lacan, and Foucault, they argue that gender has no inner essence that expression follows, and that it exists only through repeated acts: styles of dress, gesture, speech, and desire performed so consistently that they appear to express a prior identity. Gender is therefore performative rather than expressive. The final chapter turns to drag, not as a model to imitate but as a practice that exposes the imitative structure of all gender, and to the argument that the category of woman need not be stabilised for feminist politics to proceed.
Performativity is the concept most frequently misdescribed. Butler took the term from Austin's speech act theory and Derrida's reading of it, and it does not mean that gender is a costume freely chosen each morning — Bodies That Matter was written partly to correct that reading, insisting that the repetition is compelled, that it is enforced by what they call the heterosexual matrix, and that the body is not immaterial. The associated concept of gender melancholia develops Freud on mourning to explain how prohibited identifications are preserved rather than discarded. Criticism has come from several directions: Martha Nussbaum's attack on the prose and on what she saw as quietist politics, Nancy Fraser's argument about the neglect of material distribution, and materialist feminist objections that discursive construction cannot account for embodied experience.
Key Concepts
Why Butler Matters
Gender Trouble is the founding text of queer theory, and performativity has become one of the most widely used concepts across literary studies, drama, anthropology, and political theory. Butler's work supplies the standard theoretical apparatus for reading gender and sexuality in literary texts, and their later books on grief, vulnerability, and non-violence — Precarious Life, Frames of War — extend the method to war and to whose deaths are treated as grievable. Their exchanges with Nussbaum and Fraser are as examinable as the theory itself.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Subjects of Desire1987
- Gender Trouble1990
- Bodies That Matter1993
- Excitable Speech1997
- Undoing Gender2004
- Precarious Life2004
- Frames of War2009
- The Force of Non-Violence2020