Prof.

Judith Butler
(1956 - )

Department of Comparative
Literature and the Program of
Critical Theory at the
University of California,
Berkeley
 Judith Butler: academic life

• Studied Philosophy, receiving her B.A. in 1978 from

Bennington College and her Ph.D. in 1984 from Yale
University.

• Structural anthropologist, specializes and uses

psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, third wave
feminist and queer scholarship.

Famous for her concept of

PERFORMATIVITY of OUR IDENTITIES
the
CONSTRUCTION of GENDERED IDENTITIES.
 Published works
• 1990: Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of
Identity (PhD thesis)
• 1993: Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
These book have emerged as founding texts in
queer theory and are adopted as an argument for
understanding gender as a performance.
• 1997: The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection
• 2004: Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning
• 2004: Undoing Gender
• 2000: Antigone’s Claim: Kinship, Aberration, and
Psychoanalysis.
Gender Trouble

•Butler’s most popular work:

gender and sexuality are
performative.

• Or gender behaviour is
culturally constructed.

• We have created an idea of what

is biological from the gender we
have constructed.
Bodies That Matter
• Takes forward the debates of Gender
Trouble.
• Discusses the performativity of
gender as involuntary.
• And how the body and gender are
affected by heterosexual hegemony
(classification of the Normal and
Abnormal).
• The construction of gender is not
something the individual chooses, and
it’s not something that we are
conscious of happening.
• [Naturalized] Binary gender can only
exist through the exclusion as without
this exclusion: the need for a
separation between masculinity and
femininity.
Undoing Gender
• Collection of essays concerned with
the question- What it would mean to
undo the conceptions of gender.
• The aspects of gender regulations
the question that- Have regulations
themselves created gendered
subjects.
• Re-questioning the idea of gender
which exclusively means masculine
and feminine.
• Highlighting the point that those
genders that do not fit within the
norm are as much a part of the
perceived gendered norms.
• This work uncovers contemporary
debates of individual gender identity.
 Undoing Gender
• Gender always comes from a source that is elsewhere
and directed toward “I” constituted in a sociality…
• This un does the “I” who is supposed to be or bear
this constitution this undoing is part of the very
meaning and comprehensibility of the personal “I”.
•If “I” claim to have a sexuality, then it would seem
that a sexuality is there for “me” to call my own, to
possess as an attribute.

BUT, what if sexuality is the means by which I am dispossessed?

•Butler calls this gender-identity disorder which is to

deem the person as having a stigmatised abnormality,
overriding the [Naturalized] Binary gender.
 Judith Butler: Concepts
• Butler’s work responds to and engages with classic
questions of ontology (the study of being),
epistemology (the study of knowing) and philosophy of
language.
• Explore the ways that social reality is not a given but is
continually created as an illusion “through
language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social
sign”.

• Performativity is designated by the ways that linguistic

constructions create our reality in general through
the speech acts we participate in everyday.
 Judith Butler: Concepts
• Performativity is a discursive practice that enacts or
produces which it names.

• The act of speaking, makes the individual a ‘linguistic

occasion’ incorporate that in reality through
enacting the “spoken” with our bodies
[gestures produced with body positions, speech
acts, reflective processes and other performative
behavior].

• The interpretation of acts and gestures in reality are

a social construction.

Butler uncovers the paradoxes and complexities, in relation to

masculinity and femininity in the formation of the gendered
subject.
• Third-Wave Feminism: The feminist activity beginning in
the 1990’s, concerned with diversity, fair representation of
women in the media, standards of beauty, as well as legal
issues like abortion and sexual harassment.

About understanding Butler’s concept of GENDER

“I didn’t exactly lose a lot of sleep over this, but I wasn’t
proud of it either, if only because I’m of a mind that one
should never be proud of not knowing something. Whether
you agree with the theories put forth in Gender Trouble or
not is your business. But you should at least know enough
about them to understand why you do or don’t agree with
them, right? That seems pretty reasonable , right.”
https://www.themarysue.com/judith-butler-explained-with-cats /
body-gender-construction