Judith Butler

It’s the birthday of the philosopher and critic Judith Butler, (books by this author) born on this day in Cleveland, Ohio (1956). When she was a teenager, she went down in her basement to smoke cigarettes, and one day she found her mother’s college textbooks — books by Benedict de Spinoza and Søren Kierkegaard — and she was fascinated. Then she started reading Jewish philosophy, because she had such bad behavior problems that she was forced to take a private tutorial with her rabbi, who introduced her to Jewish thinkers. So when she went to college, she chose to study philosophy, and from there moved into fields like queer theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies. And she went on to write many books, including the popular Gender Trouble (1990), where she argued that we “perform” our gender. WA

She has been called "one of the superstars of '90s academia" and "the most famous feminist philosopher in the United States" and "the most brilliantly eclectic theorist of sexuality in recent years." It's a name well known to grad students in the humanities across the English-speaking world: Judith Butler, (books by this author) born in Cleveland, Ohio (1956).

She's best known for a book published 20 years ago, called Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). It's used in gender studies classes all over the world now, and it helped provide the foundation for the academic discipline of queer theory. The argument she makes draws, she says, "upon Simone de Beauvoir's claim that 'one is not born, but rather becomes a woman.'" In the book, she critiques the works of theorists like Foucault and Freud and Derrida, and she "deconstructs" gender and sex.

She argues, among other things, that the feminist movement had been wrong to try to classify "women" all together as a group of people sharing similar traits, that doing this just reinforced a binary approach to gender that limited people's options — when a person could choose from a spectrum of gender identifications. Ultimately, she argues that we "perform" our gender.

She currently teaches Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkeley. Her work is known for being really hard to understand. She once wrote this sentence: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

But she's also composed sentences like: "Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact."

And, "I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic." WA