Judith Butler

8 Key excerpts on "Judith Butler"

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  The Žižek Dictionary

  • Rex Butler, Rex Butler(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  BUTLER, JUDITH

  J udith Butler (b.1956) is an American philosopher and political theorist well known for her early role in shaping the field of queer theory and for defining the anti-identitarian turn in feminist thought. Butler and Žižek’s intellectual conversation spans nearly two decades, and includes their collaboration with Ernesto Laclau on Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Butler teaches rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

  Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) is frequently cited as one of the most influential books of the 1990s. There she proposed the theory of performativity to intervene in the ongoing feminist debate over whether sexual and gender identities are either biologically or symbolically given. Instead, Butler posits the notion that sex and gender are performative – that is, the effect of the repeated citation of a set of symbolic norms. Drawing on Foucault’s assertion that power produces its own resistances, Butler stresses the subversive potential of those performances that exceed their disciplinary production, including parodic and non-normative gender and sexual acts such as drag and lesbian sex. For her, political revolt inheres in attaining social recognition for this proliferation of subjectivities that always exceed the symbolic law of which they are the by-product.

  It is on the question of the failure of the symbolic law fully to define the subject’s identity that Butler and Žižek have entered into a collegial debate, evidence of which has appeared in chapters of Butler’s follow-up to Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), and Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999), and their collaborative Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. The debate centres upon how each understands “the negativity at the heart of identity” and the relationship of this negativity, or gap, to hegemony and political contestation (CHU

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  Judith Butler and Political Theory

  Troubling Politics

  • Samuel Chambers, Terrell Carver(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Judith Butler and Political Theory

  Over the past 25 years the work of Judith Butler has had an extraordinary impact on numerous disciplines and interdisciplinary projects across the humanities and social sciences. She is self-described as wanting to trouble the most basic categories of human identity (such as gender, sex and sexuality) and to engage with the most troubling political issues of our time (such as the ‘war on terror’, hate speech and recourse to rights). This original study is the first to take a thematic approach to Butler as a political thinker. Starting with an explanation of her terms of analysis, Judith Butler and Political Theory develops Butler’s theory of the political through an exploration of her politics of troubling given categories and approaches. By developing concepts such as normative violence and subversion and by elaborating her critique of heteronormativity, this book moves deftly between Butler’s earliest and most famous writings on gender and her more recent interventions in post-9/11 politics. It explores her notorious deconstruction of the subject and supposed negation of political agency, and concludes that her work demonstrates a commitment to a radical vision of democracy troubled, but not constrained, by political theory itself.

  This book, along with its companion volume, Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics, marks an intellectual event for political theory, with major implications for feminism, women’s studies, gender studies, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies, queer theory and anyone with a critical interest in contemporary American ‘great power’ politics.

  Samuel A.Chambers is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Swansea University, where he teaches political theory and cultural politics. He writes broadly in contemporary thought, including work on language, culture, and the politics of gender and sexuality.

  Terrell Carver

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  Key Thinkers on Space and Place

  • Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  10      Judith Butler

  BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT

  Judith Butler was born in 1956. She attended Bennington College and then Yale University, where she received her BA and PhD in Philosophy (1984). She taught at Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins universities before becoming Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Butler has written extensively on questions of identity politics, gender, and sexuality, and is largely considered the originator of modern queer theory, although she herself has resisted this label for her work (see Gauntlett, 2002). Her work has critiqued traditional feminist theory for remaining within the confines of a male/female binary and argued that gendered subjectivity needs to be understood as a socially constituted and context dependent fluid performance. Her key contributions include Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies that Matter (1993), Excitable Speech (1997), the collection Undoing Gender (2004a) and Frames of War (2009) among other publications. The latter demonstrates an increasing focus in her work on questions of violence, especially the relationship between Zionism and oppression, in the context of ‘the war on terror’.

  Although Judith Butler herself has very little to say about space or place her ideas about performativity and subject formation have been very influential for a critical geography ‘concerned to denaturalize taken-for-granted social practices’ (Gregson and Rose, 2000: 434). First, Butler’s theorisation of gender has reshaped geographers’ understandings of identities/bodies and their spatialities. Second, her notion of performativity has been recast to theorise the concept of space. Third, her work has influenced critical geographers’ engagement with non-representational theory. Fourth, her conceptualisation of performativity has upset feminist methodological debates about reflexivity and positionality.

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  Morality, Ethics and Responsibility in Organization and Management

  • Robert McMurray, Alison Pullen(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 Judith Butler Theorist and political activist Nancy Harding

  Judith Butler, a hugely influential but also controversial theorist, is a philosopher whose writings are not often found on the bookshelves labelled ‘philosophy’. Her job title is ‘Professor of Comparative Literature’, but her work on literature is a very small part of her oeuvre. An avowed feminist, her early, major books Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter are seminal within queer theory.1 What is in no doubt is that she is one of the most important theorists in feminist and gender studies and her influence extends across disciplines, contributing not only to feminist, gender or queer accounts in those disciplines, but to new ways of thinking through and theorizing some major issues for academia in the 21st century. These include, for example, what form of left-wing politics might emerge to combat the rise of far-right extremism; who can and cannot be classed as ‘human’ and therefore disposable or protected; and whose lives are made precarious by the actions of governments?

  Butler’s work has provoked significant interest in management and organization studies, both through its influence on feminist or gender theories of work but also because her thesis of performativity (whose meaning will be unfolded in the next section) offers ways of understanding management, organizations and work more generally. Sometimes inadequate attention has been paid to the nuances of this influential theory, perhaps not surprisingly because her earlier works in particular are very difficult to absorb even after several readings. It could be tempting, after struggling with her early work, to ignore her later publications. This would be wrong because her account of performativity has developed. This chapter tracks those changes, showing how an increasingly sophisticated but more accessible account of performativity has evolved in her writing. Butler’s more recent work focused on developing a new radical politics through a feminist ethics of precarity and relationality and continues to build on her account of performativity. This chapter barely touches the surface of Butler’s influence in management and organization studies to date due to space constraints; rather it will look to the future and how, through tracking Butler’s evolving thought, possibilities for a new politics of working lives may be developed.

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  Judith Butler and Organization Theory

  • Melissa Tyler(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction

  Judith Butler is perhaps the most widely cited contemporary feminist philosopher. Although her work emanates from the United States, she holds a number of international academic posts; her writing has global resonance and has been translated into at least twenty languages. It draws from and speaks to a range of empirical ‘problems’, philosophical and political, contemporary and historical, and engages a complex and rich variety of theoretical traditions. A recent article in the New York Times magazine cited her performative theory of gender as recognizable to an audience well beyond academia, albeit in a popularized form (Fischer, 2016).1 As Vicki Kirby (2006) has noted, Butler’s writing is a valuable illustration of how to read critically and generously, unfettered by disciplinary boundaries whilst at the same time being painstakingly respectful of intellectual traditions and dialogues. The latter has often led to criticisms of Butler’s work as being overly and unnecessarily complex,2 yet it is a significant scholarly template, one that connects academic and activist concerns, and which shows what is possible when we write and think about mutual recognition3

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  Judith Butler and Education

  • Deborah Youdell(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  woman–White–middle class–queer–able-bodied–British – created intelligibility, and how with that intelligibility came privilege and/or restrictions/exclusions (Youdell 2003). In 2006, when Judith Butler’s popularity in critical, largely feminist and queer education circles was booming, the British Journal of Sociology of Education published a special issue on her influence in education. This marked the recognition of the importance of Butler’s ideas for education studies. Similarly, I have since written a number of introductory chapters for Education and Cultural Politics Handbooks that examine the contribution of Butler’s work to contemporary social and cultural analysis (Youdell 2010a, 2010b, 2014). More recently Butler has turned her attention to contemporary global politics and the ways in which these constitute the citizen and human, developing ethical responses to the ‘War on Terror’, and thinking with collaborators including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ernesto Laclau and Athena Athanasiou about how collective performative acts might be worked as a politics. There is so far a lesser amount of work in education that engages with this part of Butler’s scholarship, although my 2011 book School Trouble was expressly concerned with how we use the performative as an education politics and Laura Teague’s paper that closes this collection takes this up to think about political pedagogies. Staying with Butler In the last decade, as a tide of work in gender and education has turned its attention to the post-human/new-materialist work of Rosi Braidotti (2013) and others influenced by particular readings of Deleuze and Foucault, Judith Butler has gone somewhat out of favour amongst education feminists

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  Modern Criticism and Theory

  A Reader

  • Nigel Wood, David Lodge(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  38 Judith Butler DOI: 10.4324/9781315835488-38 Introductory note Judith Butler (1956–) is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, at Berkeley. Her work on representations of gender has altered the contemporary debate about the role of sexual behaviour in contemporary life, and has created links between social history, psychology and the semantics of desire. She first came to international notice with her first full-length study, Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity (1990), wherein she questioned the essential characteristics of gender difference and the biological imperatives that cause us to act in a gendered way. The ‘Trouble’ of the title is that impulse to question and deny received opinions and judgements, running the risk of short-term opposition or isolation, but in the long term actually laying claim to a truer context for discussion and social development. Male or Female identities are the sum of certain repetitive stylized acts; far from these deriving directly from alternative biological constitutions, they appear to be instinctual because of the pervasive mediation of what Michel Foucault called ‘regulative discourses’ (see his Surveiller et Punir: naissance de la prison [1975; trans. as Discipline and Punish; the birth of the prison [1977]), at times legal, but more usually social in origin. Even anatomical differences enter the world of discourse as soon as they are represented in the media, and certain taboos or desires are constructed around them. Daily life is increasingly based on the creation of consumer desire, and our bodies are clothed and even altered in line with these expectations

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  Management, Organizations and Contemporary Social Theory

  • Stewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha, Stewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  13   Judith Butler and performativity Kate Kenny

  Chapter objectives

  This chapter discusses:

  • How Butler’s early work examining discourses of gender and sexuality gave rise to her theories of identification and subjection
  • Butler’s practical relevance as an influential thinker and a social activist
  • Affective recognition and its location relative to other post-structural and psychoanalytic thinking, including that of Foucault and Lacan
  • An overview of this approach including its relevance for debates about the relation between self and other, and agency and structure, within organization studies
  • The concept of performativity and its implications for studies of networks of power and discourse
  • The effects of subjection, including dynamics of exclusion and violence

  Examples from organization studies are provided to illustrate each of these points.

  Introduction

  Unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence (Judith Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly ).

  I felt overwhelmed with pride and gratitude that someone with the integrity to be so out as a lesbian was taking the leadership that the rest of us needed, not just emotionally but practically. It had been a long time since I felt real leadership before me that I could rely on. I experienced a great feeling of relief to see and hear that other voice, that other face literally creating a context one day, for me, whereas the day before there was none (Sarah Schulman [artist-activist and Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York]).

  Judith Butler holds the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School and is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a philosopher and one of the most challenging thinkers of our time. The rich and nuanced theory of identification and subjection she develops encompasses an understanding of the productive, positive side of these processes along with their darker, more hurtful aspects. At the same time her account emphasizes the inescapable unpredictability of the ways in which we identify with dominant aspects of our social world, including our organizations.

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