Judith Butler

Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American feminist, queer philosopher, and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, and the fields of feminist and queer theory, academic freedom, and literary theory. Butler has held academic appointments at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University where they received tenure in 1992 before joining the faculty in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. There they became the Maxine Elliot Professor in 1998, holding faculty appointments in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory which they cofounded in 2007. They founded the International Consortium of Critical Theory, funded by the Mellon Foundation, in 2015. They also hold the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School (EGS). Butler is best known for the books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), in which they challenge conventional, heteronormative notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship. Butler has also spoken and written on war, non-violence, ethics, public mourning, democratic theory and other contemporary political questions, including the Palestinian struggles and the limits of Zionism. They have also spoken internationally in support of LGBTQIA rights and against anti-gender ideology.

Early life and education Judith Butler was born on February 24, 1956, in Cleveland, Ohio, to a family of Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent. Most of their maternal grandmother's family was murdered in the Holocaust. Butler's parents were practicing Reform Jews. Their mother was raised Orthodox, eventually becoming Conservative and then Reform, while their father was raised Reform. As a child and teenager, Butler attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics, where they received their "first training in philosophy". Butler stated in a 2010 interview with Haaretz that they began the ethics classes at the age of 14 as a form of punishment by Butler's Hebrew school's rabbi because they were "too talkative in class" and often accused of clowning. Butler said they were "thrilled" by the idea of these tutorials. When asked what they wanted to study in these special sessions, Butler responded with three questions preoccupying them at the time: "Why was Spinoza excommunicated from the synagogue? Could German Idealism be held accountable for Nazism? And how was one to understand existential theology, including the work of Martin Buber?" Butler attended Bennington College before transferring to Yale University, where they studied philosophy and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1978 and a PhD in 1984 with the dissertation Recovery and Invention: The Projects of Desire in Hegel, Kojève, Hyppolite and Sartre. Their studies fell primarily under the traditions of German idealism and phenomenology, and they spent one academic year at Heidelberg University as a Fulbright Scholar in 1979. After receiving their PhD, Butler revised their doctoral dissertation to produce their first book, entitled Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (1987). Butler went on to teach at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. In 2002, they held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. In addition, they joined the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Visiting Professor of the Humanities in the spring semesters of 2012, 2013 and 2014 with the option of remaining as full-time faculty. Butler serves on the editorial or advisory board of several academic journals, including Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

Overview of major works

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