THE RELEVANT QUEER: Judith Butler, Philosopher and Theorist

“I would say that I’m a feminist theorist before I’m a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist.”

TRQ: Judith Butler, Born February 24, 1956

Philosopher and theorist Judith Butler, who has reshaped current feminist, cultural and queer theory through her work on performative gender and sex, was born in Cleveland, Ohio.

“When I was twelve, I was interviewed by a doctoral candidate in education and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I either wanted to be a philosopher or a clown, and I understood then, I think, that much depended on whether or not I found the world worth philosophising about, and what the price of seriousness might be.” — Judith Butler

Unsurprisingly, Butler’s academic career is marked with distinction. She started at Bennington, because “it seemed to be a place where, as a young queer kid, I would be okay in 1974… I knew that there were other people there who were at least minimally bisexual.” Next she attended Yale University. She earned a B.A. (1978), M.A. (1982), and Ph.D. (1984).

Butler has taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University. In 1988, At the University of California, Berkeley, Butler was appointed Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature. At the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, she has served as Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy.

In her books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), Butler argues that society dominates women, homosexuals and transgender persons through perpetuating certain understandings of gender and sexuality. Gender Trouble serves as one of the foundational texts of queer theory.

“I think we won’t be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don’t understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.” — Judith Butler

In general, Butler argues that the performance of domination, and repeating these dominating acts, re-establishes social understandings of gender and sexuality. These social understandings shape the behaviours of society, including both people who dominate, and people who are dominated. Theoretically, people behave what it means to be queer, homosexual, feminine, and masculine. Butler even suggests that being biologically male or female is somewhat a performative social construct.

“We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it’s a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.” — Judith Butler

Butler has carried her theory into considering the definition of human, the value of human life and death. She has investigated post-9/11 War on Terror in terms of rhetoric, and critiqued police brutality. Currently she is collaborating with psychologist Ken Corbett on an illustrated version of Gender Trouble, aimed for children.

Butler and her partner Wendy Brown, a political-science professor at Berkeley, have a son, Isaac.

About the Authors

Troy Wise is currently a PhD student at UAL Central St Martins and teaches fashion and graphic design at London College of Contemporary Arts. His background is in marketing and is founder and co-editor of Image Amplified. He lives in, and is continually fascinated by, the city of London.

Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central St Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries. He currently holds two MA’s and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co-editor at Image Amplified since its start, he lives in London, is fascinated by history and is motivated by continuing to learn and explore.

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Sources:

Britannica

The Cut

Jewish Virtual Library