Judith Butler
She argued that gender is not what you are but what you do, and that doing it differently is where freedom begins.
Butler's Gender Trouble, published in 1990, made one argument with long reverberations: gender is performative. This does not mean gender is a performance you could simply stop giving, but that it is produced through repeated acts (what you say, how you move, what you wear, what you do) and has no prior nature it expresses. Sex itself, she argued, is not the natural bedrock on which gender is culturally built; both are produced by the norms that regulate bodies. The implication was that because gender is made through repetition, it can be unmade, or made differently. The argument drew on Austin's philosophy of speech acts, Foucault's genealogy, and psychoanalytic theory. She has extended it since to questions of precarity, grievability, and the politics of mourning: asking which lives are considered lives worth protecting, and whose deaths count as deaths worth grieving.
Places
Ideas
Words
“Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act in the most theatrical sense.”
“Precarity is a shared condition, and politics is what we do in response to it.”
Works
Life & Moments
Gender Trouble published
Published in 1990, Gender Trouble challenged both feminist theory and cultural assumptions about sex and gender. Butler argued that neither sex nor gender are prior to culture: both are produced through the repetition of norms. The book became the founding text of queer theory and one of the most cited works in the humanities.
Influence
Influenced by
- Simone de Beauvoir
Butler took de Beauvoir's claim that 'one is not born but becomes a woman' further than de Beauvoir intended: not just gender roles but the categories of sex themselves are culturally constituted and performatively maintained.
- G.W.F. Hegel
Butler's first book was on the reception of Hegel's account of desire in twentieth-century France, and the idea that a subject comes into being through recognition by another runs through everything after it.
- Michel Foucault
Butler takes from Foucault the claim that power does not simply repress a subject who was already there but produces subjects, and applies it to gender, where the norm precedes and shapes the person who performs it.
- Jacques Derrida
Performativity depends on the thought that an act gets its force from being a repetition of prior acts, none of which is the original, which is the structure Derrida called iterability.
