Continental · born 1956 · living
Judith Butler
American philosopher at Berkeley, theorist of gender performativity
Butler argued that gender is not an inner essence that behaviour expresses but a performance repeated under social norms, which produces the appearance of a natural sex; norms can be subverted by repeating them differently.
Life and thought
Judith Butler (born 1956) grew up in a Jewish family in Cleveland, studied philosophy at Yale and wrote a doctorate on the reception of Hegel in twentieth-century France. Gender Trouble (1990) made Butler one of the most widely cited theorists of the late twentieth century. After teaching at Johns Hopkins, Butler moved to the University of California, Berkeley, and has also written on violence, mourning, Jewish ethics and the politics of protest.
Butler asks whether gender is something we are or something we do. Gender Trouble argues that there is no inner gender identity that our behaviour expresses; gender is performative, produced by repeated acts, gestures and styles under social norms, and the repetition creates the appearance of a natural core, even of a natural binary of sex. Because norms must be repeated constantly, they can be repeated differently: drag, for example, exposes gender as imitation. Bodies That Matter answered critics by asking how norms shape what counts as a body. The work became foundational for queer theory and remains contested.