Judith Butler

In the essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" (Performative Acts), Judith Butler proposes that gender is performative. The essay draws on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the feminism of Simone de Beauvoir, noting that both thinkers grounded their theories in "lived experience" and viewed the sexual body as a historical idea or situation.[22] Butler distinguishes "between sex, as biological facticity, and gender, as the cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity."[22]

Butler argues that gender is best perceived as performative, which suggests that it has a social audience. It also suggests that women's performances are compelled and enforced by historical social practice.

For Butler, the "script" of gender performance is effortlessly transmitted generation to generation in the form of socially established "meanings.” They state, "gender is not a radical choice ... [nor is it] imposed or inscribed upon the individual".[22] Given the social nature of human beings, most actions are witnessed, reproduced, and internalized and thus take on a performative or theatric quality. According to Butler's theory, gender is essentially a performative repetition of acts associated with male or female. Currently, the actions appropriate for men and women have been transmitted to reproduce a social atmosphere that both maintains and legitimizes a seemingly natural gender binary.[22] Consistently with Butler's acceptance of the body as a historical idea, Performative Acts suggests that our concept of gender is seen as natural or innate because the body "becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time".[22]

In Performative Acts, Butler argues that the performance of gender itself creates gender. The essay compares the performativity of gender to performance in the theater, noting such similarities as the idea of each individual functioning as an actor of their gender. However, Butler highlights a critical difference between gender performance in reality and theater performances: because there is a clear distinction from reality in the theater, a theater performance does not produce the same fear in an actor that gender performances often encounter in real life.

Butler uses Sigmund Freud's notion of how a person's identity is modeled in terms of the normal. Butler revises Freud's notion of this concept's applicability to lesbianism, where Freud says that lesbians are modeling their behavior on men, the perceived normal or ideal. Butler instead says that all gender works in this way of performativity and a representation of an internalized notion of gender norms.[23]

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally, in multiple languages.[24] The book's title alludes to the 1974 John Waters film Female Trouble, which stars the drag queen Divine.[25] Gender Trouble discusses the works of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. The book has even inspired an intellectual fanzine, Judy![26]

The crux of Butler's argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies—is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. Although the repeated, stylized bodily acts establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender, Butler understands gender, along with sex and sexuality, to be performative. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex.[27] The performance of gender is not voluntary, in Butler's opinion, and they believe the gendered, sexed, desiring subject must be constructed within what they call, borrowing from Foucault's Discipline and Punish, "regulative discourses." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," determine in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural". Regulative discourse includes disciplinary techniques that coerce the stylized actions and thereby maintain the appearance of "core" gender, sex and sexuality.[28]

The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a natural fact, is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, which then purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of sex. In Butler's account, it is on the basis of the construction of natural binary sex that binary gender and heterosexuality are likewise constructed as natural.[29] Butler claims that without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective.[30]

Butler offers a critique of the terms gender and sex as they have been used by feminists.[31] Butler argues that feminism made a mistake in trying to make "women" a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler writes that this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations. Butler believes that feminists should not try to define "women" and they also believe that feminists should "focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement."[32] Finally, Butler aims to break the supposed links between sex and gender so that gender and desire can be "flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors". The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as a performance, not an essence, is one of the foundations of queer theory.

Judith Butler explores the production of identities such as homosexual and heterosexual and the limiting nature of identity categories. An identity category for them is a result of certain exclusions and concealments, and thus a site of regulation. Butler acknowledges, however, that categorized identities are important for political action at the present time. Butler believes that identity forms through repetition or imitation and is not original. Imitation fosters the illusion of continuity. Heterosexual identity, which is set up as an ideal, requires constant, compulsive repetition if it is to be safeguarded.[33]

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" seeks to clear up readings and supposed misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.[34] Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, which is a form of citationality:

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.[35]

In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Butler surveys the problems of hate speech and censorship. They argue that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and that in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance.[36]

Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state's power to censor.[37]

Deploying Foucault's argument from the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid.[38] As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th-century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality they sought to control.[39] Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic "I" is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech".[40]

Undoing Gender collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people for a more general readership than many of their other books. Butler revisits and refines their notion of performativity and focuses on the question of undoing "restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life".

Butler discusses how gender is performed without one being conscious of it, but says that it does not mean this performativity is "automatic or mechanical". They argue that we have desires that do not originate from our personhood, but rather, from social norms. The writer also debates our notions of "human" and "less-than-human" and how these culturally imposed ideas can keep one from having a "viable life" as the biggest concerns are usually about whether a person will be accepted if his or her desires differ from normality. Butler states that one may feel the need of being recognized in order to live, but that at the same time, the conditions to be recognized make life "unlivable". The writer proposes an interrogation of such conditions so that people who resist them may have more possibilities of living.[41]

In Butler's discussion of intersex issues and people, Butler addresses the case of David Reimer, a person whose sex was medically "reassigned" from male to female after a botched circumcision at eight months of age. Reimer was "made" female by doctors, but later in life identified as "really" male, married and became a stepfather to his wife's three children, and went on to tell his story in As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, which he wrote with John Colapinto. Reimer died by suicide in 2004.[42]

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself; in other words, the limits of self-knowledge. Primarily borrowing from Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Laplanche, Adriana Cavarero and Emmanuel Levinas, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject. Butler theorizes the subject in relation to the social – a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms, as precisely the very condition of that subject's formation, the resources by which the subject becomes recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in the first place.

Butler accepts the claim that if the subject is opaque to itself the limitations of its free ethical responsibility and obligations are due to the limits of narrative, presuppositions of language and projection.

You may think that I am in fact telling a story about the prehistory of the subject, one that I have been arguing cannot be told. There are two responses to this objection. (1) That there is no final or adequate narrative reconstruction of the prehistory of the speaking "I" does not mean we cannot narrate it; it only means that at the moment when we narrate we become speculative philosophers or fiction writers. (2) This prehistory has never stopped happening and, as such, is not a prehistory in any chronological sense. It is not done with, over, relegated to a past, which then becomes part of a causal or narrative reconstruction of the self. On the contrary, that prehistory interrupts the story I have to give of myself, makes every account of myself partial and failed, and constitutes, in a way, my failure to be fully accountable for my actions, my final "irresponsibility," one for which I may be forgiven only because I could not do otherwise. This not being able to do otherwise is our common predicament (page 78).

Instead Butler argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself. Any concept of responsibility which demands the full transparency of the self to itself, an entirely accountable self, necessarily does violence to the opacity which marks the constitution of the self it addresses. The scene of address by which responsibility is enabled is always already a relation between subjects who are variably opaque to themselves and to each other. The ethics that Butler envisions is therefore one in which the responsible self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes the limits of its capacity to give an account of itself to others, and respects those limits as symptomatically human. To take seriously one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation means then to critically interrogate the social world in which one comes to be human in the first place and which remains precisely that which one cannot know about oneself. In this way, Butler locates social and political critique at the core of ethical practice.[43][44]

When Butler received the 2012 Adorno Prize, the prize committee came under attack from Israel's Ambassador to Germany Yakov Hadas-Handelsman; the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff;[70] and the German Central Council of Jews. They were upset at Butler's selection because of Butler's remarks about Israel and specifically their "calls for a boycott against Israel".[71] Butler responded saying that "[Butler] did not take attacks from German Jewish leaders personally".[72] Rather, they wrote, the attacks are "directed against everyone who is critical against Israel and its current policies".[72]

In a letter to the Mondoweiss website, Butler asserted that they developed strong ethical views on the basis of Jewish philosophical thought and that it is "blatantly untrue, absurd, and painful for anyone to argue that those who formulate a criticism of the State of Israel is anti-Semitic or, if Jewish, self-hating".[68]

Butler was criticized for statements they had made about Hamas and Hezbollah. Butler was accused of describing them as "social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left."[73] They were accused of defending "Hezbollah and Hamas as progressive organizations" and supporting their tactics.[74][75]

Butler responded to these criticisms by stating that their remarks on Hamas and Hezbollah were taken completely out of context and, in so doing, their established views on non-violence were contradicted and misrepresented. Butler describes the origin of their remarks on Hamas and Hezbollah in the following way:

I was asked by a member of an academic audience a few years ago whether I thought Hamas and Hezbollah belonged to "the global left" and I replied with two points. My first point was merely descriptive: those political organizations define themselves as anti-imperialist, and anti-imperialism is one characteristic of the global left, so on that basis one could describe them as part of the global left. My second point was then critical: as with any group on the left, one has to decide whether one is for that group or against that group, and one needs to critically evaluate their stand.[68]

In a January 2015 interview with George Yancy of The New York Times, Butler discussed the Black Lives Matter movement. They said:

What is implied by this statement [Black Lives Matter], a statement that should be obviously true, but apparently is not? If black lives do not matter, then they are not really regarded as lives, since a life is supposed to matter. So what we see is that some lives matter more than others, that some lives matter so much that they need to be protected at all costs, and that other lives matter less, or not at all. And when that becomes the situation, then the lives that do not matter so much, or do not matter at all, can be killed or lost, can be exposed to conditions of destitution, and there is no concern, or even worse, that is regarded as the way it is supposed to be...When people engage in concerted actions across racial lines to build communities based on equality, to defend the rights of those who are disproportionately imperiled to have a chance to live without the fear of dying quite suddenly at the hands of the police. There are many ways to do this, in the street, the office, the home, and in the media. Only through such an ever-growing cross-racial struggle against racism can we begin to achieve a sense of all the lives that really do matter.

The dialogue draws heavily on their 2004 book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.[76]

On May 11, 2018, Butler led a group of scholars in writing a letter to New York University following the sexual harassment suit filed by a former NYU graduate student against his advisor Avital Ronell. The signatories acknowledged not having had access to the confidential findings of the investigation that followed the Title IX complaint against Ronell. Nonetheless, they accused the complainant of waging a "malicious campaign" against Ronell. The signatories also wrote that the presumed "malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare" for a highly regarded scholar. "If she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties, the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed."[77] Butler, the chief signatory, invoked their title as President Elect of the Modern Language Association. James J. Marino, a professor at Cleveland State University and a member of the MLA, started a petition to demand Butler's resignation or removal from their post. He argued that "Protesting against one instance of punishment is only a means to the larger end of preserving senior faculty's privilege of impunity. ... [Butler] was standing up for an old, corrupt, and long-standing way of doing business. The time for doing business that way is over. We should never look back."[78] Some three months later, Butler apologized to the MLA for the letter. "I acknowledged that I should not have allowed the MLA affiliation to go forward with my name," Butler wrote to the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I expressed regret to the MLA officers and staff, and my colleagues accepted my apology. I extend that same apology to MLA members."[79]

• Butler, Judith (1999) [1987]. Subjects of desire: Hegelian reflections in twentieth-century France. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231159982. [Their doctoral dissertation.]
• Butler, Judith (2006) [1990]. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415389556.
• Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of "sex". New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415903653.
• Butler, Judith; Benhabib, Seyla; Fraser, Nancy; Cornell, Drucilla (1995). Feminist contentions: a philosophical exchange. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415910866.
• Butler, Judith (1997). Excitable speech: a politics of the performative. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415915878.
• Butler, Judith (1997). The psychic life of power: theories in subjection. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804728126.
• Butler, Judith (2000). Antigone's claim kinship between life and death. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231518048.
• Butler, Judith; Laclau, Ernesto; Žižek, Slavoj (2000). Contingency, hegemony, universality: contemporary dialogues on the left. London: Verso. ISBN 9781859842782.
• Butler, Judith; Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth; Puigvert, Lídia (2003). Women & social transformation. New York: P. Lang. ISBN 9780820467085.
• Butler, Judith (2004). Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. London New York: Verso. ISBN 9781844675449.
• Butler, Judith (2004). Undoing gender. New York/London: Routledge. ISBN 9780203499627.
• Butler, Judith (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. ISBN 9780823246779.
• Butler, Judith; Spivak, Gayatri (2007). Who sings the nation-state?: language, politics, belonging. London New York: Seagull Books. ISBN 9781905422579.
• Butler, Judith; Asad, Talal; Brown, Wendy; Mahmood, Saba (2009). Is critique secular?: blasphemy, injury, and free speech. Berkeley, California: Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California Distributed by University of California Press. ISBN 9780982329412.
• Butler, Judith (2009). Frames of war: when is life grievable?. London New York: Verso. ISBN 9781844673339.
• Butler, Judith; Habermas, Jürgen; Taylor, Charles; West, Cornel (2011). The power of religion in the public sphere. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9781283008921.
• Butler, Judith; Weed, Elizabeth (2011). The question of gender Joan W. Scott's critical feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253001535.
• Butler, Judith (2012). Parting ways: Jewishness and the critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231517959.
• Butler, Judith; Athanasiou, Athena (2013). Dispossession: the performative in the political. Cambridge, UK Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. ISBN 9780745653815.
• Butler, Judith (2015). Senses of the subject. New York: Fordham University Press. ISBN 9780823264674.
• Butler, Judith (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674967755.
• Butler, Judith (2020). The force of nonviolence. New York: Penguin Random House. ISBN 9781788732765.

• Butler, Judith (1982), "Lesbian S & M: the politics of dis-illusion", in Linden, Robin Ruth (ed.), Against sadomasochism: a radical feminist analysis, East Palo Alto, California: Frog in the Well, ISBN 9780960362837.
• Butler, Judith (1990), "The pleasures of repetition", in Glick, Robert A.; Bone, Stanley (eds.), Pleasure beyond the pleasure principle: the role of affect in motivation, development, and adaptation, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300047936.
• Butler, Judith (1991), "Imitation and gender insubordination", in Fuss, Diana (ed.), Inside/out: lesbian theories, gay theories, New York: Routledge, ISBN 9780415902373.
• Butler, Judith (1993), "Kierkegaard's speculative despair", in Solomon, Robert C.; Higgins, Kathleen M. (eds.), The age of German idealism, Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume VI, London New York: Routledge, pp. 363–395, ISBN 9780415308786.
• Butler, Judith (1997), "Imitation and gender insubordination", in Nicholson, Linda (ed.), The second wave: a reader in feminist theory, New York: Routledge, pp. 300–316, ISBN 9780415917612.
• Butler, Judith (1997), "Gender is burning: questions of appropriation and subversion", in McClintock, Anne; Mufti, Aamir; Shohat, Ella (eds.), Dangerous liaisons: gender, nation, and postcolonial perspectives, Minnesota, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 381–395, ISBN 9780816626496.
• Butler, Judith (2001), "Sexual difference as a question of ethics", in Doyle, Laura (ed.), Bodies of resistance: new phenomenologies of politics, agency, and culture, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, ISBN 9780810118478.
• Butler, Judith (2001), "Appearances aside", in Post, Robert (ed.), Prejudicial appearances: the logic of American antidiscrimination law, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, pp. 73–84, ISBN 9780822327134.
• Butler, Judith (2005), "Subjects of sex/gender/desire", in Cudd, Ann; Andreasen, Robin O. (eds.), Feminist theory: a philosophical anthology, Oxford, UK Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 145–153, ISBN 9781405116619.
• Butler, Judith (2009), "Ronell as gay scientist", in Davis, Diane (ed.), Reading Ronell, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ISBN 9780252076473. A collection of essays on the work of Avital Ronell.
• Blanchet, Nassia; Blanchet, Reginald (April 3, 2010). "Interview with Judith Butler". Hurly-Burly: The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis. 3.
• Butler, Judith (2011), "Lecture notes", in Ronell, Avital; Joubert, Joseph (eds.), Georges Perros (Issue 983 of Collection Europe), Paris: Europe, ISBN 9782351500385. Details.
• Butler, Judith; Hark, Sabine (2018), "Defamation and the Grammar of Harsh Words", in Sweetapple, Christopher (ed.), The Queer Intersectional in Contemporary Germany, Applied Sexology, Psychosocial-Verlag, pp. 203–207, doi:10.30820/9783837974447, ISBN 978383797444-7, ISSN 2367-2420[98]