Judith Butler

Bio: Judith Butler is an academic researcher from University of California, Berkeley. The author has contributed to research in topics: Feminism & Performative utterance. The author has an hindex of 68, co-authored 228 publications receiving 68959 citations. Previous affiliations of Judith Butler include University of Chicago & Yale University.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Bodies that matter : on the discursive limits of sex

Abstract: Preface Acknowledgements Part 1: 1. Bodies that Matter 2. The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary 3. Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex 4. Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion Part 2: 5. 'Dangerous Crossing': Willa Cather's Masculine Names 6. Queering, Passing: Nella Larsen Rewrites Psychoanalysis 7. Arguing with the Real 8. Critically Queer. Notes. Index

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Abstract: Written after September 11, 2001, in response to the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that have prevailed since then, Judith Butler critiques the use of violence and argues for a response in which violence might be minimized, and interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. Following the expressions of public mourning post-September 11, Butler asks why it's acceptable, even necessary to grieve some lives, while others are not valued or are even incomprehensible as lives at all. Questions of sovereignty, patriotism and censorship are all examined, especially in light of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Finally she investigates the way in which any criticism of the Israeli state is automatically labelled anti-semitic, thus rendering all criticism of Israel a political taboo in the US and the UK. She counters that we have a responsibility to speak out against both Israeli injustices and anti-semitism, and argues against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate.

Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative

Abstract: With the same intellectual courage with which she addressed issues of gender, Judith Butler turns her attention to speech and conduct in contemporary political life, looking at several efforts to target speech as conduct that has become subject to political debate and regulation. Reviewing hate speech regulations, anti-pornography arguments, and recent controversies about gay self-declaration in the military, Judith Butler asks whether and how language acts in each of these cultural sites.

Performative Acts and Gender Constitution : An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory

Abstract: This chapter draws from theatrical, anthropological, and philosophical discourses, but mainly phenomenology, to show that what is called gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. Feminist theory has often been critical of naturalistic explanations of sex and sexuality that assume that the meaning of women’s social existence can be derived from some fact of their physiology. For both Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, the body is understood to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities, a complicated process of appropriation, which any phenomenological theory of constitution needs to describe. In order to describe the gendered body, a phenomenological theory of constitution requires an expansion of the conventional view of acts to mean both that which constitutes meaning and through which meaning is performed or enacted. The feminist appropriation of the phenomenological theory of constitution might employ the notion of an act in a richly ambiguous sense.

The Complexity of Intersectionality

Abstract: Since critics first allegedthat feminism claimed tospeak universally for all women, feminist researchers havebeen acutely aware ofthe limitations of genderas a single analyticalcategory. In fact, feministsare perhaps alone in the academy in theextent to which theyhave embraced intersectionality – the relationshipsamong multiple dimensions andmodalities of social relations and subject formations – as itselfa central category ofanalysis. One could evensay that intersectionality isthe most important theoreticalcontribution that women’s studies,in conjunction with relatedfields, has made sofar.1

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

Abstract: Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity. In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

Abstract: L anguage has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on “matter” do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them. Rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of “fact” (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here). Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter. What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented? How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture? How does one even go about inquiring after the material conditions that have led us to such a brute reversal of naturalist beliefs when materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility?

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Abstract: Evolutionary psychology is one of many biologically informed approaches to the study of human behavior. Along with cognitive psychologists, evolutionary psychologists propose that much, if not all, of our behavior can be explained by appeal to internal psychological mechanisms. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations—products of natural selection—that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive and reproduce. To understand the central claims of evolutionary psychology we require an understanding of some key concepts in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Philosophers are interested in evolutionary psychology for a number of reasons. For philosophers of science —mostly philosophers of biology—evolutionary psychology provides a critical target. There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise. For philosophers of mind and cognitive science evolutionary psychology has been a source of empirical hypotheses about cognitive architecture and specific components of that architecture. Philosophers of mind are also critical of evolutionary psychology but their criticisms are not as all-encompassing as those presented by philosophers of biology. Evolutionary psychology is also invoked by philosophers interested in moral psychology both as a source of empirical hypotheses and as a critical target.