American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler has contributed to political philosophy, ethics, third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory.
Starting in 1998, Butler has been Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Additionally, they hold the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School.
Their books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993) challenge conventional notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. Feminist and queer scholarship have been greatly influenced by this theory.
In this instalment of repsychl’s ‘Notes From’ series, we present a collection of quotes from their most notable works.
“We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.”
“The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.”
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
“We must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are.”
Undoing Gender
“That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility.”
Undoing Gender
“There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender… identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”
Gender Trouble
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