Rather, performativity refers to a set of inherited norms and collective actions that iterate what is and isn’t ‘normal’ male or female behaviour (i.e., how we dress or walk, for example). But performativity is not the same as performance we cannot simply choose to act like a woman or man by mimicking expected patterns of behaviour. Compulsory heterosexuality, Butler argues, is harmful because it enacts violence on anyone who does not naturally conform to its norms.īutler shows that gender is constructed through performativity and repetition (see 36.3. For Butler, second wave feminism too readily accepted the binary definition of gender, which essentialises the category of woman, and reproduces compulsory heterosexuality (see 36.2. Instead, Butler sets out to theorise a more inclusive feminism by tracing how the category of woman is produced, or constructed, in the first place. Butler echoed such concerns in their book, arguing that there are no essential qualities that define a person as belonging to a specific gender. By the 1980s, however, these movements were being challenged by others who felt excluded by their narrow definition of what it meant to be a woman, gay or lesbian, for example. Beginning in the 1960s, a wide range of political movements based on shared features of identity developed in response to social exclusion and discrimination (see Key Concept: Identity Politics). Butler is openly queer and lives with their partner, the political theorist Wendy Brown, in the San Francisco Bay Area.īutler is perhaps best known for Gender Trouble (1990), a deconstruction of a binary interpretation of gender. Butler is an advocate of non-violence and has been active in human rights organisations including the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and Jewish Voice for Peace ( ). Butler’s work has enjoyed widespread popularity outside of academia, but there has also been a violent backlash by right-wing critics of ‘gender ideology’. Butler also holds the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland ( ). In 1998, Butler was appointed Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where Butler still teaches today ( ). Throughout their academic career, Butler has taught at George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University. But Butler is best known for their pioneering work in queer theory (see Key Concept: Queer Theory), which questions conventional notions of gender and sex (see 36.2. Apart from German idealism, Butler’s philosophical training included phenomenology, Frankfurt School critical theory and, later, a turn towards poststructuralism ( ). In Heidelberg, Butler studied Hegel and German idealism (see Key Concept: transcendental idealism in Chapter 29 on Immanuel Kant) under Dieter Heinrich and the famous German philosopher of hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer. In 1979, Butler received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Heidelberg University. After graduating from high school, Butler attended Bennington College, a liberal arts college in Vermont, before enrolling at Yale University where they received BA (1978), MA (1982) and PhD (1984) in Philosophy ( ). Judith Butler was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in a Jewish family.
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