Judith Butler
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removing mention of Susan Gubar, see talk; it might not be right to place this in the Gubar article at the moment, but that still does not mean that this is the proper place for it
{{Infobox_Philosopher|
| region = Western Philosophy
| era = [[20th-century philosophy|20th]] / [[21st-century philosophy]]
| color = #B0C4DE
<!-- Image and Caption -->
| image_name = Judith Butler.jpg
| image_caption =
| name = Judith Butler
| birth = {{birth date and age|1956|2|24}} <br /> [[Cleveland, Ohio]]
| school_tradition = [[Continental Philosophy]], [[Third-wave feminism|Third-Wave Feminism]], [[Critical Theory]], [[Queer Theory]], [[Postmodernism]], [[Post-structuralism]]
| main_interests = [[Feminist theory|Feminist Theory]], [[Political Philosophy]], [[Ethics]], [[Psychoanalysis]], [[Discourse]], [[Embodiment]], [[Human sexuality|Sexuality]], [[Jewish Philosophy]]
| notable_ideas = [[Gender|Sex and gender]] as [[social construction]], [[performativity]]
| influences = [[Michel Foucault]], [[Theodor Adorno]], [[J.L. Austin]], [[Luce Irigaray]], [[Gayle Rubin]], [[Monique Wittig]], [[Emmanuel Lévinas]], [[Jacques Derrida]], [[Louis Althusser]], [[Jacques Lacan]], [[Sigmund Freud]], [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel]], [[Simone de Beauvoir]], [[Claude Levi-Strauss]]
| influenced = [[Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick|Eve Sedgwick]], [[Michael Warner]], [[Judith Halberstam]], [[José Esteban Muñoz|José Muñoz]], [[Lauren Berlant]], [[Kate Bornstein]]
}}
'''Judith Butler''' (born [[February 24]], [[1956]]) is an [[United States|American]] [[post-structuralist]] philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of [[feminism]], [[queer theory]], [[political philosophy]], and [[ethics]]. She is the Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of [[Rhetoric]] and [[Comparative Literature]] at the [[University of California, Berkeley]].
Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from [[Yale University]] in 1984, and her dissertation was subsequently published as ''Subjects of Desire: [[Hegel]]ian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France''. In the late-1980s, between different teaching/research appointments (such as at the Humanities Center at [[Johns Hopkins University]]), she was involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western [[feminist theory]] to question the "presuppositional terms" of [[feminism]]. Her most recent work focuses on [[Jewish philosophy]], engaging in particular with "pre-[[Zionist]] criticisms of [[state violence]]."<ref>[http://rhetoric.berkeley.edu/faculty_bios/judith_butler.html Judith Butler's Faculty Biography, Department of Rhetoric, University of Berkley.]</ref><ref>Butler, Judith. "The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique. ''Wrestling with Zionism: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict''. Ed. Tony Kushner and Alisa Solonmon. New York: Grove, 2003. pp. 249-265.</ref>
== Major works ==
=== ''Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity'' (1990) ===
{{main|Gender Trouble}}
''[[Gender Trouble]]'' was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages {{Fact|date=May 2007}}. Alluding to the similarly named 1974 [[John Waters (filmmaker)|John Waters]] film ''[[Female Trouble]]'' starring the [[drag queen]] [[Divine (Glen Milstead)|Divine]],<ref>{{cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |authorlink=Judith Butler |title=Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity |origyear=1990 |year=1999 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York |pages=xxviii-xxix}}</ref> ''Gender Trouble'' critically discusses the works of [[Simone de Beauvoir]], [[Julia Kristeva]], [[Sigmund Freud]], [[Jacques Lacan]], [[Luce Irigaray]], [[Monique Wittig]], [[Jacques Derrida]], and, most significantly, [[Michel Foucault]]. The book has also enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring an intellectual fanzine, ''Judy!''.<ref>Larissa MacFarquhar, "Putting the Camp Back into Campus," ''[[Lingua Franca (magazine)|]]'' (September/October 1993); see also Judith Butler, "Decamping," ''Lingua Franca'' (November-December 1993).</ref>
The crux of Butler's argument in ''Gender Trouble'' is that the coherence of the categories of sex, [[sociology of gender|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. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, [[ontology|ontological]] "core" gender. This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as [[performative]]. The performance of gender, sex, and sexuality, however, is not a voluntary choice for Butler, who locates the construction of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject within what she calls, borrowing from [[Foucault]]’s ''[[Discipline and Punish]]'', "regulative [[discourse]]s." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," decide in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural." Regulative discourse includes within it [[Discipline and Punish#Discipline|disciplinary techniques]] which, by coercing subjects to perform specific stylized actions, maintain the appearance in those subjects of the "core" gender, sex and sexuality the discourse itself produces.<ref>Butler explicitly formulates her theory of [[performativity]] in the final pages of ''Gender Trouble'', specifically in the final section of her chapter "Subversive Bodily Acts" entitled "Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions" and elaborates performativity in relation to the question of political agency in her conclusion, "From Parody to Politics." See {{cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |authorlink=Judith Butler |title=Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity |origyear=1990 |year=1999 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York |pages=171-90}}</ref>
A significant yet sometimes overlooked part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of "natural" or coherent gender and sexuality. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse.<ref>For Butler's critique of biological accounts of sexual difference as a ruse for the cultural construction of "natural" sex, see {{cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |authorlink=Judith Butler |title=Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity |origyear=1990 |year=1999 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York | pages=135-41 |chapter=Concluding Unscientific Postscript}}</ref> The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a “natural” and unquestioned “fact,” is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, unavoidably more cultural in their appearance, which can purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of a more fundamental sex. On 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.<ref>For Butler's discussion of the performative co-construction of sex and gender see {{cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |authorlink=Judith Butler |title=Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity |origyear=1990 |year=1999 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York | pages=163-71, 177-8}} The signification of sex is also addressed in connection with [[Monique Wittig]] in the section "Monique Wittig: Bodily Disintegrations and Fictive Sex," pp. 141-63</ref> In this way, 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 and Lesbian Existence|compulsory heterosexuality]] will be ineffective.<ref>For Butler's problematization of the [[sex/gender distinction]] see {{cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |authorlink=Judith Butler |title=Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity |origyear=1990 |year=1999 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York | pages=9-11, 45-9}}</ref>
The concept of [[gender performativity]] is at the core of Butler's work. It extends beyond the doing of gender and can be understood as a full-fledged theory of subjectivity. Indeed, if her most recent books have shifted focus away from gender, they still treat performativity as theoretically central.
=== ''Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"'' (1993) ===
''[[Bodies That Matter]]'' seeks to clear up readings and misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.<ref>For example, {{cite journal |last=Jeffreys |first=Sheila |authorlink=Sheila Jeffreys |year=1994 |title=The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians: Sexuality in the Academy |journal=Women's Studies International Forum |volume=17 |issue=5 |pages=459–72 |doi=10.1016/0277-5395(94)00051-4}}</ref> To do this, Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of [[Derrida]]'s theory of iterability, a form of [[citationality]], to work out a theory of performativity in terms of iterability:
<blockquote>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.<ref>{{cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |authorlink=Judith Butler |title=Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" |year=1993 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York |pages=95}}</ref></blockquote>
Iterability, in its endless ''un''determinedness as to-be-determinedness, is thus precisely that aspect of performativity that makes the production of the "natural" sexed, gendered, heterosexual subject possible, while also and at the same time opening that subject up to the possibility of its incoherence and contestation.
=== ''Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative'' (1997) ===
{{main|Performativity#Judith Butler's perspective on performativity}}
In ''[[Excitable Speech]]'', Butler surveys the problems of [[hate speech]] and [[censorship]]. She argues 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. She develops a new conception of censorship’s complex workings, supplanting the myth of the independent subject who wields the power to censor with a theory of censorship as an effect of state power and, more primordially, as the condition of language and [[discourse]] itself.
Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. {{Fact|date=February 2007}} 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. Butler warns that such appeals to state power may backfire on those like MacKinnon who seek social change, in her case to end [[patriarchal]] [[oppression]], through legal reforms. She cites for example the [[R. A. V. v. City of St. Paul]] 1992 Supreme Court case, which overturned the conviction of a teenager for [[cross burning|burning a cross]] on the lawn of an African American family, in the name of the [[First Amendment to the United States Constitution|First Amendment]].{{Fact|date=February 2007}}
Deploying [[Foucault]]’s argument from ''[[The History of Sexuality|The History of Sexuality Vol. 1]]'', Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid.<ref>{{cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |authorlink=Judith Butler |title=Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative |year=1997 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York | pages=129-33}}</ref> As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality it sought to control.<ref>For example, {{cite book |last=Foucault |first=Michel |authorlink=Michel Foucault |others=Trans. Robert Hurley |title=The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol 1. |origyear=1976 |year=1990 |publisher=Vintage |location=New York | pages=23 |quote=A censorship of sex? There was installed [since the 17th century] rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex, capable of functioning and taking effect in its very economy.}}</ref> 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".<ref>{{cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |authorlink=Judith Butler |title=Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative |year=1997 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York | pages=140}}</ref>
Butler also questions the efficacy of censorship on the grounds that hate speech is context-dependent. Citing [[J.L. Austin]]'s concept of the [[performative utterance]], Butler notes that words’ ability to “do things” makes hate speech possible but also at the same time dependent on its specific embodied context. {{Fact|date=February 2007}} Austin’s claim that what a word “does,” its [[illocutionary force]], varies with the context in which it is uttered implies that it is impossible to adequately define the performative meanings of words, including hate, abstractly.{{Fact|date=February 2007}} On this basis, Butler rejects arguments like [[Richard Delgado]]’s which justify the censorship of certain specific words by claiming the use of those words constitutes hate speech in any context. In this way, Butler underlines the difficulty inherent in efforts to systematically identify hate speech.
=== ''Undoing Gender'' (2004) ===
''[[Undoing Gender]]'' collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex for a more general readership than many of her other books. Butler revisits and refines her notion of performativity, which is the focus of ''Gender Trouble''.
In her discussion of intersex, 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, and ultimately committed suicide.<ref>Butler discusses Reimer's case as part of her continued interrogation of those norms and discourses which decide in advance who counts as recognizably human. See, for example, {{cite journal |last=Butler |first=Judith |authorlink=Judith Butler |year=2001 |title=Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality |journal=GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies |volume=7 |issue=4 |pages=621–36 |doi=10.1215/10642684-7-4-621}}</ref>
=== ''Giving an Account of Oneself'' (2005) ===
In ''[[Giving an Account of Oneself]]'', Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself, the limits of self-knowledge. Borrowing from [[Theodor Adorno|Adorno]], [[Foucault]], [[Nietzsche]], [[Laplanche]] and [[Levinas]], among others, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject as a 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. The subject is therefore dispossessed of itself by another or others as the very condition of its being at all, and this process by which I become myself only in relation to others and therefore cannot own myself completely, this constitutive dispossession, is the opacity of the contemporary subject to itself, what I cannot know, possess, and master consciously about myself.
Butler then turns to the ethical question: If my narrative account of myself is necessarily incomplete, breaking down tellingly at the point precisely when "I" am called to elucidate the foundations of this "I", my genesis and ontology, what kind of ethical agent, or "I", am "I"? {{Fact|date=February 2007}} 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 casual 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 she argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself. {{Fact|date=February 2007}} 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. {{Fact|date=February 2007}} 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. {{Fact|date=February 2007}}
== Politics ==
In a [[London Review of Books]] article published in August 2003, Butler has identified herself as an [[anti-Zionist]] Jewish American who is concerned with the loss of [[academic freedom]] implicitly advocated by pro-Israeli groups.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n16/butl02_.html | title=No, it's not anti-semitic | author=Judith Butler | work=London Review of Books | date=21 | year=2003 |month=August | accessmonthday=April 5 | accessyear=2006}}</ref> She expounds upon her views on Zionism in a section of ''Precarious Life'' examining a debacle surrounding Harvard President [[Lawrence Summers]]. On September 7th, 2006, she partook in a faculty-organized [[teach-in]] at the University of California, Berkeley, scrutinizing the Israeli war on Lebanon during the summer.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.btiaw.org/ | title=Questioning the 'New Middle East:' War and Resistance in Lebanon | author=Judith Butler | work=Berkeley Teach-In Against War | accessmonthday=September 17 | accessyear=2006}}</ref>
== Reception ==
While Butler’s work, especially the notion of “gender performativity” is far from universally accepted as being an accurate or complete explanation of gender identity, it has been extremely influential in the field of gender studies, and in cultural studies, philosophy, and literary criticism. The extent of Butler’s influence may be approximated by referring to the website for the University of California, Irvine’s Critical Theory Institute, which hosts a list of references to Butler’s work that includes hundreds of titles. The list is not comprehensive, since new analyses of Butler’s work are still being written. <ref>http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/indiv/scctr/Wellek/butler/, accessed Feb 24, 2008.</ref>
Butler has been called "one of the superstars of '90s academia, with a devoted following of grad students nationwide"<ref>[http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm Judith Butler], ''www.theory.org.uk''</ref> "the most famous feminist philosopher in the United States", "the queer theorist par excellence", and "the most brilliantly eclectic theorist of sexuality in recent years"<ref name="Salih">Salih, Sara (2002). ''Judith Butler'', p.137. ISBN 0415215188. "Most famous" quoted from "Review", ''Subjects of Desire'' (1999). "Most brilliant" quoted from Jonathan Dollimore (1996: 533).</ref>.
"Lois McNay claims that Butler's work has influenced feminist understandings of gender identity (1999: 175)"<ref name="Salih"/>. More specifically, some theorists have built off Butler’s work and the idea of gender performativity in new directions. For example, Susan A. Speer and Jonathan Potter claim that it gives new insight in several areas, especially in the concept of heterosexism. However, although Speer and Potter find Butler’s work useful in this respect, they find her work too abstracted to be usefully applied to “real-life situations.” For this reason, they pair a reading of Butler with Discursive Psychology in order to extend Butler’s ideas to real-world scenarios.<ref>Speer, Susan A., and Jonathan Potter. "From Performatives to Practices." Talking Gender and Sexuality. Ed. Paul McIlvenny. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Company, 2002. 150-180.</ref>
Negative critical response to Butler’s work has generally fallen into two categories: criticisms of her writing style, and criticisms of the ideas she puts forth.
===Style===
[[Martha Nussbaum]] wrote an article in ''[[The New Republic]]'' titled "The Professor of Parody" criticizing Butler's writing for [[obscurantism]] and for its merely "verbal and symbolic politics." <ref>Nussbaum, Martha. [http://www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf "The Professor of Parody"], ''[[The New Republic]]'', 22 February 1999</ref>
[[Susan Bordo]] has criticized Butler for reducing gender to language. Bordo argues that the body is a major part of gender, thus implicitly opposing Butler’s conception of gender as performed. <ref> Hekman, Susan. “Material Bodies.” Body and Flesh: a Philosophical Reader. Ed. Donn Welton. Blackwell Publishing. 61-70. Accessed through Google Books on Feb 24, 2008.</ref>
In 1998, ''[[Philosophy and Literature]]'' admonished Butler with first prize in its Fourth Bad Writing Contest, for a sentence in the scholarly journal ''[[diacritics (journal)|diacritics]]''.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://aldaily.com/bwc.htm | title=Winners of the Fourth Bad Writing Contest (1998) | author=Philosophy and Literature | work=Press Release | accessmonthday=April 13 | accessyear=2006}}</ref> Following controversy, and perceptions of mean-spiritedness, over the "Bad Writing" award that [[Denis Dutton]] gave out under the auspices of his academic journal, Dutton discontinued the award in 1999.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.mobylives.com/LF_part_two.html | author=Dennis Loy Johnson | title=Who Killed Lingua Franca? | accessmonthday=April 14 | accessyear=2006}}</ref> Butler commented on the event in an interview,<ref>''JAC'', vol. XX, no 4, reproduced in ''The Judith Butler Reader'', Judith Butler and Sarah Salih (ed.), 2004</ref> and published a response entitled "A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back" in the pages of the ''[[New York Times]]''.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE5D61531F933A15750C0A96F958260 | title=A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back | author=Judith Butler | Work=The New York Times | accessmonthday=January 14 | accessyear=2007}}</ref>
Butler has responded to criticism of her writing’s accessibility, writing in 2004:
<blockquote>It’s not that I’m in favor of difficulty for difficulty’s sake; it’s that I think there is a lot in ordinary language and in received grammar that constrains our thinking – indeed, about what a person is, what a subject is, what sexuality is, what politics can be – and that I’m not sure we’re going to be able to struggle effectively against those constrains or work within them in a productive way unless we see the ways in which grammar is both producing and constraining our sense of what the world is.<ref name="ButlerReader">Butler, Judith. The Judith Butler Reader. Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., 2004. 327-8. ISBN 0631225943.</ref>
</blockquote>
Butler further argues that attacks on her writing style from those in the humanities are symptomatic of these critics’ doubts of their own importance or of the importance of the humanities in general to the academic world, writing:
<blockquote>Those intellectuals who speak in a rarefied way are being scapegoated, are being purged, are being denounced precisely because they represent a certain anxiety about everyone’s effect – that is, what effect are any of us having, and what effect can we have?<ref name="ButlerReader"/></blockquote>
===Ideas===
Others, like Peter Digeser, have argued that Butler’s idea of performativity is too pure to account for identity. Like others before him, Digeser doubts that pure performativity is possible, and argues that in viewing the gendered individual as purely performed, Butler ignores the gendered body, which Bordo has argued is extremely important. Digeser argues that neither an essentialist nor a performative notion of gender should be used in the political sphere, as both simplify gender too much.<ref>Diseger, Peter. "Performativity Trouble: Postmodern Feminism and Essential Subjects." Political Research Quarterly 47 (1994): 655-673. Accessed through JSTOR on Feb 24, 2008.</ref>
Butler, [[Nancy Fraser]], [[Seyla Benhabib]] and [[Drucilla Cornell]], participated in a discourse about each others’s work in 1995. Fraser argued that Butler’s focus on performativity has distanced her from “everyday ways of talking and thinking about ourselves … Why should we use such a self-distancing idiom?”<ref>Fraser, Nancy. “False Antitheses.” Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. Routledge. 67. Accessed through Google Books on Feb 24, 2008.</ref> Fraser argues that Butler needs to fully commit to her positions by way of justifying them and thus validating them, as this is the only way to achieve a political impact. Like Speer and Potter, Fraser also argues that Butler’s focus on language removes her from real-world issues and makes her work difficult to be applied to real-life situations. Fraser has also argued that homophobia is a result of cultural influences rather than economic, a position which Butler has argued directly against in an essay titled “Merely Cultural.”
Although Butler and Fraser disagree philosophically, the two are old friends who have entered into direct discourse several times in the past<ref>Kirby, op. cit. 140.</ref>, and Butler has stated that she views the difference of opinion between the two as “productive disagreement.”<ref>Butler, op. cit. 355.</ref>
== Books ==
* 2007: ''[[Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging]]'' (with [[Gayatri Spivak]])
* 2005: ''[[Giving An Account of Oneself]]''
* 2004: ''[[Undoing Gender]]''
* 2004: ''[[Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence]]''
* 2003: ''[[Women and Social Transformation]]'' (with [[Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim]] and [[Lidia Puigvert]])
* 2000: ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality|Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left]]'' (with [[Ernesto Laclau]] and [[Slavoj Žižek]])
* 2000: ''[[Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death]]''
* 1997: ''[[The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection]]''
* 1997: ''[[Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative]]''
* 1993: ''[[Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"]]''
* 1990: ''[[Gender Trouble]]'': ''Feminism and the Subversion of Identity''
* 1987: ''[[Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France]]''
== Honors ==
* Recipient of the 2004 [[Brudner Prize]] at Yale
* Elected a Member of the [[American Philosophical Society]] (2007)
== References ==
{{reflist|2}}
== See also ==
* [[List of deconstructionists]]
== Further reading ==
* ''Judith Butler: Live Theory'' by Vicki Kirby
* ''The Judith Butler Reader'' by Sara Salih
* ''Routledge Critical Thinkers: Judith Butler'' by Sara Salih
* Cheah, Pheng, "Mattering," ''Diacritics,'' Volume 26, Number 1, Spring 1996, pp. 108-139.
== External links ==
{{wikiquote}}
* [http://rhetoric.berkeley.edu/faculty_bios/judith_butler.html Berkeley Faculty Biography - Judith Butler]
* [http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2188&editorial_id=20101 Israel/Palestine and the Paradoxes of Academic Freedom] in [[Radical Philosophy]]
* [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1239949151693820357 Judith Butler on the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon]
* [http://www.alashrafia.com/english/butler.html Judith Butler's Significance for Islamic Studies]
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