Judith Butler

Judith Butler

Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School, UC Berkeley

An older person with short gray hair, wearing a dark blazer, light blue shirt, and a blue and gray scarf, poses against a plain light background.

Judith Butler is a post-structuralist philosopher and queer theorist. They are most famous for their notion of gender performativity, but their work ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, mourning and war.

They have received countless awards for their teaching and scholarship, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Rockefeller fellowship, Yale's Brudner Prize, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.

Their books include "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity," "Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex," "Undoing Gender," "Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?,” and “What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology.”

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The discourse of homosexuality as it becomes more popular makes it more possible for people to become gay or lesbian—but it doesn’t produce homosexuals, says Butler.
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Nobody is born one gender or the other, says the philosopher. “We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or […]