Judith Butler Biography
The Cleveland born philosopher, Judith Pamela Butler, is well known for her political philosophy, ethics, and literary theory. Additionally, she is a gender theorist. She has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley since 1993. Pamela is a Maxine Elliot Professor for Comparative Literature and Program Critical Theory.
Also, she is the chair of the Hannah Arendt at the European graduate school. She also supports lesbian and gay rights movements. She often speaks out on various occasions about contemporary political issues and is a vocal critic of Zionism.
Judith Butler Education
She began learning philosophy at a Hebrew school. In this same school, she also learned Jewish Ethics among other topics as a punishment due to her talkative nature in class but she liked the classes despite that. She studied philosophy at Yale University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1984.
Judith Butler Career
Her earliest works were teaching at colleges and/or universities. Some of her previous lecturing positions were at the Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University. After these, she joined the University of California, Berkeley as a lecturer in 1993 where she has been teaching ever since.
She was a holder of the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in 2002. Additionally, she was part of the department of English and Comparative Literature at Colombia University in the spring semesters in 2012, 2013, and 2014. Also, she is part of several editorial boards of several academic journals, including JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics among others.
Judith Butler Age
Judith Pamela Butler was born on 24th February 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio. She celebrates her birthday every 24th of February of every year. Her birth sign is Pisces.
Judith Butler Family
Most of her maternal grandmother’s family died out in the Holocaust. She was born to parents consisting of Russian, Jewish and Hungarian ancestry. She is openly gay and is currently in a relationship with the American Political theorist Wendy L. Brown. They live together with their son Isaac in Berkeley, California.
Judith Butler Partner
She has a partner, Wendy Brown. The duo lives with one son, Isaac.
Judith Butler Body Measurements
- Height: Not Available
- Weight: Not Available
- Shoe Size: Not Available
- Body Shape: Average
- Hair Color: Platinum Blonde
- Eye Color: Not Available
Judith Butler Net Worth
Working as a philosopher, there is no doubt Judith Butler earns a good salary and has been able to accumulate good net worth. However, her exact net worth has not yet been revealed but the information will be updated as soon as it is available.
Judith Butler Philosophy
Performative Acts and Gender Constitution
The essay was released in 1988, where she proposes that gender is a performance. She differentiates gender and sex by stating that sex is a biological facticity and gender as the cultural interpretation or signification of sex. The essay revolves around gender and its negative impact on society drawing on facts and formulating theories on the topic. Her arguments revolve around the take of society on gender, bringing many similarities including the idea of each individual functioning as an actor of their gender. She even uses Sigmund Freud’s notion of how a person’s identity is modeled in terms of the normal.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
It is the first published in 1990 and selling over 100,000 copies internationally, has even inspired an intellectual fanzine, Judy! The book emphasizes that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence—is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. She shows her understanding of gender as performative and also challenges some biological accounts of binary sex. She criticizes the terms gender and sex as they have always been used by feminists.
Imitation and Gender Insubordination
She explores the upcoming of identities such as “homosexual and heterosexual and their limiting nature. Judith Butler openly accepts the importance of these identities but she also believes they are not original due to their repetition and imitation. Heterosexual identity, for example, which is set up as an ideal, requires constant, compulsive repetition if it is to be safeguarded.
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”
It clarifies the readings and supposed misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of gender as a daily choice. She uses Derrida’s theory of iterability in the form of citationality to further explain her intention. She links this concept to her discussion of performativity.
Excitable Speed: A Politics of the Performative
It was released in 1997 has Judith Butler surveying problems of hate speech and censorship. She states that censorship is difficult to evaluate but in some cases may be useful, while in others it is intolerable. Here, she lays claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or not, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid. She also argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities so as to leave the rights to define hate speech entirely to them and conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse.
Along with these publications, she has aired out her grievances with others like Undoing Gender in 2004, where she publicizes her reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people for a more general readership, and Giving an Account of Oneself in 2005 where she discusses the limits of self-knowledge with citations from Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Laplanche, Adriana Cavarero, and Emmanuel Levinas.
Judith Butler Books
- Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in twentieth-century France. (1999)
- Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. (2006)
- Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of “sex”. (1993)
- Feminist Contentions: a philosophical exchange. (1995)
- Excitable speech: the politics of the performative. (1997)
- The psychic life of power: theories in subjection. (1997)
- Antigone’s claim kinship between life and death. (2000)
- Contingency, hegemony, universality: contemporary dialogues on the left. (2000)
- Women & social transformation. (2003)
- Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. (2004)
- Undoing gender. (2004)
- Giving an account of oneself. (2005)
- Who sings the nation-state?: language, politics, belonging. (2007)
- Is critique secular?: blasphemy, injury, and free speech (2009)
- Frames of war: when is life grievable? (2009)
- The power of religion in the public sphere. (2011)
- The question of gender Joan W. Scott’s critical feminism. (2011)
- Parting ways: Jewishness and the critique of Zionism. (2012)
- Dispossession: the performative in the political. (2013)
- Senses of the subject. (2015)
- Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. (2015)
Frequent Asked Questions About Judith Butler
Who is Judith?
Judith Pamela Butler is one of American’s best-known and loved philosophers and gender theorists.
How old is Butler?
Judith Butler is 63 years as of 2019. She was born in 1956.
How tall is Judith?
Butler’s height is proportional to her weight.
Is Butler married?
Butler lives with her partner, Wendy Brown and a son, Isaac.
How much is Judith worth?
She earns a good salary to accumulate good net worth.
Where does Butler live?
Judith, Wendy, and Isaac reside in Berkely, United States.
Is Judith dead or alive?
Judith Pamela Butler is very much alive and in good health.
Where is Butler now?
Butler is a philosopher and gender theorist.