Who is Judith Butler: Born on the 24th

February, 1956, Cleveland, Ohio

Butler identifies herself as an anti-Zionist
Jewish American. She came out as a lesbian
at the age of 14.
She earned her PhD in Philosophy from Yale
University in 1984, same place she got her
BA. Currently she is Maxine Elliot professor
of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at
University of California, Berkley.
The most common subject associated with
Butler is queer theory, but she has also
written on subjects like language, political
philosophy, Jewish philosophy and
psychoanalysis.
Butler was a member of a guerrilla theatre
group called LIPS , which she says she
enjoyed because it stood for nothing.
In 2004 she received the Brudner Prize at
Yale.

Juridical notions of power appear to regulate

political life in purely negative termsthat
is, through the limitation, prohibition,
regulation, control, and even protection of
individuals related to that political structure
through the contingent and retractable
operation of choice. In such cases, an
uncritical appeal to such a system for the
emancipation of women will be clearly selfdefeating.(ibid:376)

Gender Trouble: 1990 book by

philosopher Judith Butler. Influential in
academic feminism and queer theory, it is
credited with creating the notion of gender
performativity. It is considered to be one of
the canonical texts of queer theory
and postmodern poststructural feminism

Criticism: An initial criticism on queer theory

is that precisely "queer" does not refer to
any specific sexual status or gender object
choice.

Women as a subject of Feminism: Butler

begins Gender Trouble with an attack on one
of the central assumptions of feminist
theory : the supposition that there exists an
Identity and a subject that requires
representation in politics and language.
For Butler, "women" and "woman" are
fraught categories, complicated by class ,
ethnicity, sexuality, and other facets of
Identity.
Foucault points out that juridical systems of
power produces the subjects they
subsequently come to represent.
(Butler,1990:pp,376)

By conforming to a requirement of
representational politics that feminism
articulate a stable subject, feminism thus
opens itself to charges of gross
misrepresentation.(ibid,378)
Perhaps, paradoxically, representation will
be shown to make sense for feminism only
when the subject of women is nowhere
presumed.(ibid,379)

Example: Halperin (1995) allows that

straight persons may be "queer," which
some believe, robs gays and lesbians of
the distinctiveness of what causes them
to be marginalized. It desexualizes
identity, when the issue is precisely
about a sexual identity (Jagose, 1996).

Since queer theory refuses any reference to

standard ideas of normality, cannot make
crucial distinctions.

Example, queer theorists usually argue

that one of the advantages of the term
"queer" is that it includes transsexuals,
sado-masochists, and other marginalized
sexualities.

Typically, critics of queer theory are

concerned that the approach obscures or

glosses altogether the material conditions

that underpin discourse.

Tim Edwards(1998) argues that queer

theory extrapolates too broadly from
textual analysis in undertaking an
examination of the social.

Adam Green(2002) argues that queer theory

ignores the social and institutional conditions
within which lesbians and gays live.
Example, queer theory dismantles social
contingency in some cases (homosexual
subject positions) while recuperating social
contingency in others (racialized subject
positions).