Judith Butler The FBA (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and third wave feminist fields, strange and literary theories. Since 1993, he has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is now Professor Maxine Elliot at the Department of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory Program. He is also Chairman of Hannah Arendt at the European Graduate School.
Butler is best known for his book Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: In Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), where he challenges the conventional notion of gender and develop his theory of gender performance. This theory has a major influence on feminist and fanciful scholarship. His works are often implemented in film programs that emphasize gender studies and performativity in discourse.
Butler has actively supported lesbian and gay rights movements and has spoken on many contemporary political issues. In particular, he is a vocal critic of Zionism, Israeli politics and its effect on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, stressing that Israel is not and should not be considered to represent all Jews or Jewish opinions.
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Early life and education
Judith Butler was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to a family of Jewish-Hungarian and Jewish-Russian descent. Most of her maternal grandmother's family was killed in the Holocaust. As a child and a teenager, he attended Hebrew school and a special class on Jewish ethics, where he received his first "philosophical training". Butler stated in a 2010 interview with Haaretz that he started an ethics class at age 14 and that they were created as a form of punishment by his Hebrew schoolboy because he "talked too much in class". Butler also stated that he was "thrilled" by the idea of ​​this tutorial, and when asked what he wanted to learn in this special session, he answered with three questions that occupied him at the time: "Why is Spinoza ostracized from the synagogue? over Nazism? And how to understand existential theology, including Martin Buber's work? "
Butler attended Bennington College and then Yale University where he studied philosophy, accepting him B.A. in 1978 and his Ph.D. in 1984. He spent an academic year at the University of Heidelberg as Fulbright-Scholar. He taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. In 2002 he held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. In addition, she joins the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Visits Professor of Humanity in the spring semester of 2012, 2013 and 2014 with the option of remaining a full-time faculty member.
Butler serves on the editorial boards or academic journals advisory boards including JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics and Signs: Women's Journal in Culture and Society.
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Overview of main work
"Acting and Gender Constitution" (1988)
In this essay, Judith Butler proposed her theory of gender performativity, which would then be taken in 1990 throughout her work, Gender Trouble. He began by basing his theory on gender performance at the feminist phenomenology point of view. He suggested that both phenomenology and feminism set their theories in "life experiences". Furthermore, in comparing the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the feminist Simone de Beauvoir, Butler argues that both theories view the sexual body as an idea or historical situation; he accepted the idea of ​​"the difference between sex, as biological factuality, and gender, as cultural interpretations or signifiers of that factuality." The combination of these theories is crucial to finding Butler's view of "theatrical" or gender performative in society.
Butler argues that it is more valid to regard gender as a performance in which individual agents act. The performative element of his theory shows a social audience. For Butler, the "manuscript" of gender performance is transmitted easily to generations in the form of socially constructed "meaning": He states, "gender is not a radical choice... [Nor does it] be imposed or inscribed on the individual." Given the social nature of human beings, most actions are witnessed, reproduced, and internalized and thus take on the performative or theatrical qualities. With Butler's theory, gender is essentially a performative repetition of actions associated with men or women. Today, appropriate actions for men and women have been transmitted to produce a social atmosphere that both retains and legitimizes the apparently natural gender binaries. Consistent with his acceptance of his body as a historical idea, he points out that our concept of gender is seen as natural or innate because the body "becomes its gender through a series of actions that are updated, revised and consolidated over time".
Butler argues that gender performance itself creates gender. In addition, he compared gender performance with theater performance. He brings many similarities, including the idea of ​​each individual acting as their gender actor. However, it also highlights important differences between gender performance in reality and theater performances. He explains how the theater is much less threatening and does not produce the same fear that is often encountered by gender performances due to the fact that there is a clear distinction from reality in the theater.
Butler uses Sigmund Freud's idea of ​​how a person's identity is modeled in the normal way. He revised Freud's idea of ​​applying this concept to lesbianism, in which Freud says that lesbians modeled their behavior in men, who felt normal or ideal. Instead, he says that all genes work in this way of performativity and are representations of the idea of ​​internalized gender norms.
Gender Issues: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (1990)
Gender Trouble was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in multiple languages. Talking about the 1974 same John Waters movie The Difficulties of Women starring Drag queen Divine, Gender Trouble critically discusses the works of Freud, de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. This book has enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring an intellectual fanzine,
The essence of Butler's argument at Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality-a natural-looking coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in the male body-is culturally built through repetition stylish actions in time. These stylish body actions, in their repetition, establish the emergence of an essential and ontological "core" type of nucleus. This is the sense in which Butler theorized gender, along with sex and sexuality, as performative. The performance of gender, sex, and sexuality, however, is not a voluntary choice for Butler, which places the construction of a gendered, sexed subject, wants in what he calls, borrows from Foucault's Discipline and Punish, regulative sermons. This, also called the "understanding frame" or "disciplinary regime," decides in advance the possibility of sex, sex, and sexuality being socially allowed to appear as coherent or "natural." The regulative discourse includes disciplinary techniques which, by forcing subjects to take special actions, maintain appearances in the "core" gender subjects, sex and sexuality generated by the discourse itself.
An important part of Butler's argument about the role of sex in gender construction and "natural" or sometimes neglected sexuality. Butler explicitly challenges the biological accounts of binary sex, redefining the skinned body as he culturally built by regulative discourse. The existence of sex that is supposed to be a natural biological fact proves how deep the production in discourse is hidden. The skinned body, once defined as a "natural" fact and unquestionably, "is an alibi for the construction of gender and sexuality, inevitably more cultures in their appearance, which can be regarded as the expression or natural consequence of a more basic sex In Butler's account, it is on the basis of the natural binary construction of binary sex and heterosexuality as well as natural constructions.In this way, Butler claims that without criticism of sex produced by discourse, gender/gender differences as a feminist strategy to question construction the asymmetrically binary and heterosexual genders will be ineffective.
Thus, by pointing out the terms "gender" and "sex" as social and cultural constructs, Butler offers criticisms of both terms, although both have been used by feminists. Butler argues that feminism makes mistakes in trying to make "women" a separate and ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler says this approach reinforces binary views of gender relations because it allows two different categories: men and women. Butler believes that feminists should not try to define "women" and he also believes that feminists should "focus on providing an explanation of how power functions and shaping our understanding of womanhood not only in the wider society but also in feminist movements. Finally, Butler aims to break the link between sex and gender so that gender and desire can be "flexible, free-floating and not caused by other stable factors". The idea of ​​identity as free and flexible and gender as a performance, not the essence, is one of the foundations of Queer's theory.
"Felling of Imagination and Gender" (1990)
Judith Butler explores the production of identities such as "homosexual" and "heterosexual" and the nature of limiting identity categories. The identity category for her is the result of certain exceptions and concealments, and thus the place of the regulation. However, Butler also recognizes that the identity that is categorized is important for current political action. The important idea in this work is also that the forms of identity through repetition of actions or imitation and not because of a certain original identity that existed before the repetition. Imitating gives the illusion of continuity to generate identity. In the same way, the heterosexual identity, defined as ideal, requires constant "compulsive" repetition to protect the repetition of the created identity.
Body That Matter: On Discursive Limit "Sex" (1993)
Bodies That Matter is trying to clear up the reading and misread the performativity that sees the application of sex/gender as a daily choice. To do this, Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, utilizing Derrida's iterability theory, a form of citationality, to construct the theory of performativity in terms of iterability:
Performativity can not be understood beyond the iterability process, regular and restricted norms repetition. And this repetition is not done by the subject; This repetition is what allows the subject and is a temporal condition for the subject. This irritability implies that 'performance' is not a single 'action' or event, but ritualized production, repeated rituals under and through obstacles, under and through prohibiting and taboo powers, with the threat of ostracism and even control of death and imposing forms of production, but no, I will insist, define it fully in advance.
This concept is related to Butler's discussion of performativity. Iterability, in its incessant determination and persistence, it is appropriate that the aspect of performativity that makes the production of the sex, gender, and heterosexual subject possible, while also at the same time opens the subject up to the possibility of its incoherence and contradiction.
Exclusive Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997)
In Exclusive Speeches , Butler examines the subject of hate speech and censorship. He argues that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance.
Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after it has been declared so by the state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, acceptable discourse boundaries. In this connection, Butler criticized the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon's feminist law against pornography for his unquestioned acceptance of the power of the state to censor.
Spreading Foucault's argument from the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Butler claims that any censorship, legal or otherwise, is spreading the language he is trying to ban. As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual customs of Western Europe of the 19th century did nothing but strengthen the discourse of their sexuality seeking to control. Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that sensors are primitive to language, and that linguistics is a mere effect of the original sensor. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of true opposition discourse; "If speech depends on censorship, then the principle that may want to be challenged is at once the formative principle of an opposition speech."
Undoing Gender (2004)
Gender Undoing collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and intersex medical care for more general readers than many of his other books. Butler reviewed and refined his performance ideas and focused on the question of "abrogating the normative concept of sexual and gender life".
Butler discusses how gender is done without anyone noticing it, but says that it does not mean this performativity is "automatic or mechanical". He argues that we have a desire that does not come from our personality, but rather than social norms. The author also debates our notion of "human" and "less than human" and how culturally imposed ideas can prevent a person from having a "decent life" because his greatest concern is whether a person will be accepted if he or she is not. His desires are different from normality. He states that a person may feel the need to be recognized in order to live, but at the same time, the conditions that must be acknowledged make life "unbearable". The author proposes an interrogation of such conditions so that those who reject him may have more possibilities for life.
In his discussion of intersex, Butler discusses the case of David Reimer, a person whose sex is medically "transferred" from male to female after a failed circumcision at the age of eight months. Reimer was "made" by a female physician, but later in life identified as a "really" male, married and became stepfather to his three wife's children, and proceeded to tell his story at As He Made Nature: Son Man Raised as a Girl, whom he wrote with John Colapinto. Reimer committed suicide in 2004. Giving an Account of Yourself (2005)
In Giving an Account of Yourself , Butler develops ethics based on the opacity of the subject itself; in other words, the limits of self-knowledge. Especially borrowed from Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Laplanche, Adriana Cavarero and Emmanuel Levinas, Butler developed the theory of subject formation. He theorized the subject in relation to the social - a community of others and their norms - which are beyond the control of the subject formed, as precisely the very conditions of the subject's formation, the resources upon which the subject becomes recognizable to man, a grammatical "I" in the first place.
Butler accepts the claim that if the subject is unclear the limitations of his liability and free obligations are due to narrative restrictions, language prejudices and projections.
You may think that I am actually telling a story about a prehistoric subject, one that I have debated can not be told. There are two responses to this objection. (1) That no reconstruction of the final or sufficient narratives of prehistory speaks "I" does not mean we can not tell it; it just means that at a time when we are telling us to be speculative philosophers or fiction writers. (2) This prehistory never ceases to occur and, therefore, is not prehistoric in any chronological sense. This is not done with, over, passed down to the past, which then becomes part of the reconstruction of causal or self-narrative. Instead, the prehistory interrupted the story I had to give myself, made every story about myself partial and failed, and was, in a way, my failure to be fully responsible for my last, "irresponsible" action, one for which I may be forgiven simply because I can not do otherwise. This can not do otherwise is our general state (page 78).
Instead he argues for ethics based on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself. Any concept of responsibility that demands the full transparency of the self, a wholly responsible self, of course violates the opacity that marks the self-constitution it addresses. The scene of the address in which responsibility is activated is always the relationship between the different subjects for themselves and each other. The ethics that Butler is concerned about is one in which the self is responsible for knowing the limits of his knowledge, recognizing the limits of his capacity to give himself accountable to others, and respecting the boundaries as a human being in a symptom. To take seriously a person's evil into oneself in ethical considerations means then critically interrogating the social world in which a person becomes human in the first place and who remains exactly as one can not know about himself. In this way, Butler puts social and political criticism at the heart of ethical practice.
Reception
Butler's work has been influential in feminist and odd theories, cultural studies, and continental philosophy. But his contributions to various other disciplines - such as psychoanalysis, literature, film, and performance studies as well as visual arts - are also significant. His theory of gender performance and his notion of "strange criticism" not only alters gender awareness and strange identity in the academic world, but has shaped and mobilized various types of political activism, especially odd activism, worldwide. Butler's work has also entered contemporary debates on gender teaching, gay parenting and transgender depathologization. Before the papal election, Pope Benedict XVI wrote several pages that challenged Butler's argument about gender. In some countries, Butler became a symbol of the destruction of traditional gender roles for reactionary movements. This is especially true in France during anti-gay marriage protests. Bruno Perreau has pointed out that Butler is truly described as an "antichrist," both because of his gender and Jewish identity, the fear of minority politics and critical study expressed through the faulty body fantasies.
Some academics and political activists argue that Radical's departure from gender dichotomy/gender and his non-essentialist concept of gender - along with his insistence that power helps shape the subject - revolutionized feminist and bizarre praxis, thought, and study. Darin Barney from McGill University writes that:
Butler's work on gender, sex, sexuality, peculiarity, feminism, body, political speech and ethics has changed the way scholars around the world think, talk and write about identity, subjectivity, power and politics. It has also changed the lives of many people whose bodies, sex, sexuality and passions have made them subject to violence, isolation and oppression.
Other scholars are more critical. In 1998, Denis Dutton's journal Philosophy and Literature gave Butler the first prize in his fourth annual "Bad Writing Competition", which aims to "celebrate the bad writing of the saddest parts found in books - scientific books and articles. "The unconscious entries, published in the 1997 scientific journal Diacritics, go so:
The shift from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to build social relations in a relatively homologous way to a hegemonic view in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brings the problem of temporality into structural thinking, and marks a shift from the form of Althusserian theory which takes structural totality as a theoretical object to one in which the insight into the possibility of contingent structure inaugurates the conception of the updated hegemony as being tied to the contingent site and the strategy of rearticulation of power.
Some critics have accused Butler of being elitist because of his difficult prose style, while others claim he reduced gender to "discourse" or promote gender volunteer forms. Susan Bordo, for example, argues that Butler reduces gender to language, arguing that the body is a major part of gender, thus implicitly opposing Butler's conception of gender. A highly vocal critic has become a liberal feminist, Martha Nussbaum, who argues that Butler misreads JL Austin's idea of ​​performative speech, makes the wrong legal claims, seizes important sites of resistance by rejecting pre-cultural agents, and does not provide normative ethical theories for directs the Butler-supported subversive show. Finally, Nancy Fraser's critique of Butler is part of the famous exchange between the two theorists. Fraser argues that Butler's focus on performativeness keeps him away from "the ways of talking and thinking about ourselves everyday. [...] Why should we use selfish idioms?"
Butler responded to criticism from prose in his introduction to his 1999 book, Gender Trouble.
Recently, some critics - most prominently, Viviane Namaste - criticize Judith Butler's Gender Undoing for lacking emphasis on the intersexal aspects of gender-based violence. For example, Timothy Laurie notes that the use of phrases by Butler such as "gender politics" and "gender violence" in relation to attacks on transgender individuals in the United States can "explore the landscape filled with class and labor relations, racial urban stratification, and complex interactions between sexual identity, sexual practices and sex work ", and produce a" clean surface where the human 'fight is imaginable to play. "Nevertheless, both Namaste and Laurie recognize the importance of the important Butler contribution to the study of gender identity.
German feminist Alice Schwarzer speaks of Butler's "radical intellectual play" that will not change the way society classifies and treats a woman; Thus, by eliminating the identity of women and men Butler will abolish the discourse on sexism in a strange community. Schwarzer also accuses Butler of remaining silent about the oppression of women and homosexuals in the Islamic world, while ready to exercise his right to same-sex marriage in the United States; on the contrary, Butler will sweep by sweeping Islam, including Islamism, from critics.
Political activism
Much of Butler's early political activism centered on weird and feminist issues, and he served, for a period of time, as chairman of the board of the International Commission on Human Rights and the Lesbian Communists. Over the years, he has been particularly active in the gay and lesbian rights, feminist, and anti-war movements. He has also written and spoken on issues ranging from affirmative actions and gay marriages to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. Most recently, he was active in the Occupy movement and publicly declared support for the 2005 BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign version against Israel.
On September 7, 2006, Butler participated in a teaching organized faculty against the 2006 Lebanon War at the University of California, Berkeley. Another widely-publicized event occurred in June 2010, when Butler rejected the Civil Courage Award (Zivilcouragepreis) of the Christopher Street Parade (CSD) in Berlin, Germany at the awards ceremony. He cited racist comments from the organizers and the general failure of CSD organizations to distance themselves from racism in general and from anti-Muslim reasons for more specific war. Criticizing the commercialism of the event, he went on to name some of the groups he professed as strong opposing "homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and militarism".
In October 2011, Butler attended Occupy Wall Street and, referring to calls for clarification of the demands of the demonstrators, he said:
People ask, so what's the demand? What do these people demand for? Either they say there is no demand and make your critics confused, or they say that demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And impossible demands, they say, are impractical. If hope is an impossible request, then we demand the impossible - that the right to shelter, food and work is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible. If it is not possible to demand that those who benefit from the recession redistribute their wealth and stop their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible.
He is currently an executive member of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Faculty in the United States and the Jenin Theater in Palestine. He is also a member of the Jewish Sound advisory council for Peace.
Adorno Prize affair
When Butler received the 2012 Adorno Prize, the prize committee was attacked from the Israeli Ambassador to Germany Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, Ephraim Zuroff, and the German Central Council of Jews. They were angry at Butler's election because of his statement about Israel and specifically he "called for a boycott of Israel". Butler responded by saying that "he did not take the offensive from the German Jewish leaders personally". Instead, he writes, the attack was "directed against all those who are critical of Israel and its current policies".
In a letter to the Mondoweiss website, Butler asserted that he developed a strong ethical view on the basis of Jewish philosophical thought and that "openly untrue, unreasonable, and painful for anyone to argue that those who formulate criticism of the State of Israel are anti-Semites or, if Jews, hate themselves ".
Comments about Hamas and Hezbollah
Butler was criticized for the statements he made about Hamas and Hezbollah. He described them as "the progressive social movement, which is on the Left, which is part of the global Left". He is accused of defending "Hizbullah and Hamas as a progressive organization" and supporting their tactics.
Butler responds to these criticisms by stating that his statements about Hamas and Hezbollah are completely out of context and bad, if not deliberately, distorting his established view of nonviolence. He has repeatedly condemned the violence and non-democratic actions of these groups while clearly advocating a politics committed to nonviolence.
Butler explains the origin of his talk on Hamas and Hezbollah in the following ways:
I was asked by a member of an academic audience a few years ago whether I thought Hamas and Hezbollah were "left global" and I answered with two points. My first point is only descriptive: these political organizations define themselves as anti-imperialist, and anti-imperialism is one of the global leftist traits, so on that basis one can describe it as part of the global left. My second point is then critical: as with any group on the left, one has to decide whether one is for the group or against the group, and one needs to critically evaluate its position.
Comments on Black Life Matter
In a January 2015 interview with George Yancy of The New York Times, Butler discussed the Black Lives Matter movement. This dialogue relies heavily on his 2004 book Precious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence.
Personal life
Butler lives in Berkeley with his partner Wendy Brown and his son, Isaac.
Appreciation and award selected
Butler has had an appointment at Birkbeck, University of London (2009-).
- 2015: Selected as Fellow Correspondent of the English Academy
- 2014: Named as one of the top 11 Jewish gay and lesbian icons of PinkNews
- 2014: Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Friborg University
- 2013: Doctoral Literature, honoris causa, St. University Andrews
- 2013: Doctoral Literature, honoris causa, McGill University
- 2012: Theodor W. Adorno Award
- 2010: "25 Visionaries Who Changed Your World", Utne Reader
- 2008: Mellon Award for his exemplary contributions to scholarships in the field of humanity.
- 1999: Guggenheim Fellowship
Publications
All of Butler's books have been translated into different languages; The Gender Problem , itself, has been translated into twenty-seven different languages. In addition, he has co-authored and edited over a dozen volumes - most recently the Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013), co-written with Athena Athanasiou. Over the years he has also published many influential essays, interviews, and public presentations. Butler is considered by many to be "one of the most influential voices in contemporary political theory," and as the most read and influential gender theorist in the world.
The following is a partial list of Butler publications.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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