Judith Butler

Based on Wikipedia: Judith Butler

The Troublemaker Who Changed How We Think About Gender

At fourteen years old, Judith Butler was so disruptive in Hebrew school that the rabbi sentenced them to private tutorials in Jewish ethics. Most teenagers would have dreaded the punishment. Butler was thrilled.

When asked what they wanted to study, the young Butler came prepared with three questions that had been keeping them up at night: Why was Spinoza excommunicated from the synagogue? Could German Idealism be held accountable for Nazism? And how should we understand existential theology, including the work of Martin Buber?

These weren't casual curiosities. They were the first signs of a mind that would go on to fundamentally reshape how scholars, activists, and ordinary people understand gender, identity, and what it means to perform the everyday act of being human.

From Cleveland to the Academy

Butler was born on February 24, 1956, in Cleveland, Ohio, to a family of Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent. The shadow of history loomed large over their upbringing—most of their maternal grandmother's family had been murdered in the Shoah, the Hebrew term for the Holocaust. Their parents were practicing Reform Jews, though their mother had made a journey of her own, starting Orthodox, becoming Conservative, and eventually settling into Reform Judaism.

After those fateful ethics tutorials, Butler's philosophical path was set. They attended Bennington College before transferring to Yale University, where they studied philosophy. In 1978, they earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, and six years later, in 1984, they completed their doctorate with a dissertation examining the concept of desire in the works of Hegel, Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre—four philosophers grappling with questions of consciousness, recognition, and human longing.

Between their undergraduate and graduate work, Butler spent a year at Heidelberg University in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar, immersing themselves in the traditions of German idealism and phenomenology that would shape their thinking. Phenomenology, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a branch of philosophy that focuses on the structures of conscious experience—how things appear to us and how we make meaning of those appearances.

After Yale, Butler taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before landing at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. There they became the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory, a position they've held for decades. They also hold the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School in Switzerland—an apt appointment, given that Arendt herself was a philosopher deeply concerned with questions of power, identity, and what makes us human.

The Big Idea: Gender as Performance

Here's the question that made Butler famous: What if gender isn't something you are, but something you do?

This might sound obvious now, in an era when conversations about gender identity have become mainstream. But when Butler articulated this idea in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was revolutionary. The dominant view—even among feminists—was that sex (your biology) and gender (your social role) were distinct but relatively stable categories. You were born male or female, and society shaped you into a man or a woman. The connection might be culturally constructed, but the categories themselves were real and fixed.

Butler questioned all of it.

In their 1988 essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," Butler proposed that gender is performative. This doesn't mean gender is a theatrical performance—like putting on a costume that you can take off at the end of the day. Rather, it means that gender is constituted through repeated acts, gestures, movements, and styles of behavior that create the illusion of a stable, inner gender identity.

Think of it this way: there is no essential "femaleness" or "maleness" hiding inside you that then expresses itself through your actions. Instead, the actions themselves—the way you walk, talk, dress, sit, express emotion—create the appearance of an underlying gender. We perform gender so consistently, and society reinforces these performances so thoroughly, that we come to believe gender is something fundamental about who we are.

As Butler put it: "If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style."

In plain language: if gender is made through repeated actions, then different actions could make different genders. The script can be rewritten.

Gender Trouble and Its Aftermath

Butler's 1990 book "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" became an unexpected bestseller—or at least as close to a bestseller as a dense academic text can get. It sold over 100,000 copies internationally and was translated into multiple languages. For a work of feminist philosophy drawing on Freud, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, this was extraordinary.

The book's central argument went further than the performativity essay. Butler challenged the very idea that "women" could serve as a stable category around which feminist politics should organize. They argued that feminism had made a mistake in trying to define "women" as a discrete group with common characteristics, because doing so reinforced the binary view of gender that patriarchy depends upon.

This was controversial. Many feminists saw the category of "woman" as essential to their political project. How could you fight for women's rights if you couldn't even define what a woman was?

Butler's response was subtle. They weren't saying women don't exist or that the category is meaningless. They were saying that feminists should focus less on defining the boundaries of womanhood and more on understanding how power shapes our conceptions of gender in the first place—including within feminist movements themselves. The goal was to make gender and desire "flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors," as the media scholar David Gauntlett summarized it.

This idea—that identity is fluid rather than fixed, performed rather than essential—became one of the foundational concepts of queer theory, an academic field that emerged in the early 1990s to examine how sexuality and gender operate outside and against heterosexual norms.

Clarifying the Confusion

Gender Trouble made Butler famous, but it also made them misunderstood.

Many readers came away thinking Butler was saying that gender is a choice—that you wake up each morning and decide what gender to perform that day, like selecting an outfit. This interpretation missed the point entirely and trivialised the real constraints people face.

In 1993, Butler published "Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex" partly to address these misreadings. They emphasized that performativity is not a singular act of will but a process of repetition constrained by social norms. You don't choose your gender any more than you choose your native language—but like language, gender is something you do, something that exists only through continued practice.

Butler drew on the philosopher Jacques Derrida's concept of iterability—the idea that meaning is created through repetition and citation. Every time you perform gender, you're citing previous performances, both your own and those you've observed in others. This repetition creates the illusion of a natural, original gender that you're merely expressing. But there is no original. It's citations all the way down.

And here's the crucial point: this repetition happens "under 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." People don't perform gender freely. They perform it under enormous social pressure, with real consequences for deviation.

This is why Butler described gender not only as a performance but as a "constitutive constraint"—something constructed that nonetheless shapes and limits what we can be. It's not that gender is fake or easily discarded. It's that gender is real precisely because we keep making it real through our actions.

The Question of Hate Speech

Butler's work on performativity had implications far beyond gender. If identities are created through repeated speech acts and behaviors, then language itself becomes a site of political struggle. Words don't just describe reality—they help create it.

In "Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative," published in 1997, Butler turned to questions of hate speech and censorship. The issue was pressing: debates raged about whether certain forms of speech should be legally prohibited, with feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon arguing forcefully that pornography constituted a form of hate speech against women.

Butler's analysis was characteristically subtle. They argued that what counts as "hate speech" doesn't exist in some obvious, pre-political way. Instead, state authorities declare certain speech to be hate speech after the fact, thereby reserving for themselves the power to define acceptable discourse. This should make us cautious about inviting state censorship, even of speech we find abhorrent.

Drawing on the French philosopher Michel Foucault's work on sexuality, Butler noted a paradox: attempts to suppress speech often amplify it. Foucault had argued that the strict sexual mores of nineteenth-century Western Europe didn't silence discussions of sex—they generated an explosion of discourse about sexuality, as doctors, clergy, educators, and lawmakers obsessively categorised and analyzed sexual behaviors they claimed to be forbidding.

The same dynamic applies to censorship more broadly. The very act of prohibiting certain words or ideas draws attention to them, names them, gives them power. Butler went even further, suggesting that censorship is not external to language but somehow primitive to it—that the very structure of language depends on exclusions and prohibitions. If this is true, then oppositional discourse faces a genuine dilemma: "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech."

This doesn't mean Butler thought hate speech was harmless or that nothing should be done about it. Their point was that the question is genuinely difficult, and that simplistic calls for censorship may backfire or may enhance state power in ways we should resist.

Precarious Lives

After September 11, 2001, Butler's work took another turn. The "war on terror," the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, and the broader climate of fear and militarism prompted them to think about vulnerability, grief, and whose lives count as worthy of protection.

In "Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence," published in 2004, Butler examined how certain lives come to be seen as "grievable"—worthy of public mourning—while others do not. When Americans died on September 11, their deaths were treated as world-historical tragedies, endlessly memorialized. When Afghan or Iraqi civilians died in subsequent military operations, their deaths often went unmentioned and unmourned.

Butler argued that this differential treatment wasn't accidental. It reflected deep structures of power that determine whose lives register as fully human. Certain populations—stateless people, those labeled "terrorists," undocumented migrants, racial minorities—are rendered precarious not just by material deprivation but by being excluded from the frameworks through which we recognize human life.

Drawing on the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote extensively about our ethical obligations to others, Butler explored how representation shapes recognition. The way media frame events, the images they show and don't show, the stories they tell and don't tell—all of this determines which deaths we mourn and which we ignore. If someone's life was never presented as truly alive, as situated in a condition common to ours, then their death cannot register as a loss.

Butler also examined the legal anomalies of Guantanamo Bay and similar detention centers. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben had written about the "state of exception"—the way sovereign power operates by suspending normal law. Butler argued that the situation was actually more complex than Agamben suggested. The U.S. government didn't simply suspend law; it maintained an ambiguous relationship to law, complying with it or suspending it depending on its interests. This flexibility was itself a tool of power.

International law, too, proved inadequate. Documents like the Geneva Conventions protect people who belong to recognized states or act on behalf of them. But what about stateless people? What about those labeled "enemy combatants" who are treated as acting on their own behalf, as irrational actors who forfeit legal protection? The existing frameworks left entire categories of humans unprotected.

Vulnerability as a Starting Point

One of Butler's most important ideas from this period is the concept of shared precariousness. All human beings, they argued, are vulnerable. We depend on others for our survival from the moment of birth. We can be injured, harmed, killed. We grieve. We lose people we love.

This vulnerability is not a weakness to be overcome but a fundamental feature of human existence. And it connects us. We are never fully autonomous, never completely "complete." We are always in some sense "dispossessed"—dependent on others, exposed to others, shaped by others.

Butler saw in this shared vulnerability the basis for a different kind of politics—one grounded not in the assertion of sovereign individual rights but in the recognition of mutual dependency. If we truly grasped that everyone is precarious, that everyone's life can be damaged or ended, might we not organize society differently? Might we not think twice before waging war or abandoning whole populations to poverty and neglect?

The obstacle is that we don't recognize everyone as equally human. Some lives are framed as grievable, others as expendable. Butler's work asks us to examine those frames—to notice whose lives we mourn and whose we ignore, and to ask whether we might frame things differently.

Gender Beyond the Academy

Butler's most recent work on gender, particularly "Undoing Gender," published in 2004, aimed to make their ideas accessible to a broader audience. The book collects reflections on gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, and the medical treatment of intersex individuals—people born with sex characteristics that don't fit typical definitions of male or female.

The question of intersex treatment illuminated Butler's concerns about how normative ideas of gender cause real harm. For decades, standard medical practice was to surgically "correct" intersex infants, altering their bodies to fit binary sex categories. This was done without the infants' consent, often without even informing them later in life about what had happened. The practice was justified as being in the children's best interest, helping them live "normal" lives.

Butler's framework helps us see what's wrong with this picture. The surgeries weren't correcting a medical problem—they were enforcing a social norm. The assumption that everyone must be clearly male or female, that ambiguity is intolerable, drove doctors to perform irreversible procedures on children who could not consent. The violence wasn't just physical; it was conceptual, flowing from a way of thinking about gender that couldn't accommodate human variation.

A Troublemaker Still

Butler has remained politically engaged throughout their career. They've spoken out on Israeli politics, critiquing the Israeli state's treatment of Palestinians while drawing on their Jewish heritage and the ethics lessons that began with a rabbi's punishment so many years ago. They've been a prominent advocate for LGBTQ rights, and their work continues to inform activists and scholars around the world.

Not everyone appreciates Butler's contributions. Their writing is notoriously difficult—dense, abstract, filled with philosophical jargon that can make even sympathetic readers struggle. They once "won" a Bad Writing Contest for a particularly impenetrable sentence. Critics from across the political spectrum have attacked their ideas: some argue that undermining stable categories of sex and gender is dangerous or nihilistic; others claim Butler's work is too abstract to be politically useful.

But love them or hate them, it's hard to deny Butler's influence. The ideas they articulated in the late 1980s and early 1990s—that gender is performed rather than innate, that the categories we take for granted are historical productions rather than natural facts, that our very sense of self is shaped by power in ways we often can't see—have become part of how a generation thinks about identity.

When a fourteen-year-old today questions gender norms, or when debates about transgender rights fill the news, or when someone describes identity as "fluid" or "constructed," they're drawing on a vocabulary that Butler helped create. The troublemaker from Cleveland Hebrew school grew up to trouble some of the deepest assumptions Western culture holds about who we are.

And they're still at it.