Judith Butler

Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American feminist, queer philosopher, and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, and the fields of feminist and queer theory, academic freedom, and literary theory.

Butler has held academic appointments at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University where they received tenure in 1992 before joining the faculty in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. There they became the Maxine Elliot Professor in 1998, holding faculty appointments in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory which they cofounded in 2007. They founded the International Consortium of Critical Theory, funded by the Mellon Foundation, in 2015. They also hold the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School (EGS).

Butler is best known for the books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), in which they challenge conventional, heteronormative notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship.

Butler has also spoken and written on war, non-violence, ethics, public mourning, democratic theory and other contemporary political questions, including the Palestinian struggles and the limits of Zionism. They have also spoken internationally in support of LGBTQIA rights and against anti-gender ideology.