| 1 | Name: | Dr. Judith Butler | |
| Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | ||
| Year Elected: | 2007 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 402. Criticism: Arts and Letters | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1956 | ||
Grounded in Continental philosophy, Judith Butler has become one of the most influential voices in the fields of feminist theory, literary criticism, social theory, ethics, and psychoanalysis. Her best-known book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, became a founding text for theoretical work in gender and sexuality through its critical readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray. Perhaps the book's most significant choice was the use of J. L. Austin's concept of performativity as the basis for an understanding of the development of a gendered subjectivity not dependent on biological givens. Performativity becomes an increasingly powerful and flexible conceptual tool in Butler's subsequent, nuanced work on iterability and citation. Responding to postmodern and post-structuralist critiques of the self-evidence of identity, Dr. Butler has emerged as a public intellectual through her rigorous exploration of non-foundationalist approaches to issues of rights and representation. Over the past decade, her work has increasingly moved outward from gender and sexuality (while not letting go of its emphasis on those issues) to encompass broader questions of human rights, social theory, and ethics. Her more recent books explore hate speech, the politics of kinship, the problematics of universalism, and the efficacy and limitations of self-knowledge in the context of inequality. Those publications include Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000); (with E. Laclau, S. Zizek) Hegemony, Contingency, Universality (2000); Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). Judith Butler was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award for exemplary contributions to scholarship in the humanities in 2008. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019). She has been Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Berkeley since 1993. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and has also served on the faculties of Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins Universities. Judith Butler was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2007. | |||