Judith Butler
1) Her Biography and Main Works:
Judith Butler was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on February 24, 1956, to a Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish family. The Holocaust killed the majority of their maternal grandmother’s family. Butler grew up in a Reform Jewish household. Their mother grew up Orthodox before turning Conservative and later Reform, while their father grew up Reform. Butler attended Hebrew school and special lessons on Jewish ethics as a kid and adolescent, where he acquired his “first instruction in philosophy.” Butler told Haaretz in 2010 that they started the ethics lessons when they were 14 years old, and that they were devised as a sort of punishment by Butler’s Hebrew school’s Rabbi because they were “too chatty in class.” They were also, according to Butler, “When asked what they wanted to learn in these special sessions, they answered with three questions that had been bothering them at the time: “Why was Spinoza banished from the synagogue?” Is it possible to hold German Idealism responsible for Nazism? And how was existential theology, including Martin Buber’s work, to be understood?”
Butler studied philosophy at Bennington College before moving to Yale University, where they earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1978 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1984. As a Fulbright Scholar, they spent one academic year at Heidelberg University. Before joining the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993, Butler taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University. They were the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam from 2002 to 2003. They also joined Columbia University’s English and Comparative Literature department as Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Visiting Professor of the Humanities in the spring semesters of 2012, 2013, and 2014, with the potential of continuing as full-time faculty.
Butler is a member of the editorial board or advisory board of a number of academic publications, including Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Butler is best known for the works Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), in which they question gender stereotypes and create their gender performativity theory. This idea has had a significant impact on feminist and queer studies. Their work is often discussed and argued in cinema studies classes that emphasize gender studies and discourse performativity. Butler has backed lesbian and homosexual rights organizations, and they have spoken out on a variety of current political topics, including criticism of Israeli policy.
2) Gender Trouble:
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity was initially published in 1990 and has since sold over 100,000 copies in several languages throughout the world. Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault are all discussed in Gender Trouble.
Butler criticises feminists’ usage of the concepts “gender” and “sex.” Butler claims that feminism made a mistake by attempting to define “women” as a distinct, ahistorical category with a set of shared qualities. This strategy, according to Butler, perpetuates the binary view of gender relations. Butler argues that feminists should “concentrate on offering an account of how power operates and forms our understandings of femininity not just in society at large but also inside the feminist movement,” rather than attempting to define “women.” Finally, Butler wants to dispel the myth that sex and gender are inextricably linked so that gender and desire might be “fluid, free-floating, and unaffected by other stable elements.” One of the basis of queer theory is the concept of identity as fluid and changeable, and gender as a performance rather than an essence.
3) Main Themes in her Works:
The Production of Subjectivity, Identity and Desire:
Butler returns to a discussion of Foucault’s idea of identity creation that she began in The Psychic Life of Power in her book Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). The latter is considered as being constructed in accordance with “certain requirements of the liberal state” as well as its legal system (Butler 1997b: 100). Individuals are essentially created as ‘subjects of the state’ by this set of arrangements (1997b: 100). Butler explores Foucault’s views on power and how it is exercised within a ‘regime of truth’ in a subsequent essay (Butler 2005: 22). She instead focuses on his exhortation to build new forms of subjectivity, forms that reject those supplied by the State and the present power system, and which have been forced on individuals for “several centuries” in The Psychic Life of Power (Foucault, cited by Butler, 1997b: 101). Rather than following Foucault to the letter, Butler highlights Foucault’s shift from a position in Discipline and Punish (1977) arguing that no resistance to authority is conceivable to one in 1982 arguing that it is.
Butler not only points out the disparity, but also considers the possibilities that such a stance may, or might not, open up. She further emphasizes that since identity is a basic attachment for the subject, it cannot be shrugged off at whim. Unlike Foucault, she also wishes to create room for a psychoanalytic reading of the Law, which asserts that there is no desire without the Law, and that prohibition, in reality, eroticizes the Law. In Butler’s interpretation of Foucault, the Law is always external to desire, and hence a barrier that must be overcome. As a result, psychoanalysis has a place in the world, since any resistance to subjugation must first use subordination as a resource.
Butler seems to be trying to improve on the voluntarism of the performative in her prior position in Gender Trouble. Butler raises the prospect of an opacity in the self that remains, and that, if not inaccessible, is at least only accessible after a great deal of reflexive labor, in her book Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), which has a clear ethical focus, despite referring to Foucault in order
to pose key questions. The argument is that, although an intellectual, and hence relatively transparent, relationship to oneself is feasible, determining the true material underpinnings of identity, including, if one wishes, a “regime of truth” (Butler 2005: 22), is far more difficult. Indeed, how can one reject to be what one is (the Foucauldian thesis) if one’s identity is ambiguous? More specifically, Butler still has to explain the following question: How can performativity operate as a principle of resistance (against stereotypes, etc.) when every identity contains some opacity?
Sexuality and the Masquerade:
Butler argues in her earlier work that for Lacan, the masquerade, in which heterosexuality is a game of appearances, is central: a man hates becoming a woman because it shows an unconscious yearning to be loved by another man, a need for sameness rather than diversity. Butler responds to Lacan’s assertion that female homosexuality is a disappointed heterosexuality (Butler 1999: 63).
Butler’s critique of Kristeva demonstrates that her central argument is that the Symbolic predetermines gender identities and that, contrary to Lacan’s view, gender identities can be viewed as established within and by a given cultural and social matrix (another term for performative) that can be subverted.
Power and Resistance:
Butler has always been interested in issues of power resistance and the significance of homosexual rights and queer politics in society. Critics like Zizek, on the other hand, have questioned whether perversion can lead to the overthrow of the present system. As observed in Foucault’s work on power, the problem is not perversion as unnatural activities, but rather the order of the Law generating the criminal, the ban motivating the violation. A perverse theory of power, on the other hand, views power as having a ‘interest’ in resistance, while a progressive perspective contends that power-generated opposition weakens current forms of authority, if not power itself. Butler’s major reference in the Psychic Life of Power (1997b) is Hegel’s idea of Lordship and Bondage, which reveals a disavowal of the body akin to that seen in patriarchal society’s man-woman relationship. The misconception of feminine autonomy here is more restricting than the notion that woman is a symptom of man.
Butler’s performative implies, as we’ve seen, that subjectivity is formed in the act, rather than existing as some a priori fundamental part, via Althusserian interpellation, where “the subject is constituted by being hailed” (Butler 1997b: 95). Is it possible to maintain such absolute contingency? This is an issue that Butler’s method raises. Butler’s critique of Lacan is based on the notion that resistance is contingent on the symbolic structure being rejected. However, two types of resistance must be distinguished here: social-political and mental resistance. Despite the fact that the two realms are connected and intertwined, they are not reducible to one another. Butler often takes the risk of doing just that. When it comes to problems of sexual identity, psychic opposition to power is often limited to the social-political articulation of power, such as resisting
a legislation that states that no same-sex weddings are authorized. Butler often creates the idea that the nature of psychological space is determined by the social-political world for her.
Butler, on the other hand, prefers Foucault to Lacan and rejects the Lacanian Symbolic as the realm that predetermines human existence’s coordinates. However, if, as Butler claims, Foucault demonstrates that resistance to power is itself an outcome of power (the perverse thesis), this seems to be a no-win position with no way out.
Foucault and the Performative:
The concept of sex, on the other hand, is constructed in Foucault’s work via the discourse of sexuality. Butler is correct in his assessment of Foucault’s failure to project anything beyond discourse. There may as well be no pre-discursive world for him. Such a stance would sidestep Kristeva’s difficulty with the semiotic as a challenge to, but reliance on, the Symbolic. Butler also approves of Foucault because, unlike the exclusively negative purpose of the Law, and hence of power, Foucault views power as positive in the sense that it is a constructive force that creates things. It’s not only a repressive or prohibitive mechanism, for example.
Butler, influenced by Foucault, uses the term “performative” to emphasize how the gendered body is performed. “That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts that constitute its reality,” she continues in a crucial paragraph. This also implies that, if reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that interiority is an effect and function of decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that distinguishes inner from outer, and thus institutes the subject’s ‘integrity.'” Butler (1999, p. 173).
‘Performative’ argues that gender and subjectivity are profoundly contingent and susceptible to change, in contrast to the approach that places the gendered body into pre-existing categories (such as heterosexual) related to an ontology based on origins. Indeed, this method implies that gender relations may be altered. Things needed to change, Butler said in 1989, since heterosexually gendered bodies were dominant, while homosexual and lesbian bodies were labelled abnormal. Despite her theoretical brilliance, Butler believes Kristeva contributes to the perpetuation of hegemonic heterosexuality.
Despite the fact that feminism was dedicated to the advancement of women’s rights, Butler claims that it failed to question the hegemonic characteristics of a male who identifies with being male and seeks out a female sexual partner, or a female who identifies with being female and seeks out a male partner. The Freudian concept at work here is that one can only want the sex with which one identifies, hence if one identifies as a woman, one cannot (usually) desire another woman.
Butler aims to question this theory by claiming that gender physical connections do not need to be bound by such a framework because of “subversive bodily activities.” Unlike a naturalist approach, which holds that gender relations are imposed by nature and hence cannot be modified fundamentally, the performative principle allows for the subversion of established identity concepts.
Austin’s Performative:
Butler uses J.L. Austin’s concept of performative (also known as a ‘speech act’) to study how individuals might claim to have been hurt by language in her book Excitable Speech (1997). Austin believes that words may be used to ‘do’ things (see Austin 1980). As a result, for Austin, language is more than just a means of communication or a means of representing the world. Austin dubbed activities like promising, marrying, offering counsel, beginning a meeting, naming and launching a ship, and directing someone to do something ‘performatives,’ since pronouncing the words of these events in the proper context is an act. The act is conducted only via words. Thus, contrary to the proverb’s meaning, ‘words are just words,’ Austin persuasively demonstrated that words might be more than just words. Austin refers to these sorts of public speeches as ‘illocutionary acts.’ ‘Perlocutionary acts,’ on the other hand, may be described as employing words to convince, beguile, or coax someone to do something. Perlocutionary actions occur only via the use of words.
Butler, like Foucault on sexuality and Althusser on interpolating persons as subjects via the utterance of words, analyses concepts like “hate speech,” “contagious words,” and censorship using the idea of performative as illocutionary and perlocutionary. She discovers that such occurrences are as much as or more constitutive of the utterance’s subject as they are constitutive of the utterance’s topic. Butler, in other words, refers to her previous usage of performative as ‘subject construction.’ In her appropriation of Austin, she adds that such subject construction occurs in a context of “ongoing political contestation and subject reformulation as well” (Butler 1997a: 160).
Critique of Essentialism:
We will concentrate on Butler’s criticism of Julia Kristeva’s theory of the drive-based, semiotic, rather than offering a comprehensive description of the argument in Gender Trouble, since it encapsulates Butler’s basic theoretical stance. Because of its connection to the drives – believed to be biological – and indebted, through opposition, to the socially sanctioned Symbolic: the Law of the Father, the sphere of the determination of ‘normal’ gender and sexuality, the semiotic is ultimately essentialist (and this is clearly a criticism) for Butler. Even though she differs with Lacan on the function and position of the drives in Freudian theory, Kristeva demonstrates that she is ultimately Lacanian.
Kristeva argues that the semiotic has subversive political consequences because of its ability to disturb social order (language, for example), even if it cannot form the foundation of a new system (for it to be so would entail a flirtation with psychosis). The semiotic must be suppressed by the Symbolic before it can become really subversive, such that the semiotic may only express itself ‘before’ or ‘after’ meaning, as in the infant’s holophrastic utterances, or ‘after’ meaning, as in psychosis, when words are no longer utilized to indicate. Butler does not give poetic language or aesthetic activity in general much consideration. When the semiotic is linked with the organization of the impulses and the maternal body, Butler sees problems. Because it seems to her that Kristeva
favors heterosexuality over homosexuality, particularly lesbian sexuality, Butler believes that homosexuality as assessed by Kristeva likewise risks devolving into insanity. Furthermore, Kristeva is considered to emphasize the maternal body and the act of birth, despite the fact that the Law of the Father prevents them from having a symbolic outlet.
Butler’s issue is this: how can one have an ontological buy on the semiotic if access to it is only accessible via the Symbolic? Surely, Butler suggests, we will end up with, at best, no clear understanding of the semiotic, and, at worst, the demand that the semiotic drives be hypothesized as pre-Symbolic and existent prior to language but manifesting only in and through language (the same Symbolic). There seems to be no actual outside of the Symbolic that can be reached. ‘All manner of things “primitive” and “Oriental” are summarily reduced to the principle of the mother body,’ Butler says, raising both the question of Orientalism and the issue of plurality as a ‘univocal signifier’ (Butler 1999: 114).
4) Importance of her Works in our Times:
Identity, in Judith’s political opinion, should not be the cornerstone for politics. The important phrases for a growing left are alliance, coalition, and solidarity. And we must know what we are fighting for and against in order to maintain our concentration. It is critical that we collaborate across divides and construct nuanced explanations of social power. Accounts that help us connect the poor, the precarious, the dispossessed, LGBTQI+ peoples, workers, and everyone else who is oppressed by racism and colonialism. These are not necessarily distinct groups or identities, but overlapping and interwoven forms of oppression that challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, as well as capitalism and its ills, such as the destruction of the Earth and indigenous cultures.
Judith Butler claims that the right is urgently trying to regain notions of identity that have been rightfully challenged. Simultaneously, they have a tendency to dismiss movements for racial justice as “identity” politics, or to dismiss movements for sexual freedom or against sexual assault as “identity” politics. In reality, the primary goal of these movements is to redefine what justice, equality, and freedom may and should entail. They are crucial to any radical democratic movement in this sense, thus we should reject stereotypes of them.
So, how does this affect the left? She doubts that we can comprehend the complexity of our social and economic environments or establish the type of analyses or alliances required to realize objectives of radical justice, equality, and freedom if we base our perspectives just on individual identities. At the same time, identifying oneself is a technique of demonstrating how coalitions must evolve in order to be more sensitive to interconnected oppressions.
There are many gay and feminist groups today that are anti-capitalist, devoted to the battle for racial justice, disability rights, Palestinian political liberties, and against the destruction of the Earth and indigenous lifeworlds, as well as the elimination of feminism. Even though we are living at a period of profound sorrow as we see global economic inequities worsen due to the
pandemic, we can now appreciate Judith’s work and how it strives to make the world a better place.
