# Judith Butler [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler) ( b. 1956 ) ## Description American philosopher whose theory of gender performativity — first developed in *Gender Trouble* (1990) and *Bodies That Matter* (1993) — argues that gender is constituted through repeated, citational acts rather than expressing an internal essence; a foundational figure for queer theory and for later scholarship on precarity, mourning, and kinship. ## Key Tags #philosophy #gender #queer-theory #theorist ## Essential Works - *Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity*. Routledge, 1990. - foundational statement of gender performativity - *Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"*. Routledge, 1993. - extends performativity to the materiality of the body itself - *Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence*. Verso, 2004. - theory of grievability, precarity, and vulnerability ## Details Reframes gender not as an expression of a pre-existing identity but as an effect produced through the repeated citation of social norms ("performativity") — a move that unsettled fixed categories of sex, gender, and sexuality and became a central reference point for queer theory. Later work extends this into questions of kinship, mourning, and which lives are socially recognized as "grievable." ### Concepts and Theories - [[Queer Theory]] - *Gender Trouble* is one of the field's founding texts, alongside work by [[José Esteban Muñoz]] and others - [[The Body]] - *Bodies That Matter* theorizes the body itself as constituted through discourse and repetition ### Creative and Technical Practices %% none yet %% ### Collaborators %% none yet %% ### Institutional Affiliations and Associated Movements - University of California, Berkeley - longtime faculty, Rhetoric and Comparative Literature ## References ### Primary Sources Bibliography Butler, Judith. "Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?" *differences*, n.d. [link](https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/4/article/9630/pdf). "If we understand kinship as a set of practices that institutes relationships of various kinds which negotiate the reproduction of life and the demands of death, then kinship practices will be those that emerge to address fundamental forms of human dependency, which may include birth, child-rearing, relations of emotional dependency and support, generational ties, illness, dying, and death (to name a few)." (Butler, 2002, p. 14) ### Secondary Sources Bibliography %% none yet %%