Feminists Theorize the Political

by Judith Butler (Editor), Joan W. Scott (Editor)

A collection of work by leading feminist scholars, engaging with the question of the political status of poststructuralism within feminism, and affirming the contemporary debate over theory as politically rich and consequential.

Genres: Feminism, Feminist Theory, Politics, Nonfiction, Gender, Philosophy, Theory

504 pages, Paperback

First published May 21, 1992

About the author

Judith Butler is an American philosopher, feminist, and queer theorist whose work has profoundly shaped gender studies, political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to a Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish family, Butler was raised in a Jewish cultural and ethical environment that fostered an early engagement with philosophy, ethics, and questions of identity, attending Hebrew school and specialized ethics classes as a teenager. They studied philosophy at Bennington College before transferring to Yale University, where they earned a BA in 1978 and a PhD in 1984, focusing on German idealism, phenomenology, and French theory, including Hegel, Sartre, and Kojève. Butler taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining the University of California, Berkeley in 1993, where they co-founded the Program in Critical Theory, served as Maxine Elliot Professor, directed the International Consortium of Critical Theory, and also hold the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School. Butler is best known for Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, works in which they introduced the theory of gender performativity, arguing that gender is constituted through repeated social acts rather than a fixed identity, a concept that became foundational in feminist and queer theory. They have also published Excitable Speech, examining hate speech and censorship, Precarious Life, analyzing vulnerability and political violence, Undoing Gender, on the social construction of sexual norms, Giving an Account of Oneself, exploring ethical responsibility and the limits of self-knowledge, and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, addressing public protest and collective action, while their 2020 book, The Force of Nonviolence, emphasizes ethical engagement in social and political struggles. Butler has engaged in global activism, supporting LGBTQIA rights, opposing anti-gender ideology, advocating for Palestinian rights, critiquing aspects of contemporary Israeli policy, and participating in movements such as Occupy Wall Street, while navigating controversies including critiques of their comments on Hamas and Hezbollah, debates over TERF ideology, and disputes over the Adorno Prize, illustrating the intersections of their scholarship and public interventions. Their work extends into ethical theory, exploring vulnerability, interdependence, mourning, and the recognition of marginalized lives, as well as the performative dimensions of identity and the social construction of sex and gender. They have influenced contemporary feminist, queer, and critical theory, cultural studies, and continental philosophy, shaping debates on gender, sexuality, power, and social justice, while also participating in public discourse and advocacy around education, political violence, and anti-discrimination. Butler is legally non-binary in California, uses they/them pronouns, identifies as a lesbian, and lives in Berkeley with their partner Wendy Brown and their son.

Reviews

[Mario · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the risk of being caricaturish and simplistic:

The contributors to this volume (edited by the historian and theorist Joan W. Scott and the inimitable Judith Butler) share a broad concern: making coherent a committment to feminsim in the wake of both (a) poststructuralist interventions concerning power and identity and also (b) so-called "Third Wave" critiques of, among other things, the uninterrogated whiteness presupposed certain ways of thinking feminist subjectivity.

Such a "broad concern" is broached in a number of considerably different ways: Butler's essay engages the U.S. television coverage of Operation Desert Storm, G.S. Spivak comments on Sartre commenting on Heidegger, there's an analysis of a late 1980's divorce case in India.... I think these essays, different as thet are, have aged really well, especially in comparison with other so-called poststructuralist essays from U.S. journals in the 1980s and early 1990s.

[jonah grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

In "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” Judith Butler describes the human subject as neither a ground nor a product of the permanent possibility of certain resignifying process (one which gets detoured and stalled through other mechanisms of power), but veritably, power’s own possibility of being reworked. Our identity is not simply fixed, absolute or unchangeable (i.e., one's identity is not simply a woman, an African, a Jew) but rather, it is permanently capable of change and this change is not brought about by the definite, distinct characteristics that the subject carries with him or her, i.e. their gender, race, socioeconomic status, religion, etc. Instead, it is a product of all such categories interacting with one another that is manifested in the individual. Butler argues that identity is an unfinished effect, not a cause, of relationship between different categories and at the same time, the relationship of these categories with the “mechanisms of power” that influence the individual. Butler wants us to re-examine the foundations on which we rest our identities and question the basis for our definition of the categories we use to define ourselves. She inquires as to where we get the repository for our ideas for these categories and how did these ideas get into that repository.

[Janice]

The title says it all.

[Melani · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is probably dated now, but I liked it when I read it in the early 90s.