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Judith Butler and Political Theory
Over the past twenty-five years the work of Judith Butler has had an extraordinary impact on numerous disciplines and interdisciplinary projects across the humanities and social sciences. This original study is the first to take a thematic approach to Butler as a political thinker. Starting with an explanation of her terms of analysis, Judith Butler and Political Theory develops Butler’s theory of the political through an exploration of her politics of troubling given categories and approaches. By developing concepts such as normative violence and subversion and by elaborating her critique of heteronormativity, this book moves deftly between Butler’s earliest and most famous writings on gender and her more recent interventions in post-9/11 politics. This book, along with its companion volume, Judith Butler's Precarious Politics , marks an intellectual event for political theory, with major implications for feminism, women’s studies, gender studies, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies, queer theory and anyone with a critical interest in contemporary American ‘great power’ politics.
- GenresPolitics
196 pages, Hardcover
First published July 31, 2007
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 25, 2025
This book is not a simple introduction to Judith Butler, nor is it a biography of her key ideas. It is more an invitation to think with Butler—not just about gender, but about normativity, recognition, and the political fragility of life itself.
Moving chapter by chapter, the book present Butler as a thinker who persistently troubles foundational categories—not to destroy them, but to expose their exclusions. What emerges is a method of political theory rooted in openness, vulnerability, and the ethics of response.
Each chapter focuses on a conceptual field. The early chapters situate Butler not primarily as a gender theorist, but as a political thinker concerned with how power produces the subject—through performativity and citationality.
As I read, I found myself asking: If all identity is discursively constructed, and every norm is exclusionary, what ultimately grounds ethics? In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler insists that we are ethically responsible not because we are sovereign, but because we are exposed, implicated, and relational. Yet this responsibility feels like a moral residue of a liberal subject who has lost faith in universals but still wants to be good. She retains the burden of the “I” without a transcendent anchor, offering humility as the only posture left.
The book presents Butler’s critique of kinship, grief, and heteronormativity as grounded not in identity politics, but in the politics of recognisability. Norms decide which lives count as real, grievable, and protected. For Butler, the ethical then is not about asserting universals but about living with the tension of what escapes recognition.
But here, too, I am uneasy. Butler seems to replace God with grief, command with relationality, and law with vulnerability. She teaches us to live within the limits of language—i kind of got this from reading her works but it was good to gather it all into a text
Hence, the book succeeds in showing how Butler’s politics of “troubling” opens space for thinking about the lives that don’t fit, the norms that wound, and the possibility of citing otherwise. It is not an answer, but a method. And maybe that’s all butler intended
Moving chapter by chapter, the book present Butler as a thinker who persistently troubles foundational categories—not to destroy them, but to expose their exclusions. What emerges is a method of political theory rooted in openness, vulnerability, and the ethics of response.
Each chapter focuses on a conceptual field. The early chapters situate Butler not primarily as a gender theorist, but as a political thinker concerned with how power produces the subject—through performativity and citationality.
As I read, I found myself asking: If all identity is discursively constructed, and every norm is exclusionary, what ultimately grounds ethics? In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler insists that we are ethically responsible not because we are sovereign, but because we are exposed, implicated, and relational. Yet this responsibility feels like a moral residue of a liberal subject who has lost faith in universals but still wants to be good. She retains the burden of the “I” without a transcendent anchor, offering humility as the only posture left.
The book presents Butler’s critique of kinship, grief, and heteronormativity as grounded not in identity politics, but in the politics of recognisability. Norms decide which lives count as real, grievable, and protected. For Butler, the ethical then is not about asserting universals but about living with the tension of what escapes recognition.
But here, too, I am uneasy. Butler seems to replace God with grief, command with relationality, and law with vulnerability. She teaches us to live within the limits of language—i kind of got this from reading her works but it was good to gather it all into a text
Hence, the book succeeds in showing how Butler’s politics of “troubling” opens space for thinking about the lives that don’t fit, the norms that wound, and the possibility of citing otherwise. It is not an answer, but a method. And maybe that’s all butler intended
Displaying 1 of 1 review