Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory

Judith Pamela Butler is a nonbinary an American philosopher whose work has shaped the academic understanding of gender and queer identity. They have also worked on issues of hate speech and censorship, violence, grief, and self-knowledge. Butler graduated from Yale University, receiving BA (1978), MA (1982), and PhD (1984) degrees. They taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California, Berkeley, where they were appointed Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature in 1998. They also served as Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Their best-known works are Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and its sequel, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), in which Butler elaborates on the theory of gender propounded in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.”

Criticism of Butler’s work has involved its academic focus, the difficulty of the writing style, and its inability to directly affect social change. Outside of their academic work, they are an engaged political activist, involved in queer, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-war movements.