This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. It needs additional citations for verification. Tagged since July 2011. It may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Tagged since July 2011. It may contain original research. Tagged since July 2011.

Sociology
Outline
Theory · History
Positivism · Antipositivism Functionalism · Conflict theory Middle-range · Mathematical Critical theory · Socialization Structure and agency
Research methods
Quantitative · Qualitative Historical · Computational Ethnographic · Network analytic
Topics · Subfields
Cities · Class · Crime · Culture Deviance · Demography · Education Economy · Environment · Family Gender · Health · Industry · Internet Knowledge · Law · Medicine Politics · Mobility · Race and ethnicity Rationalization · Religion · Science Secularization · Social networks Social psychology · Stratification
Browse
Portal Category tree · Lists Journals · Sociologists Article index
v t e

Queer theory is a field of post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of queer studies and Women's studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself. Heavily influenced by the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Lauren Berlant, queer theory builds both upon feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of the essential self and upon gay/lesbian studies' close examination of the socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities. Whereas gay/lesbian studies focused its inquiries into "natural" and "unnatural" behaviour with respect to homosexual behaviour, queer theory expands its focus to encompass any kind of sexual activity or identity that falls into normative and deviant categories.

Queer theory[link]

Queer theorist Michael Warner attempts to provide a definition of a concept that typically circumvents categorical definitions: "Social reflection carried out in such a manner tends to be creative, fragmentary, and defensive, and leaves us perpetually at a disadvantage. And it is easy to be misled by the utopian claims advanced in support of particular tactics. But the range and seriousness of the problems that are continually raised by queer practice indicate how much work remains to be done. Because the logic of the sexual order is so deeply embedded by now in an indescribably wide range of social institutions, and is embedded in the most standard accounts of the world, queer struggles aim not just at toleration or equal status but at challenging those institutions and accounts. The dawning realisation that themes of homophobia and heterosexism may be read in almost any document of our culture means that we are only beginning to have an idea of how widespread those institutions and accounts are.^[2]

Queer theory's main project is exploring the contesting of the categorisation of gender and sexuality; identities are not fixed – they cannot be categorised and labeled – because identities consist of many varied components and that to categorise by one characteristic is wrong. Queer theory said that there is an interval between what a subject “does” (role-taking) and what a subject “is” (the self). So despite its title the theory's goal is to destabilise identity categories, which are designed to identify the “sexed subject” and place individuals within a single restrictive sexual orientation.

Overview[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Queer theory is derived largely from post-structuralist theory, and deconstruction in particular. Starting in the 1970s, a range of authors brought deconstructionist critical approaches to bear on issues of sexual identity, and especially on the construction of a normative "straight" ideology. Queer theorists challenged the validity and consistency of heteronormative discourse, and focused to a large degree on non-heteronormative sexualities and sexual practices.

The term "queer theory" was introduced in 1990, with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich and Diana Fuss (all largely following the work of Michel Foucault) being among its foundational proponents.

History[link]

Before the phrase “Queer Theory” was born, the term ‘Queer Nation’ appeared on the cover of the short-lived lesbian/gay quarterly Outlook in the winter 1991 issues. Writers Allan Berube and Jeffrey Escoffier drove home the point that Queer Nation strove to embrace paradoxes in its political activism, and that the activism was taking new form and revolving around the issue of identity.^{[3][dead link]} Soon enough Outlook and Queer Nation stopped being published, however, there was a mini-gay renaissance going on during the 1980s and early 1990s. There were a number of significant outbursts of lesbian/gay political/cultural activity. Out of this emerged queer theory.

Teresa de Lauretis is the person credited with coining the phrase "Queer Theory". It was at a working conference on lesbian and gay sexualities that was held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in February 1990 that de Lauretis first made mention of the phrase.^[4] She later introduced the phrase in a 1991 special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, entitled “Queer Theory, Lesbian and Gay Sexualities.” Similar to the description Berube and Escoffier used for Queer Nation, de Lauretis asserted that, “queer unsettles and questions the genderedness of sexuality.” ^[5]

Barely three years later, she abandoned the phrase on the grounds that it had been taken over by mainstream forces and institutions it was originally coined to resist.^[6] Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, and David Halperin's One Hundred Years of Homosexuality inspired other works. Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick arranged much of the conceptual base for the emerging field in the 1990s. Along with other queer theorists, these three outlined a political hermeneutics, which emphasized representation. These scholars asked questioned if people of varying sexual orientations had the same goals politically and did those in the sexual minority feel that they could be represented along with others of different sexualities and orientations. “While some critics insist that queer theory is apolitical word-smithery, [de Lauretis, Butler, and Sedgwick] take seriously the role that signs and symbols play in shaping the meanings and possibilities of our culture at the most basic level, including politics conventionally defined.” ^[3]

In the late 1980s, social constructionists conceived of the sexual subject as a culturally dependent, historically specific product.^{[citation needed]}

Background concepts[link]

Queer theory is grounded in gender and sexuality. Due to this association, a debate emerges as to whether sexual orientation is natural or essential to the person, as an essentialist believes, or if sexuality is a social construction and subject to change.^[7]

The queer theory has two predominant strains:

• Radical deconstructionism: interrogates categories of sexual orientations.
• Radical subversion: disrupts the normalizing tendencies of the sexual order.

The essentialist feminists believed that genders "have an essential nature (e.g. nurturing and caring versus being aggressive and selfish), as opposed to differing by a variety of accidental or contingent features brought about by social forces".^[8] Due to this belief in the essential nature of a person, it is also natural to assume that a person's sexual preference would be natural and essential to a person’s personality.

Identity politics[link]

Queer theory was originally associated with radical gay politics of ACT UP, OutRage! and other groups which embraced "queer" as an identity label that pointed to a separatist, non-assimilationist politics.^[8] Queer theory developed out of an examination of perceived limitations in the traditional identity politics of recognition and self-identity. In particular, queer theorists identified processes of consolidation or stabilization around some other identity labels (e.g. gay and lesbian); and construed queerness so as to resist this. Queer theory attempts to maintain a critique more than define a specific identity.

Acknowledging the inevitable violence of identity politics, and having no stake in its own ideology, queer is less an identity than a critique of identity. However, it is in no position to imagine itself outside the circuit of problems energized by identity politics. Instead of defending itself against those criticisms that its operations attract, queer allows those criticisms to shape its – for now unimaginable – future directions. "The term," writes Butler, "will be revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized." The mobilization of queer foregrounds the conditions of political representation, its intentions and effects, its resistance to and recovery by the existing networks of power.^[9]

The studies of Fuss anticipates queer theory.^[10]

Eng, Halberstam and Esteban Munoz offer one of its latest incarnations in the aptly “What is Queer about Queer studies now?”.^[11] Using Butler’s critique of sexual identity categories as a starting point, they work around a “queer epistemology” that explicitly opposes the sexual categories of Lesbian and Gay studies and lesbian and gay identity politics. They insist that the field of normalization is not limited to sexuality; social classifications such as gender, race and nationality constituted by a “governing logic” require an epistemological intervention through queer theory" (Green 2007). "So, the evolution of the queer begins with the problematization of sexual identity categories in Fuss (1996) and extends outward to a more general deconstruction of social ontology in contemporary queer theory" (Green 2007).

"Edelman goes from deconstruction of the subject to a deconstructive psychoanalysis of the entire social order; the modern human fear of mortality produces defensive attempts to “suture over the hole in the Symbolic Order”.^[12] According to him, constructions of “the homosexual” are pitted against constructions of “The Child” in the modern West, wherein the former symbolizes the inevitability of mortality (do not procreate) and the latter an illusory continuity of the self with the social order (survives mortality through one’s offspring). The constructs are animated by futuristic fantasy designed to evade mortality" (Green 2007).

"Fuss, Eng. et al and Edelman represent distinct moment in the development of queer theory. Whereas Fuss aims to discompose and render inert the reigning classifications of sexual identity, Eng. et al observe the extension of a deconstructive strategy to a wider field of normalization, while Edelman’s work takes not only the specter of “the homosexual”, but the very notion of “society” as a manifestation of psychological distress requiring composition" (Green 2007).

Role of biology[link]

Queer theorists focus on problems in classifying individuals as either male or female, even on a strictly biological basis. For example, the sex chromosomes (X and Y) may exist in atypical combinations (as in Klinefelter's syndrome [XXY]). This complicates the use of genotype as a means to define exactly two distinct sexes. Intersexed individuals may for many different biological reasons have ambiguous sexual characteristics.

Scientists who have written on the conceptual significance of intersexual individuals include Anne Fausto-Sterling, Ruth Hubbard, Carol Tavris, and Joan Roughgarden.^{[citation needed]}

Some key experts in the study of culture, such as Barbara Rogoff, argue that the traditional distinction between biology and culture as independent entities is overly simplistic, pointing to the ways in which biology and culture interact with one another.^[13]

The HIV/AIDS discourse[link]

Much of queer theory developed out of a response to the AIDS crisis, which promoted a renewal of radical activism, and the growing homophobia brought about by public responses to AIDS. Queer theory became occupied in part with what effects – put into circulation around the AIDS epidemic – necessitated and nurtured new forms of political organization, education and theorizing in "queer".

To examine the effects that HIV/AIDS has on queer theory is to look at the ways in which the status of the subject or individual is treated in the biomedical discourses that construct them.^[14]

1. The shift, affected by safer sex education in emphasizing sexual practices over sexual identities^[15]
2. The persistent misrecognition of HIV/AIDS as a "gay" disease ^[16]
3. Homosexuality as a kind of fatality^[17]
4. The coalition politics of much HIV/AIDS activism that rethinks identity in terms of affinity rather than essence^[18] and therefore includes not only lesbians and gay men but also bisexuals, transsexuals, sex workers, people with AIDS, health workers, and parents and friends of gays; the pressing recognition that discourse is not a separate or second-order "reality"^[19]
5. The constant emphasis on contestation in resisting dominant depictions of HIV and AIDS and representing them otherwise^{[20][dead link]}. The rethinking of traditional understandings of the workings of power in cross-hatched struggles over epidemiology, scientific research, public health and immigration policy^[21]

The material effects of AIDS contested many cultural assumptions about identity, justice, desire and knowledge, which some scholars felt challenged the entire system of Western thought,^[22] believing it maintained the health and immunity of epistemology: "the psychic presence of AIDS signifies a collapse of identity and difference that refuses to be abjected from the systems of self-knowledge."^[23] Thus queer theory and AIDS become interconnected because each is articulated through a postmodernist understanding of the death of the subject and both understand identity as an ambivalent site.

The role of language[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

For language use as associated with sexual identity, see Lavender linguistics.

Queer theory is likened to language because it is never static, but is ever-evolving. Richard Norton suggests that the existence of queer language is believed to have evolved from the imposing of structures and labels from an external mainstream culture.

Early discourse of queer theory involved leading theorists: Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others. This discourse centered on the way that knowledge of sexuality was structured through the use of language. Heteronormativity was the main focus of discourse, where heterosexuality was viewed as normal and any deviations, such as homosexuality, as abnormal or "queer". Even before the founding of ‘queer theory’ the Modern Language Association (MLA) came together for a convention in 1973 for the first formal gay-studies seminar due to the rise of lesbian and gay writers and issues of gay and lesbian textuality. The convention was entitled “ Gay Literature: Teaching and Research.” In 1981, the MLA established the Division of Gay Studies in Language and Literature.

Media and other creative works[link]

Many queer theorists have produced creative works that reflect theoretical perspectives in a wide variety of media. For example, science fiction authors such as Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler feature many values and themes from queer theory in their work. Patrick Califia's published fiction also draws heavily on concepts and ideas from queer theory. Some lesbian feminist novels written in the years immediately following Stonewall, such as Lover by Bertha Harris or Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig, can be said to anticipate the terms of later queer theory.

In film, the genre christened by B. Ruby Rich as New Queer Cinema in 1992 continues, as Queer Cinema, to draw heavily on the prevailing critical climate of queer theory; a good early example of this is the Jean Genet-inspired movie Poison by the director Todd Haynes. In fan fiction, the genre known as slash fiction rewrites straight or nonsexual relationships to be gay, bisexual, and queer in a sort of campy cultural appropriation. Ann Herendeen's Pride/Prejudice,^[24] for example, narrates a steamy affair between Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, the mutually devoted heroes of Jane Austen's much-adapted novel. And in music, some Queercore groups and zines could be said to reflect the values of queer theory.^[25]

Queer theorists analyze texts and challenge the cultural notions of "straight" ideology; that is, does "straight" imply heterosexuality as normal or is everyone potentially gay? As Ryan states: "It is only the laborious imprinting of heterosexual norms that cuts away those potentials and manufactures heterosexuality as the dominant sexual format."^[26] For example, Hollywood pursues the "straight" theme as being the dominant theme to outline what masculine is. This is particularly noticeable in gangster films, action films and westerns, which never have "weak" (read: homosexual) men playing the heroes, with the recent exception of the film Brokeback Mountain. Queer theory looks at destabilizing and shifting the boundaries of these cultural constructions.

New Media artists have a long history of queer theory inspired works, including cyberfeminism works, porn films like I.K.U. which feature transgender cyborg hunters and "Sharing is Sexy", an "open source porn laboratory", using social software, creative commons licensing and netporn to explore queer sexualities beyond the male/female binary.^{[citation needed]}

Queer theology[link]

Queer Theology is a term for the field of theology being undertaken from the perspective of Queer Theory.

The term is a neologism, originating in the 1990s.^[27] A "pro-feminist gay theology" was proposed by J. M. Clark and G. McNeil in 1992, and a "queer theology" by Robert Goss in Jesus acted up: A gay and lesbian manifesto (1993).^[28]

Criticism[link]

Typically, critics of queer theory are concerned that the approach obscures or glosses altogether the material conditions that underpin discourse.^[29] Tim Edwards argues that queer theory extrapolates too broadly from textual analysis in undertaking an examination of the social.^[29] Adam Green argues that queer theory ignores the social and institutional conditions within which lesbians and gays live.^[30] For example, queer theory dismantles social contingency in some cases (homosexual subject positions) while recuperating social contingency in others (racialized subject positions). Thus, not all queer theoretical work is as faithful to its deconstructionist roots.

Queer theory's commitment to deconstruction makes it nearly impossible to speak of a "lesbian" or "gay" subject, since all social categories are denaturalized and reduced to discourse.^[31] Thus, queer theory cannot be a framework for examining selves or subjectivities—including those that accrue by race and class—but rather, must restrict its analytic focus to discourse.^[32] Hence, sociology and queer theory are regarded as methodologically and epistemologically incommensurable frameworks ^[32] by critics such as Adam Isaiah Green. Thus Green writes that Warner, in an introductory section,^[33] Michael Warner (1990s) draws out the possibility of queer theory as a kind of critical intervention in social theory (radical deconstructionism); despite this, he weaves back and forth between the reification and deconstruction of sexual identity. Green argues that Warner begins the volume by invoking an ethnic identity politics, solidified around a specific social cleavage and a discussion of the importance of deconstructing notions of lesbian and gay identities; but, despite its radical deconstructionism, it constructs the queer subject or self in largely conventional terms: as lesbian and gay people bound by homophobic institutions and practices. So, one of the leading volumes of queer theory engages the subject via conventional sociological epistemologies that conceive of subject positions constituted through systems of stratification and organized around shared experience and identity. In other way, for Barnard,^[34] any consideration of sexuality must include inextricability with racialized subjectivities. Adam Green argues that Barnard implicitly rejects the queer theoretical conceptions of sexuality on the grounds that such work fails to account for particularity of racialized sexualities. He reasons that the failure arises because queer theorists are themselves white, and therefore operate from the particularity of a white racial standpoint. Barnard aspires to recuperate an analysis of race in queer theory, proposing that the deconstructionist epistemology of queer theory can be used to decompose a white queerness (first) in order to recover a racialized queerness (second). Thus, Adam Green argues that Barnard’s attempt to bring social contingency into queer theory violates the core epistemological premise of queer theory; in fact, by proposing that queer theory capture racialized subject positions, Barnard reinstates what it means to be a person of colour. His critique of the white subject position of queer theorists is itself a testimony to the stability of the social order and the power of social categories to mark a particular kind of experience, of subjectivity and, in turn, of queer author. He backs down the road of a decidedly sociological analysis of subject position and the self. Finally, Jagose^[35] Green observes that Jagose aims toward an analysis of social cleavages, including those accruing by race and ethnicity. Thus, on the one, Jagose underscores the strong deconstructionist epistemological premise of the term queer and queer theory more generally. Yet, she goes on to analyze identities and sexualities “inflected by heterosexuality, race, gender and ethnicity”. Thus Adam Green states that by advocating the incorporation of social contingency in this way, Jagose offers neither the critical edge of queer theory nor the clarity of standpoint theory. However, on the topic of race, Jagose asserted that for a black lesbian, the thing of utmost importance is her lesbianism, rather than her race. Many gays and lesbians of color attacked this approach, accusing it of re-inscribing an essentially white identity into the heart of gay or lesbian identity (Jagose, 1996).^[36]

The criticism of queer theory can be divided in three main ideas^[37]:

• It has a failing itineration, the “subjectless critique” of queer studies
• The unsustainable analysis of this failing self
• The methodological implication that scholars of sexuality end up reiterating and consolidating social categories

Foucault's account of the modern construction of the homosexual, a starting point for much work in Queer Theory, is itself challenged by Rictor Norton, using the Molly House as one counter-example of a distinctly homosexual subculture before 1836.^[38] He critiques the idea that people distinctly identifying in ways now associated with being gay did not exist before the medical construction of homosexual pathology in his book The Myth of the Modern Homosexual.^[39]

Queer theory underestimates the Foucauldian insight that power produces not just constraint, but also, pleasure, according to Barry Adam (2000) and Adam Isaiah Green (2010). Adam suggests that sexual identity categories, such as "gay", can have the effect of expanding the horizon of what is imaginable in a same-sex relationship, including a richer sense of the possibilities of same-sex love and dyadic commitment.^[40] And Green argues that queer is itself an identity category that some self-identified "queer theorists" and "queer activists" use to consolidate a subject-position outside of the normalizing regimes of gender and sexuality.^[41] These examples call into question the degree to which identity categories need be thought of as negative, in the evaluative sense of that term, as they underscore the self-determining potentials of the care of the self – an idea advanced first by Foucault in Volumes II and III of The History of Sexuality.

The role of queer theory, and specifically its replacement of historical and sociological scholarship on lesbian and gay people's lives with the theorising of lesbian and gay issues, and the displacement of gay and lesbian studies by gender and queer studies, has been criticised by activist and writer Larry Kramer.^{[42][dead link][43][44]} Kramer reports on a retrograde book by Richard Godbeer, a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Miami, called The Overflowing of Friendship. Kramer criticizes Godbeer’s account of 18th century Colonial times. Kramer writes, “Godbeer is hell-bent on convincing us that two men in Colonial America could have exceedingly obsessive and passionate relationships (he called them, variously, ‘sentimental,’ ‘loving,’ ‘romantic’) . . . [men would] spend many a night in bed together talking their hearts out, without the issue of sex arising in any way.” ^[45] Kramer does not agree with this theory and believes that the notion the same-sex sexual relationships and experiences existed.

Another criticism is that queer theory, in part because it typically has recourse to a very technical jargon, is written by a narrow elite for that narrow elite. It is therefore class biased and also, in practice, only really known and referenced at universities and colleges (Malinowitz, 1993).^[36]

An initial criticism on queer theory is that precisely ‘queer’ does not refer to any specific sexual status or gender object choice For example Halperin (1995) ^[36] allows that straight persons may be ‘ queer,’ which some believe, robs gays and lesbians of the distinctiveness of what causes them to be marginalized. It desexualizes identity, when the issue is precisely about a sexual identity (Jagose, 1996).^[36]

Additionally, since queer theory refuses any reference to standard ideas of normality, cannot make crucial distinctions. For example, queer theorists usually argue that one of the advantages of the term ‘queer’ is that it includes transsexuals, sado-masochists, and other marginalized sexualities. How far does this extend? Is transgenerational sex (pedophilia) permissible?^{[citation needed]}

Post–queer theory[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

The problems of capturing identity and a subject in queer theory have not gone unnoticed. Fifteen years into the development, there is now a significant literature that demonstrates epistemological, methodological and political shortcomings attendant to its deconstructionist project.

At the end of the 2000s, some academics have proposed a post–queer theory to resolve the inadequacies of queer theory, namely to have real-life impact on the queer and broader communities.

Future directions: phenomenology and queer theory[link]

In response to the criticisms that queer theory has failed to address the real-life experiences of queer persons, several theorists have argued for a return to experience-based theorizing, though not of the kind seen in 1970s second-wave feminist theory. In order to avoid the trappings of a naive reading of experience and the inadequacies of identity politics, theorists, including Sara Ahmed,^[46] David Ross Fryer,^[47] and Sara Heinamaa,^[48] have posited phenomenology as a starting point for doing queer theory.

See also[link]

Theorists[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Adam, B. 2000. "Love and Sex in Constructing Identity Among Men Who Have Sex With Men." International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 5(4):325–29.
• Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology, 2006
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble, 1990.
• Edelman, Lee. No Future, 2004
• Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, volume I: La Volonté de savoir, 1976.
• Fryer, David. Thinking Queerly, 2010.
• Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, 1995.
• Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place, 2005
• Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory, 1996.
• Miskolci, Richard. "Queer Theory and Sociology: the challenging analysis of normalization", 2009.
• Preciado, Beatriz. "Manifesto Contra-sexual", 2002.
• Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings, 1996.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men, 1985.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet, 1990.
• Turner, William B. A Genealogy of Queer Theory, 2000.
• Wiegman, Robyn. Object Lessons, 2012.
• Wilchins, Riki. Gender Theory, Queer Theory, 2004.
• Rayter, Scott. He Who Laughs Last: Comic Representations of AIDS, 2003.

External links[link]

• Trikster – Nordic Queer Journal

v t e Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) topics   Academic fields Discourse LGBT topics in education Gender studies Lavender linguistics Lesbian feminism LGBT literature LGBT/Queer studies Queer theory Transfeminism   Community Culture Anthems Bars Bisexual community Coming out Community center Drag king Drag queen Gay friendly Icons Lesbian utopia Literature Music Neighborhoods Organizations Periodicals Pride Pride parade Religious groups Rodeos Same-sex relationships Slang List of slang Slogans Symbols Tourism Category:LGBT culture   Gender identities Sexual identities Gender identities Male Female Androgyne Bigender Boi Cisgender Genderqueer Girlfag and guydyke Intersex Pangender Transgender Womyn Third sex / Third gender Akava'ine Eunuch Fa'afafine Fakaleiti Femminiello Hijra Kathoey Khanith Mahu Mukhannathun Muxe Bissu Two-Spirit Hermaphrodite Sexual orientation identities Sexual orientations Asexual Bisexual Heterosexual Homosexual Ex-gay Ex-ex-gay Pansexual Polyamorous Banjee Gay Lesbian Queer Same gender loving Non-heterosexual Object sexuality Questioning Related Gender roles Human female sexuality Human male sexuality Sexuality and gender identity-based cultures   History LGBT history History of lesbianism LGBT History Timeline Social movements History of Christianity and homosexuality History of same-sex unions Pederasty Category:LGBT history Pre-modern era Adelphopoiesis Homosexuality in ancient Greece Homosexuality in ancient Rome Homosexuality in ancient Egypt Homosexuality in ancient Peru Homosexuality in medieval Europe 16th to 19th century Mollies Urnings 20th century Gay Liberation Homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust Inversion Sea queens Stonewall riots Festival of Light action White Night riots Queer theory 21st century Same-sex marriage Post-Queer Theory   Rights Legal issues LGBT rights by country or territory Africa Americas Asia Europe Oceania List of LGBT rights articles by region LGBT rights topics Adoption Civil unions and partnerships Hate crime laws Legal aspects of transsexualism Military service Parenting Same-sex marriage (Status Timeline) Socialism Sodomy laws United Nations/Yogyakarta Principles LGBT rights movements Gay Liberation LGBT rights groups LGBT rights activists   Sexual orientations – Medicine, science and sexology Biology Birth order Demographics Environment Heterosexual–homosexual continuum Homosexuality and psychology Kinsey scale Klein Grid Mental roots Neuroscience Prenatal hormones Sexual orientation change efforts Sexual orientation identity Timeline of sexual orientation and medicine   Social attitudes Prejudice Violence Social attitudes Anti-LGBT slogans Heteronormativity Gay panic LGBT rights opposition LGBT stereotypes Religion and homosexuality Transgenderism and religion Prejudice & Discrimination AIDS stigma Biphobia Heterosexism Homophobia Internalized homophobia Lesbophobia Riddle scale Transphobia Violence against LGBT people Corrective rape Gay bashing History of violence in the UK History of violence in the US Significant acts of violence against LGBT people Trans-bashing Unlawfully killed transgender people LGBT suicides Category:LGBT LGBT portal

Monique Wittig (July 13, 1935 – January 3, 2003) was a French author and feminist theorist^[1] who wrote about overcoming socially enforced gender roles and who coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.^[2]

Biography[link]

Monique Wittig was born in 1935 in Dannemarie in Haut-Rhin, France. In 1950 she moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. In 1964 she published her first novel, L'Opoponax which won her immediate attention in France. After being translated into English, Wittig achieved international recognition. She was one of the founders of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) (Women's Liberation Movement). In 1969, she published what is arguably her most influential work, Les Guerilleres, which is today considered a revolutionary and controversial source for feminist and lesbian thinkers around the world. Its publication is also considered to be the founding event of French feminism.^[3][4]

Wittig earned her Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,^[1] after completing a thesis named "Le Chantier littéraire"^[5] Wittig was a central figure in lesbian and feminist movements in France. In 1971, she was a founding member of the Gouines rouges ("Red dykes"), the first lesbian group in Paris.^[3] She was also involved in the Féministes Révolutionnaires ("Revolutionary feminists"), a radical feminist group.^[3] She published various other works, some of which include the 1973 Le Corps lesbien (or The Lesbian Body) and the 1976 Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (or Lesbian Peoples: Materical For A Dictionary), which her partner, Sande Zeig, coauthored.

In 1976, Wittig and Zeig moved to the United States where Wittig focused on producing work of gender theory. Her works, ranging from the philosophical essay The Straight Mind to parables like Les Tchiches et les Tchouches, explored the interconnectedness and intersection of lesbianism, feminism, and literary form. With various editorial positions both in France and in the United States, Wittig's works became internationally recognized and were commonly published in both French and English. She continued to work as a visiting professor in various universities across the nation, including Vassar College and the University of Arizona in Tucson. She taught a course in Materialist Thought through Women's Studies programs, wherein her students were immersed in the process of correcting the American translation of The Lesbian Body. She died unexpectedly of a heart attack on January 3, 2003.^[1]

Writing Style[link]

Wittig had a materialist approach in her works (evident in Les guérillères). She also demonstrated a very critical theoretical approach (evident in her essay, "One Is Not Born a Woman").

As a lesbian writer adamantly opposed to any notion of an inherently feminine writing. Wittig has most often been placed either in opposition to Hélène Cixous, or in a tradition of lesbian writers. Her ties to de Beauvoir and Sarraute are, however, equally significant, and position her work within a double history of feminism and avant-garde literature of the last half of the twentieth century. Like Duras and Cixous, she develops her work to a rethinking of women's experience in writing, while her staunch opposition to a notion of "difference" that would be based on sexuality or biology aligns her more with de Beauvoir and Sarraute.^[6]

The Straight Mind[link]

While Wittig depicted only women in her literature, she abhorred the idea that she was a "women's writer" She stated: Monique Wittig called herself a "Radical lesbian."^[7]

"There is no such thing as women literature for me, that does not exist. In literature, I do not separate women and men. One is a writer, or one is not. This is a mental space where sex is not determining. One has to have some space for freedom. Language allows this. This is about building an idea of the neutral which could escape sexuality".

Moreover, for Wittig, the category "woman" exists only through its relation to the category "man," and the "women" without relation to "men" would cease to exist. She advocated a strong Universalist position, saying that the expression of one's individuality and the liberation of desire require the abolition of gender categories.

Wittig identified herself as a Radical lesbian. In her work The Straight Mind, she argued that lesbians are not women because to be a lesbian is to step outside of the heterosexual norm of women, as defined by men for men's ends.

"...and it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for 'woman' has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women" (1978).

Wittig also developed a critical view of Marxism which obstructed feminist struggle, but also of feminism itself which does not question the heterosexual dogma.

A theorist of material feminism, she stigmatised the myth of "the woman", called heterosexuality a political regime, and outlined the basis for a social contract which lesbians refuse.

Bibliography[link]

Novels[link]

• 1964, L’Opoponax (prix Médicis)
• 1969, Les Guérillères
• 1973, Le Corps Lesbien (tr. The Lesbian Body)
• 1976, Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes, (with Sande Zeig) (tr. Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary)
• 1985, Virgile, non (tr. Across the Acheron)
• 1999, Paris-la-Politique

Plays[link]

• 1967, "L'Amant vert"
• 1972, "Le Grand-Cric-Jules", "Récréation", "Dialogue pour les deux frères et la soeur." Radio plays. Radio Stuttgart.
• 1985, "Le Voyage sans fin" Paris: Vlasta 4 supplement.

Short fiction[link]

Most collected in Paris-la-Politique. Paris: P.O.L., 1999

• 1967, "Voyage: Yallankoro" Paris: Nouvelle revue française 177: pages 558-563.
• 1965, "Banlieues" Paris: Nouveau Commerce 5: 113-117.
• 1973, "Une partie de campagne" Paris: Le Nouveau Commerce 26: pages 13-31.
• 1978, "Un jour mon prince viendra" Paris: Questions féministes 2: pages 31-39.
• 1983, "Les Tchiches et les Tchouches" Paris: Le Genre humaine 6: pages 136-147.
• 1985, "Paris-la-Politique" Paris: Vlasta 4: pages 8-35.

Translations[link]

• 1982, Barnes, Djuna. Spillway and Other Stories. La Passion. Tr. Monique Wittig. Paris: Flammarion.
• 1968, Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. L'Homme unidimensionel. Tr. Monique Wittig. Paris: Minuit.
• 1974, Three Marias (Isabel Barreno, Teresa Horta, Fatima Velho Da Costa). Novas Cartas Portuguesas. Nouvelles lettres portugaises. Tr. Monique Wittig, Evelyne Le Garrec, Vera Prado. Paris: Seuil.

Essays and criticisms[link]

Most collected in La Pensée straight.Paris: Balland, 2001 and in The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992

• 1967, "Bouvard et Pécuchet." Paris: Les Cahiers Madeleine Renaud-Barrault.
• 1979, "Paradigm." Homosexualities and French Literature. Eds. Elaine Marks and George Stambolian. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 114-121.
• 1980, "The Straight Mind." New York: MLA, 1978. Feminist Issues 1.1: 103-111.
• 1982, "Avant-note" for La Passion. Paris: Flammarion.
• 1982, "The Category of Sex." Feminist Issues 2.2: 63-68.
• 1983, "Les questions féministes ne sont pas des questions lesbiennes." Amazones d'hier, lesbiennes d'aujourd'hui 2.1: 10-14.
• 1983, "The Point of View: Universal or Particular?" (Trans. of "Avant-Note" de La Passion). Feminist Issues 3.2: 63-69.
• 1984, "Le Lieu de l'action." New York: Colloque on Nouveau Roman Oct. 1983; publ. in Digraphe 32: 69-75.
• 1984, "The Trojan Horse." Feminist Issues 4.2: 45-49.
• 1985, "La Pensée straight." Questions féministes 7, (1980). Rpt. in Amazones d'hier, lesbiennes d'aujourd'hui 3.4: 5-18.
• 1985, "Le Cheval de Troie." Paris: Vlasta 4: 36-41.
• 1985, "On ne naît pas femme." Paris: Questions féministes, 1980. Rpt. Amazones d'hier, Lesbiennes d'aujourd'hui 4.1: 103-118.
• 1986, "The Mark of Gender." Feminist Issues 5.2 (1985): 3-12. Rpt. The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy Miller. New York: Columbia University Press: 63-73.
• 1986, "The Place of Action." Three Decades of the New French Novel. Champagne: University of Illinois Press.
• 1989: "On the Social Contract." Feminist Issues 9.1: 3-12.
• 1994, “Quelques remarques sur Les Guérillères.” L’Esprit créateur 34.4: 116-122.
• 1996, “Avatars” L’Esprit créateur 36.2: 109-116.
• 1996, "Lacunary Films." London: New Statesman, 15 July: 102.
• 1996, “Le déambulatoire: Entretien avec Nathalie Sarraute.” L’Esprit créateur 36.2: 3-8.
• 1996, “The Constant journey: An Introduction and a Prefatory Note.”Modern Drama 39.1: 156-159.
• 1997, ”L’ordre du poème.” In Narrative Voices in Modern French Fiction, eds.M. Cardy, G. Evans, & G. Jacobs. Cardiff: University of Wales Press: 7-12.
• 2005, “Some Remarks on Les Guérillères.” In N. Shaktini, ed., On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political and Literary Essays, 37-43. Urbana: U. Of Illinois Press.
• 2005, “Some Remarks on The Lesbian Body.” In N. Shaktini, ed., On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political and Literary Essays, 44-48. Urbana: U. Of Illinois Press.

Films[link]

• The Girl by Sande Zeig, Wittig's partner and collaborator, is made out of her first English novel.

See also[link]

• Feminism in France
• Amazones d'Hier, Lesbiennes d'Aujourd'hui

References[link]

External links[link]

• Monique Wittig Literary Estate
• Monique Wittig Biography at GLBTQ.com

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this article if you can; the talk page may contain suggestions. (March 2010)

Judith Butler

Butler during a lecture at the University of Hamburg. April 2007
Born	(1956-02-24) February 24, 1956 (age 56) Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Continental philosophy, Third-wave feminism, Critical theory, Queer theory, Postmodernism, Post-structuralism
Main interests	Feminist theory, Political philosophy, Ethics, Psychoanalysis, Discourse, Embodiment, Sexuality, Jewish philosophy
Notable ideas	Sex and gender as social construction, Gender performativity
Influenced by Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, J.L. Austin, Luce Irigaray, Gayle Rubin, Monique Wittig, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss
Influenced Eve Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Judith Halberstam, José Muñoz, Lauren Berlant, Kate Bornstein Grace Ji-Sun Kim

Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s she held several teaching/research appointments, and was involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

Her research ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka^[1] and loss, mourning and war.^[2] Her most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy, exploring pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence.^[3][4] Politically, she is a strong supporter of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.^[5]

Biography[link]

Butler was born in Cleveland, Ohio ^[2] to a family of Hungarian and Russian ancestry.^[6] Her mother was raised in Orthodox Judaism, later turning to Conservative Judaism, and finally to Reform Judaism; Butler's father belonged to a Reform Synagogue since his childhood.^[5] As a child and teenager, she attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics where she received her "first training in philosophy." ^[5][7] Butler stated in a 2010 interview with Haaretz that she began the ethics classes at the age of 14 and that they were created as a form of punishment by her Hebrew school's Rabbi because she was "too talkative in class," "talk[ed] back," and was "not well behaved."^[5] Butler also stated that she was "thrilled" by the classes and chose to focus on Martin Buber. She also encountered the writings of Kant, Hegel, and Spinoza during these special sessions.^[5]

Butler attended Bennington College and then Yale University^[8] where she studied philosophy, receiving her B.A. in 1978 and her Ph.D. in 1984.^[9] Her dissertation was subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987).^[10] In Butler’s dissertation, she attempts to understand how gender comes into being and how gender comes to be seen as something naturally occurring rather than historical. Butler points out that it is possible for a person to choose the gender they desire to be, but society prevents us from choosing no gender.^[11]

She taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining U.C. Berkeley in 1993.^[2] She will join the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as a visiting professor in the spring semesters of 2012 and 2013 and has the option of remaining as full time faculty.^[12][13][14] In 2009 she received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award for her contributions to humanistic inquiry. The prize money of $1.5 million is supposed to enable the recipients to teach and research under especially favorable conditions.^[2][15] Since 2006 Judith Butler has been the Hannah Arendt Professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Switzerland.^[7] She sits on the Advisory Board of the academic journal Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture.^[16] Butler is also working on critiquing ethical violence and trying to formulate a theory of responsibility “for an opaque subject that works with Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Fredrich Nietzsche”.^[8]

Personal life[link]

Butler currently lives with her partner, the political scientist Wendy Brown. Butler identifies as an anti-Zionist Jew and is a critic of Israeli politics.^[17]

Overview of works[link]

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2010)

[edit] Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

Gender Trouble was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages^{[citation needed]}. Alluding to the similarly named 1974 John Waters film Female Trouble starring the drag queen Divine,^[18] Gender Trouble critically discusses the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. The book has also enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring an intellectual fanzine, Judy!^[19]

The crux of Butler's argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies—is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender.^{[citation needed]} This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as performative. The performance of gender, sex, and sexuality, however, is not a voluntary choice for Butler, who locates the construction of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject within what she calls, borrowing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, "regulative discourses." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," decide in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural."^{[citation needed]} Regulative discourse includes within it disciplinary techniques which, by coercing subjects to perform specific stylized actions, maintain the appearance in those subjects of the "core" gender, sex and sexuality the discourse itself produces.^[20]

A significant yet sometimes overlooked part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of "natural" or coherent gender and sexuality. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse.^[21] The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a “natural” and unquestioned “fact,” is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, unavoidably more cultural in their appearance, which can purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of a more fundamental sex. On Butler’s account, it is on the basis of the construction of natural binary sex that binary gender and heterosexuality are likewise constructed as natural.^[22] In this way, Butler claims that without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective.^[23]

Thus, by showing both terms “gender “and “sex” as socially and culturally constructed, Butler offers a critique of both terms, even as they have been used by feminists.^[24] Butler argued that feminism made a mistake in trying to make “women” a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler said this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations because it allows for two distinct categories: men and women.^[8] Butler believes that feminists should not try to define “women” and she also believes that feminists should “focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement”.^[25] Finally, Butler aims to break the supposed links between sex and gender so that gender and desire can be “flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors”.^[8] The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as a performance, not an essence, is one of the foundations of Queer Theory.^[8]

[edit] Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)

Bodies That Matter seeks to clear up readings and supposed misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.^[26] To do this, Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, a form of citationality, to work out a theory of performativity in terms of iterability:

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.^[27]

Iterability, in its endless undeterminedness as to-be-determinedness, is thus precisely that aspect of performativity that makes the production of the "natural" sexed, gendered, heterosexual subject possible, while also and at the same time opening that subject up to the possibility of its incoherence and contestation.^[jargon]

[edit] Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997)

In Excitable Speech, Butler surveys the problems of hate speech and censorship. She argues that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and that in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance.^{[citation needed]} She develops a new conception of censorship’s complex workings, supplanting the myth of the independent subject who wields the power to censor with a theory of censorship as an effect of state power and, more primordially, as the condition of language and discourse itself.^{[citation needed]}

Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state’s power to censor.^{[citation needed]}

Deploying Foucault’s argument from The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid.^[28] As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality it sought to control.^[29] Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic “I” is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech".^[30]

Butler also questions the efficacy of censorship on the grounds that hate speech is context-dependent. Citing J.L. Austin's concept of the performative utterance, Butler notes that words’ ability to “do things” makes hate speech possible but also at the same time dependent on its specific embodied context.^{[citation needed]} Austin’s claim that what a word “does,” its illocutionary force, varies with the context in which it is uttered implies that it is impossible to adequately define the performative meanings of words, including hate, abstractly.^{[citation needed]} On this basis, Butler rejects arguments like Richard Delgado’s which justify the censorship of certain specific words by claiming the use of those words constitutes hate speech in any context. In this way, Butler underlines the difficulty inherent in efforts to systematically identify hate speech.

[edit] Undoing Gender (2004)

Undoing Gender collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people for a more general readership than many of her other books. Butler revisits and refines her notion of performativity and focuses on the question of undoing "restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life".

Butler discusses how gender is performed without one being conscious of it, but says that it does not mean this performativity is "automatic or mechanical". She argues that we have desires that do not originate from our personhood, but rather, from social norms. The writer also debates our notions of "human" and "less-than-human" and how these culturally imposed ideas can keep one from having a "viable life" as the biggest concerns are usually about whether a person will be accepted if his or her desires differ from normality. She states that one may feel the need of being recognized in order to live, but that at the same time, the conditions to be recognized make life "unlivable". The writer proposes an interrogation of such conditions so that people who resist them may have more possibilities of living.^[31]

In her discussion of intersex, Butler addresses the case of David Reimer, a person whose sex was medically "reassigned" from male to female after a botched circumcision at eight months of age. Reimer was "made" female by doctors, but later in life identified as "really" male, married and became a stepfather to his wife's 3 children, and went on to tell his story in As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl which he wrote with John Colapinto. Reimer committed suicide in 2004.^[32]

[edit] Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself; in other words, the limits of self-knowledge. Primarily borrowing from Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Laplanche, Adriana Cavarero and Emmanuel Levinas, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject. She theorizes the subject in relation to the social – a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms, as precisely the very condition of that subject’s formation, the resources by which the subject becomes recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in the first place.

Butler accepts the claim that if the subject is opaque to itself the limitations of its free ethical responsibility and obligations are due to the limits of narrative, presuppositions of language and projection. "You may think that I am in fact telling a story about the prehistory of the subject, one that I have been arguing cannot be told. There are two responses to this objection. (1) That there is no final or adequate narrative reconstruction of the prehistory of the speaking "I" does not mean we cannot narrate it; it only means that at the moment when we narrate we become speculative philosophers or fiction writers. (2) This prehistory has never stopped happening and, as such, is not a prehistory in any chronological sense. It is not done with, over, relegated to a past, which then becomes part of a causal or narrative reconstruction of the self. On the contrary, that prehistory interrupts the story I have to give of myself, makes every account of myself partial and failed, and constitutes, in a way, my failure to be fully accountable for my actions, my final "irresponsibility," one for which I may be forgiven only because I could not do otherwise. This not being able to do otherwise is our common predicament" (page 78).

Instead she argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself.^{[citation needed]} Any concept of responsibility which demands the full transparency of the self to itself, an entirely accountable self, necessarily does violence to the opacity which marks the constitution of the self it addresses. The scene of address by which responsibility is enabled is always already a relation between subjects who are variably opaque to themselves and to each other. The ethics that Butler envisions is therefore one in which the responsible self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes the limits of its capacity to give an account of itself to others, and respects those limits as symptomatically human.^{[citation needed]} To take seriously one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation means then to critically interrogate the social world in which one comes to be human in the first place and which remains precisely that which one cannot know about oneself. In this way, Butler locates social and political critique at the core of ethical practice.^{[citation needed]}

Reception[link]

Many scholars have praised Butler's work. She has been referred to as "a big-deal academic, ... and oft-cited academic superstar",^[33] "the most famous feminist philosopher in the United States," "the queer theorist par excellence," and "the most brilliantly eclectic theorist of sexuality in recent years."^[34] In addition, Lois McNay argues that, "Butler's work has influenced feminist understandings of gender identity (1999: 175)."^[34] Others, such as Susan A. Speer and Jonathan Potter claim that her research has given new insight in several areas, especially in the concept of heterosexism. However, although Speer and Potter find Butler’s work useful in this respect, they find her work too abstract to be usefully applied to “real-life situations.” For this reason, they pair a reading of Butler with Discursive psychology in order to extend Butler’s ideas to real-world scenarios.^[35]

Others are more critical. Susan Bordo has chastised Butler for reducing gender to language, arguing that the body is a major part of gender, thus implicitly opposing her conception of gender as performed.^[36] Peter Digeser argues that Butler’s idea of performativity is too pure to account for identity. Digeser doubts that pure performativity is possible, suggesting that in viewing the gendered individual as purely performed, Butler ignores the gendered body, which Bordo also argues is extremely important. He also argues that neither an essentialist nor a performative notion of gender should be used in the political sphere, as both simplify gender too much.^[37] Martha Nussbaum has argued that Butler misreads J.L. Austin's idea of performative utterance, makes erroneous legal claims, forecloses an essential site of resistance by repudiating pre-cultural agency, and provides no normative ethical theory to direct the subversive performances that Butler endorses.^[38] Finally, Nancy Fraser argued that Butler’s focus on performativity has distanced her from “everyday ways of talking and thinking about ourselves … Why should we use such a self-distancing idiom?”^[39]

Commentary on style[link]

Butler has become famous in some circles for her "impenetrable, jargon-ridden prose,"^[40] which has also generated some controversy, according to Sara Salih, lecturer in English at the University of Kent at Canterbury.^[41] The author ascribes this to the fact that the concepts she writes about are "philosophically challenging, often ‘counter-intuitive’, and not always described in immediately accessible language."^[42]

Harvard professor Steven Pinker, has cited her work as an example of confused, Postmodernist writing that detracts from the public appreciation and support of art.^[43]

In 1998, Denis Dutton's journal Philosophy and Literature gave Butler First Prize in its "Bad Writing Competition," which claims to "celebrate bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles."^[44] Butler's 94 word long sentence, published in the journal Diacritics, for which she received the award was:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Dutton discontinued the contest after being criticized for its apparently hostile spirit.^[45] Butler responded to Dutton's criticism, with a letter to the London Review of Books and an op-ed piece for The New York Times. She argued that writing clearly can make the author too reliant on common sense and as such make language lose its potential to "shape the world" and shake up the status quo.^[46][47]

Stanley Kurtz, in turn, argued against Butler's op-ed in a letter to the New York Times titled, "Bad Writing Has No Defense."^[48] Stephen K. Roney also responded that "many—indeed, most—generally recognized “great thinkers” have been clear and lucid in their writing [...] Is Butler claiming to be deeper than all of them?"^[49]

Nussbaum's "The Professor of Parody" essay also raised the issue of Butler's style, calling it "ponderous and obscure" and "dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions...It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding."^[38]

In 1999, politically conservative literary journal The New Criterion cited Butler as one of a "triumvirate of absurd figures" including Homi K. Bhabha and Fredric Jameson, for bad writing.^[50]

Political activism[link]

In "No, It's Not Anti-Semitic," an August 2003 article published in the London Review of Books, Butler argued against statements by Harvard President Lawrence Summers who suggested that certain forms of criticism of Israeli policies is a form of anti-semitism. She responded by stating that it "will not do to equate Jews with Zionists or Jewishness with Zionism" and argued against the notion that Jews such as herself who were critical of Israeli policies are "self-hating." She also referred to Post-Zionism as a "small but important" movement in Israel. In addition, Butler also argued that, "a challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people only if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive or that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of Israel in its current or traditional forms.” ^[51]

In a later 2004 article, "Jews and the Bi-National Vision," published in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, Butler attributes this vision to the writings of Martin Buber.^[52] On September 7, 2006, Butler participated in a faculty-organized teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley, against the 2006 Lebanon War.^{[53][dead link]} Butler is also a strong supporter of the 2005 international economic campaign, BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions).^[5]

In June 2010 Judith Butler refused the Civil Courage Award (Zivilcouragepreis) of the Christopher Street Day Parade in Berlin, Germany at the award ceremony, citing racist comments on the part of organizers and a general failure of CSD organizations to distance themselves from racism, and from anti-Muslim excuses for war specifically. Criticizing the event's commercialism, she went on to name several groups who she commended as stronger opponents of "homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and militarism".^[54]

In October 2011, Butler attended Occupy Wall Street and, in reference to calls for clarification of the protesters' demands, said, "People have asked, so what are the demands? What are the demands all of these people are making? Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused, or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And the impossible demands, they say, are just not practical. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible — that the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible." ^[55]

Publications (incomplete)[link]

• 2011: The question of gender : Joan W. Scott's critical feminism : ISBN 0-253-35636-9
• 2011: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere : ISBN 0-231-15645-6
• 2009: Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? : ISBN 1-84467-333-2
• 2009: Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech : ISBN 0-9823294-1-5
• 2007: Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak) : ISBN 1-905422-57-1
• 2005: Giving An Account of Oneself : ISBN 0-8232-2504-6
• 2004: Undoing Gender : ISBN 0-415-96923-9
• 2004: Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence : ISBN 1-84467-544-0
• 2003: Kierkegaard's Speculative Despair in The age of German idealism (edited by Robert C. Solomon): ISBN 0-415-30878-X
• 2003: Women and Social Transformation (with Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim and Lidia Puigvert) : ISBN 0-8204-6708-1
• 2002: The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages : ISBN 0-8047-4453-X
• 2002: Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law : ISBN 0-8223-2713-9
• 2000: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek) : ISBN 1-85984-278-X
• 2000: Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death : ISBN 0-231-11895-3
• 1997: The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection : ISBN 0-8047-2812-7
• 1997: Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative : ISBN 0-415-91587-2
• 1993: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" : ISBN 0-415-90365-3
• 1991: "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (edited by Diana Fuss): ISBN 0-415-90237-1
• 1990: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity : ISBN 0-415-38955-0
• 1987: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France : ISBN 0-231-06451-9

Films and video lectures[link]

• Judith Butler. "Cohabitation, Universality and Remembrance" Birkbeck College, London. May 24, 2010 (Audio only)
• Judith Butler. "Hannah Arendt, Ethics, and Responsibility." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 97 minutes. 2009
• Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben. "Eichmann, Law and Justice." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 71 minutes. 2009
• Judith Butler. "Quién le canta al estado- nación." Buenos Aires International Book Fair. (Feria Internacional del Libro). Buenos Aires, Argentine. Video Lecture. 81 minutes. 2009
• Paule Zadjermann. "Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind." DVD. 52 minutes. Color. 2007
• Judith Butler. "Primo Levi for the Present." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 90 minutes. 2006
• Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Larry Rickels. "About Psychoanalysis." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 29 minutes. 2006
• Avital Ronell and Judith Butler. "The Contemporaneity of Philosophy." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 23 minutes. 2006

Selected honors and awards[link]

• 2010: "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World", Utne Reader^[56]
• 2008: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, University of California, Berkeley
• 2007: Elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society
• 2004: Brudner Prize, Yale University
• 2001: Rockefeller Fellowship^{[citation needed]}
• 1999: Guggenheim Fellowship^[2]
• 1998: The Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest^[57]

References[link]