Judith Butler
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Who’s Afraid of Gender Ideology? January 08, 2025
Judith Butler could be considered the godmother of transgenderism. Her 1990 book Gender Trouble advocated a socially constructed “performative” view of gender. (Butler claims to be “non-binary” and uses “they/them” pronouns.) Her latest book is her r...
Judith Butler vs. Judy! September 13, 2024
Warning in a 1992 interview against a “bad reading” of her landmark Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler insisted, “I decide what gender I want to be today” was not what she had meant. Such an understanding, by which gender would be something changea...
Phantasms & Fascists August 08, 2024
Judith Butler pioneered new approaches to the study of gender, interrogating the relationship between concepts of gender and the social construction of hierarchical relationships and sexual stereotypes in ways that have both enraged and inspired. Gen...
Who’s Afraid of Judith Butler? May 01, 2024
In January, the American philosopher Judith Butler and the South African artist William Kentridge took part in a public conversation in Paris about atrocity and its representations. Before an audience at the École Normale Supérieure, they spoke for n...
The Phantasmagoric World of Judith Butler April 08, 2024
One chapter of Judith Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, is called “TERFs and British matters of sex.” (“TERF” is an acronym for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.) The book has not landed well on TERF Island. “Butler flatters herself if s...
All That Is Solid Melts into Theory March 25, 2024
If there is one living figure who can be credited with popularizing the worldview according to which Hamas and Hezbollah are “social movements that are progressive,” while J. K. Rowling is “in a position of woeful complicity with the key aims of new ...
The Pope of Gender March 19, 2024
More than any other living academic, Judith Butler has seen her ideas seep out into the real world—in particular, a version of one of them. Butler’s big idea was that gender is a series of culturally meaningful performances ungrounded in any underlyi...
