HTH 1002, Spring 2018

1. Butler
HTH 1002 History of Thought II
Kara Heitz

2. Judith Butler (1956-present)
• American philosopher
• Feminism, queer theory, political theory, literary studies, and
queer politics
• Major works:
• Gender Trouble: Feminism & the Subversion of Identity (1990)
• Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993)
• Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997)
• Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004)
• Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)
• Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009)
• Parting Ways: Jewishness & the Critique of Zionism (2012)
• Influenced by Foucault’s The History of Sexuality

3. Gender Trouble
• “… it is no longer clear that feminist theory ought to try
to settle the questions of primary identity in order to get
on what the task of politics.”
• Destabilizing the category of “woman”
• The gendered body “has no ontological status apart
from the various acts which constitute its reality.”
• Gender as performative
• Performance v. Performativity
• JL Austin: performative speech acts
• Citational repetitions, speech acts

4. Gender Trouble
"One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does
one's body and, indeed, one does one's body differently from one's
contemporaries and from one's embodied predecessors and
successors as well."
• Deconstructing “sex” and “bodies”
• What is “the female body”? The “natural” body?
• Can we divorce “sex” from culture?
• Nature/Culture dichotomy
• Deconstructing Essentialist Identity
• Foucault: “How/what you sexually desire” seen as
central part of our essence
• Foucault & Butler: no innate identity (for both sexuality
and gender)

5. Disrupting Gender?
• Resisting gender norms in daily life
• Performative NOT performance
• Do we have radical freedom to “perform”
gender as we choose?
. . . [treating] gender deliberately, as if it’s an object out
there, when my whole point was that the very formation
of subjects, the very formation of persons, presupposes
gender in a certain way—that gender is not to be chosen
and that ‘performativity’ is not radical choice and its not
voluntarism . . . Performativity has to do with repetition,
very often the repetition of oppressive and painful
gender norms . . . This is not freedom, but a question of
how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.”
• Resistance through cultural production
• Politics of drag
• Contemporary art