Judith Butler argued that gender is something repeatedly done rather than simply possessed
A teenager handed rabbinical ethics lessons as punishment for talking too much in Hebrew school went on to write Gender Trouble. Published in 1990, Judith Butler's book sold over 100,000 copies and made the idea of gender as performance one of the foundations of queer theory.
Butler was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 24 February 1956, to Reform Jewish parents of Hungarian and Russian descent. At 14 the rabbi at their Hebrew school assigned special ethics tutorials as a penalty for clowning in class, and Butler was delighted. Asked what to study, the teenager wanted to know why Spinoza had been excommunicated, whether German Idealism bore some blame for Nazism, and how to make sense of Martin Buber's existential theology.
After Bennington College, Butler moved to Yale, earning a philosophy degree in 1978 and a doctorate in 1984 with a dissertation on desire in Hegel, Kojève, Hyppolite and Sartre; a Fulbright year at Heidelberg came in 1979. That thesis became their first book in 1987. Posts at Wesleyan, George Washington and Johns Hopkins, where tenure arrived in 1992, led to the rhetoric department at Berkeley in 1993 and the Maxine Elliot professorship in 1998.
The core idea surfaced in a 1988 essay. Gender, Butler proposed, is not a fixed identity but a set of acts repeated over time, and it is the repetition that creates the look of a stable core; repeat differently, and it can change. Gender Trouble went further, arguing that feminism erred in treating women as one timeless group with shared traits, because that reinforced the binary it meant to challenge. Bodies That Matter, in 1993, answered readers who took performativity to mean picking a gender each morning. Drawing on Derrida, Butler stressed that the repetition happens under constraint and is what makes a subject possible at all.
Excitable Speech turned to hate speech and censorship. Following Foucault, Butler argued that banning language tends to spread the very words it targets, and that hate speech is only defined after the fact by state authority, which hands the state control over the limits of acceptable talk. On those grounds they faulted Catharine MacKinnon's case against pornography for accepting the state's power to censor without question.
Source: Judith Butler
