Butler, Judith

Judith Butler's (b. 1956) intellectual base is philosophy; she is recognized as a postmodern feminist and the canonical queer theorist. Her work is important to social theorists, as she has contributed to the corpus of postmodern knowledge considering sex, gender, the body, and social identity. In accordance with postmodern feminist paradigms, Butler challenges the liberal and radical feminist tendency to employ the sex-gender distinction and thereby separate natural categories of sexual identity from socially constructed gender identities. While Butler identifies several propositions in postmodernism, particularly the French poststructuralism of Foucault that inform her work, Butler has questioned the appropriateness of referring to postmodernism as a coherent and consistent branch of social theory insofar as those labeled as such often do not read each other's work ...