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 or base their work on a similar set of presuppositions. Her articulations of the postmodern subject and her treatment of the body and sexuality have rendered her work particularly influential.

Specifically, she has offered an extensive critique of the modernist assumption of a stable, already-constituted subject pregiven as a point of departure for theorizing or for sustained political action. Such a subject is seen as constituted outside of power, confronting power. The modernist claim to a position beyond power, she argues, depends on power, on a kind of cultural imperialism, for its legitimacy. Moreover, Butler refuses to assume a stable subject separate from power; rather, the subject is constituted by the organizing principles of material practices and the institutional arrangements of a power matrix.

[Page 73]In her view, the subject is not a ready-made thing, but a process of signification within a system of discursive possibilities that are regulated, normative, exclusionary, and often habitual. She does not negate or dispense with the notion of the subject altogether, but instead seeks to understand and critique the process of the social production and regulation of certain forms of subjectivity. Significantly, she argues against the notion that power ceases at the moment the subject is constituted; as a signifying process, the subject is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced again and again. It is in these two notions—of the subject as always constituted by power and the subject as a resignifying process—that Butler's notion of the subject as agent with “permanent possibility” emerges and with that, possibility of critical, transformative, and subversive strategies.

In accordance with her paradigm of power and identity, Butler locates the female/male binary in hegemonic constructions of sexuality and identity, thereby challenging the notion that an essential difference exists between biological sex and socially constructed gender. Her work attempts to deconstruct the accepted relationship between sex and gender, to expose the socially constructed contours of heterosexuality and the female/male binary.

In her view, one can never return the female or male body to a “pure” or natural essence. Sex is always already gendered, as observation and interpretation of the body are two components of a singular process insofar as the body is intelligible only within a socially determined context. Indeed, the concept of naturalized male and female sexual categories is already socially constructed in gendered language. The body is made intelligible through this same gendered language. With the birth of a baby, the body is assigned to a predetermined male or female sexual category. If assigned female, she is immediately called a “girl,” wrapped in pink or pastel blankets, given a name that signifies her femininity, and described using feminine gendered language and female sexual categories. Her acts become stereotypically sweet, soft, and charming. Butler (1997) asserts that while language does not bring the body into being in a literal sense, it does make a certain social existence of the body possible insofar as the body is interpellated within the terms of language. According to Butler, one exists not by being recognized, but by being recognizable. The terms that constitute the identifiable body are conventional, ritualistic, and naturalized.

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