Judith Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, where they have taught since 1993. They are the author, most famously, of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993). Their other books include Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020) and What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022). They gave an LRB Winter Lecture in 2011 entitled ‘Who owns Kafka?’ and appear on Adam Shatz’s podcast series, Human Conditions (sign up here).
Donald Trump would have us believe that his behaviour, his lawbreaking, is just fine, perfect even, and that the impeachment hearings are a kind of coup. What he has done he would do again. Indeed, he has already done it again with his open appeal to China to investigate the Bidens and his refusal to comply with the impeachment inquiry. Pundits such as Roger Cohen of the New York Times and...
The matters most in need of public discussion, the ones that most urgently need to be discussed, are those that are difficult to discuss within the frameworks now available to us. Although one wishes to go directly to the matter at hand, one bumps up against the limits of a framework that makes it nearly impossible to say what one has to say. I want to speak about the violence, the present...
This week two conversations with the feminist theorist and writer Judith Butler: one recorded the week Trump won the presidency in 2016 and one recorded a few days ago, as his presidency (just maybe) approaches...
Judith Butler delivers her lecture on the battle for ownership of Kafka and his manuscripts.
In 1987, three years before Gender Trouble made her the most famous feminist philosopher in the United States, Judith Butler published a book on Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage...
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