Judith Butler is an American philosopher who has contributed to the fields of gender studies, feminism, and political philosophy. She has been described as “the most influential queer theorist in the world,” and is known for her criticism of norms, binaries, and social conventions.
Actually, Butler was born on February 24, 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio. Her mother was a pediatrician, and her father a surgeon who worked with patients with cancer. Butler spent her childhood traveling between her parents’ homes in Cleveland and New York City. At age 8 she became interested in philosophy after reading about Plato’s dialogues in a textbook at school. Her interest continued through high school and college where she studied philosophy at Yale University. After graduating she went on to study literature at Yale’s graduate school where she received her PhD in 1987 with a dissertation on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Philosopher taught at several universities before accepting a position at UC Berkeley in 1994 where she remains today as Maxine Elliot Professor Emerita of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature. She has also held visiting professorships around the world including Harvard University (2011), Columbia University (2012), and École Normale Supérieure de Paris (2013).
Butler’s early work focused on questions of gender identity formation within discourses of power relations, especially psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This led to an emphasis on questions around sexual difference in language, discourse and politics which became increasingly important in her later work as well as an interest in the question of agency and subjectivity more generally.
