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Judith Butler

Poststructuralist · North America · born 1956

American philosopher who argues that gender is something people do over time under social pressure, not a fixed nature.

What it is

Judith Butler (born 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist, born in Cleveland, Ohio. Butler studied philosophy at Yale and taught at several American universities before joining the University of California, Berkeley, where a professorship in rhetoric and comparative literature came in 1998. Butler also holds the Hannah Arendt chair at the European Graduate School.

Butler is best known for the claim that gender is not a fixed inner nature but something done, through acts repeated over time. This idea, called performativity, has been influential in feminist and queer theory.

The main ideas

  • Gender as a doing. On this view there is no inner essence of being a man or a woman that behaviour then expresses. Gender is a series of acts whose repetition creates the appearance of such an essence.
  • Sex is shaped too. Butler extends the point to sex, arguing that even the division of people into male and female is reinforced by language and repeated practice.
  • Wider politics. Butler has also written about nonviolence, in The Force of Nonviolence, linking it to ethics and politics.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine someone noticing how many small habits they were taught, how to sit, speak or dress, and wondering which were ever a choice. Butler would say these repeated habits are how a gender appears at all. This is an illustration of the idea, not a passage from Butler's writing. The point of the example is that a habit can be old and shared and still be a made thing.

Books and moments

  • Subjects of Desire (1987) is the first book, a study of desire in Hegel and in French philosophy after him.
  • Gender Trouble (1990) is the best known and a founding text of queer theory.
  • Bodies That Matter (1993) follows it and takes up the question of sex.
  • The Force of Nonviolence is a later book on ethics and politics.

Questions and criticism

  • Agency. Even sympathetic readers asked whether a self made by repeated acts has room for real choice.
  • Politics. Some argued that treating politics as parody, as in drag, is thin as a way to change things.
  • Sex and nature. Critics who hold that categories such as sex belong to natural science reject the claim that they are shaped by language.
  • Style. Butler's dense, difficult prose has drawn complaints, and Butler has answered that radical ideas may need writing that unsettles easy clarity.

Close neighbours

The page on Simone de Beauvoir is a natural next read on gender, and Hannah Arendt gives her name to the chair Butler holds at the European Graduate School.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • G. W. F. Hegel · Her first book is on Hegel's influence in France, and she took up his view of recognition.
  • Michel Foucault · She built her account of how norms shape people on Foucault's work on power.
  • Simone de Beauvoir · She took up Beauvoir's line that one is not born, but becomes, a woman.

Other Poststructuralist thinkers

Sources we used

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