post-structuralist philosopher
, who has contributed to the fields of feminism
, queer theory
, political philosophy
, and ethics
. She is a professor in the Rhetoric
and Comparative Literature
departments at the University of California, Berkeley
.
Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University
in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s she held several teaching/research appointments, and was involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory
to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism
.
Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a "doing" rather than a "being".
There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.
Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.
Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
Perhaps the promise of phallus|phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it. "About Denis" (2009) edited by Judith Butler