Berkeley, Cal. -- Long before Gender Trouble caused a stir, and before she became a prominent theorist with a devoted graduate-student following, Judith Butler was a kid in a Cleveland synagogue who frequently got herself in trouble.
She disrupted classes. She made faces during assemblies. Finally, she was kicked out and told that she wouldn’t be allowed to return to the school until she had completed a tutorial with the head rabbi. The rabbi sized the 14-year-old up and decided that it was time for her to get serious.
So what do you want to study? he wanted to know."Holocaust historiography” was her quick reply. Martin Buber and existential theology. Whether German idealism was responsible in any way for the rise of fascism.
This after-school punishment laid the groundwork for a scholarly career marked by extreme diligence -- and a knack for making trouble."I was always talking back,” she says."I guess I’ve elevated it into an art form.”
Once a disciplinary problem, always a disciplinary problem. In 1990, as a 34-year-old professor of humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Butler published Gender Trouble (Routledge), a dense and ground-breaking book that challenged the conventional feminist wisdom and gave intellectual shape to the emerging movement of queer theory.
Gender Trouble was that rare academic commodity: an instant classic."Brilliant,""innovative,” and"subversive” are a few of the adjectives scholars have used to describe Gender Trouble. At meetings in the early ‘90s on gay-and-lesbian studies, the book and its author were cited in practically every session, with acolytes talking about working in the Butler paradigm of"performativity.""It is perhaps an understatement to say that Butler’s Gender Trouble rocked the foundations of feminist theory,” writes Sara Heinamaa, in a recent article in Hypatia, a journal of feminist philosophy.
Although she is trained in philosophy -- she received her doctorate in 1984 from Yale University -- Dr. Butler’s work has been influential in literary and cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, law, politics, and psychoanalytic theory. In the"Arts and Humanities” data base, which tracks scholarly articles and books, her work is the subject of more than 1,000 citations since 1990. Next year, she will deliver the Rene Wellek Lecture in Literary Theory and Criticism at the University of California at Irvine, an honor that has gone to Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, and Edward Said.
Now she is a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, and the author of two more books, published this spring. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge) is her analysis of contemporary controversies over hate speech. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford University Press) considers the relationship between the psyche and the social operation of power.
Drucilla Cornell, a professor of women’s studies, politics, and law at Rutgers University, calls Dr. Butler"one of the major thinkers of the late 20th century” and says Excitable Speech is essential reading for anyone concerned with the politics of free speech."She’s contributed a new theory for grappling with a very difficult topic.”
This special issue of The Chronicle offers some of the best and most representative journalism of our first 50 years — from the turbulence of the 1960s to the present moment of financial constraint and accountability. And it’s all yours, free for downloading. Download The Chronicle’s 50th-Anniversary Anthology.
Even though Dr. Butler’s work is highly theoretical -- one reviewer groused that her prose was so convoluted and opaque as to render her arguments nearly inaccessible -- she has achieved something approaching cult status outside the academy. In the book alt.culture (HarperPerennial, 1996), she gets a separate entry for her work in queer theory and is called"one of the superstars in ‘90s academia.” In the trendy British magazine The Face, she was cited as one of 50 people who have had the biggest influence on culture in the 1990s.
This conflation of intellectualism and stardom reached a zenith -- or perhaps a nadir -- in 1993, with the appearance of a fanzine devoted to Dr. Butler. Judy! was eagerly passed around among starstruck graduate students hungry for gossip, even imaginary gossip. The 17-page love letter to Dr. Butler and other"theoretical divas,” put together by an author who called herself Miss Spentyouth, raised professor worship to a new, if not absurd, level. At one point in her reverie, Miss Spentyouth -- actually Andrea Lawlor-Mariano, an undergraduate at the University of Iowa -- fantasized about a mud-wrestling match between Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, wearing shiny bikinis, with Dr. Butler as the referee.
The subject of the exercise, however, found it demeaning and offensive.
In fact, Dr. Butler is a very reluctant academic celebrity, turning down a recent interview request from The New York Times Magazine and actively discouraging the whole academic-star routine."My response to all this, for the most part, is that I’m just trying to learn how to sleep at night,” she explains."I make decisions in life based on whether it will help me sleep or whether it will ruin that sleep. And publicity always risks loss of sleep.”
She agrees to this interview on two conditions. The first -- “a hard and firm request” -- is that she not be asked about her personal life."You can say that I have a partner and a kid, but that’s about it,” she says. The second has to do with “that ‘zine,” which she’d prefer not to talk about but eventually does.
For now, she’d rather talk about speech as a"performative act.” Excitable Speech represents a continuation of her earlier work and an attempt to intervene in debates about hate speech and pornography, and about declarations of homosexuality by military personnel. Taking issue with Dr. MacKinnon, the legal scholar at the University of Michigan, she argues that speech is not necessarily a form of injury, and that state efforts to restrict it are misguided.
Speech, she says,"is always in some ways out of our control.” Existing within speech is the possibility of new meanings in new contexts. Name-calling, in fact, may be the"initiating moment of a counter-mobilization,” she writes.
“If you say that certain words wound because they have a history of injury encoded in them, and no matter who says them or how they say them or where they say them those words are injurious ... I find that really problematic,” she says. “Because many people repeat them as satire, they repeat them in jest or to defuse their power.”
Take the word"queer,” appropriated by gays and lesbians as a term of pride. When she was growing up, she dreaded the word. “If you were called it, you entered into a sort of social death,” she says."I lived in fear of it my entire adolescent life, and when it did get attached to me, I thought it was the end of my life, really.”
When queer studies emerged a few years ago, she says she felt a moment of conservatism."Then I got used to it, and it became quite thrilling.” This doesn’t happen in every case, but injurious words"can be owned and recirculated,” she maintains.
Dr. Butler views Excitable Speech as a response to a prevailing strain in feminism that views pornography as equivalent to injurious conduct against women. It is important, she believes, to separate feminism from the anti-pornography movement."I think it’s really crucial to rethink the importance of a feminist tradition of sexual freedom and the importance of a protected public sphere for the representation of sexuality,” she says.
As in Dr. Butler’s earlier work, Excitable Speech brings philosophical concepts to bear on troubling political issues, says Joan Scott, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study."One of the astonishing things about her is that while she’s grounded in philosophy, she knows how to read literary texts, psychoanalysis, legal cases. She’s done the hard work.”
On the day of her interview, Dr. Butler leads a three-hour graduate seminar at Berkeley on Hegel, working paragraph by paragraph through a chapter from Phenomenology of Spirit. A small, compact figure in wide-legged gray pants and a cobalt-blue blouse, she laughs easily and projects a sense of warmth and ease. She offers to leave some of her books on reserve at the library for the students, but warns them, in high dudgeon, that if anything happens to the books,"I’ll never teach this class -- or work with you on your dissertations.”
Several of Dr. Butler’s students cite her as an intellectual role model. She is a responsible, caring teacher, they say -- and it doesn’t hurt that she is a dazzling performer."She is the most ethical person I’ve encountered -- in how she handles departmental politics, in the kinds of work she encourages,” says David Eng, a former student of Dr. Butler’s, who is now an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University."She’s exemplary in that sense.”
In the seminar, Dr. Butler explains that historically, there have been problems in translating Hegel, with some trying to make him clearer than is perhaps appropriate."I want to suggest that the ponderousness is part of the phenomenological challenge of his text,” she says.
Little-known fact: Judith Butler’s first book was not Gender Trouble but Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987). In The Psychic Life of Power, she uses Hegel as a point of departure to analyze human subjectivity and its inseparability from the operation of social power.
“It’s an interesting starting point, because Hegel is a bete noire to so many people,” says Harry Brod, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Delaware, who draws on her work in The Masculine Masquerade (MIT Press, 1995)."He tried to explain it all in one grand narrative.” Dr. Brod argues that the roots of Dr. Butler’s notions about performativity lie in Hegelian philosophy.
In Gender Trouble, Dr. Butler’s approach was to question the very categories of gender, sex, and sexuality, using philosophical thinking to show that there is no easy or natural relationship among them. In effect, she"troubled” these categories, raising questions about the nature and limits of identity.
She argued that gender is a set of behaviors that are constantly performed and repeated; hence the idea of “performativity.""All gender roles are an imitation for which there is no original,” she writes, pointing to drag as an example of the artificiality of gender categories.
The notion of performativity had enormous theoretical and political impact -- though, to her dismay, it was often simplified and misunderstood. Performativity, she has said over and over again, was not the same as performance. In many quarters, though, it seemed as if she were saying that gender was a role that one casually chose --"that one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night,” she writes in Bodies That Matter (Routledge, 1990).
“She assumes readers have more knowledge of texts than they often do,” observes Dr. Scott, the social-science professor, who was co-editor with Dr. Butler of Feminists Theorize the Political (Routledge, 1992)."One impact of Gender Trouble was its wonderful way of rethinking sexuality. But for more-simple-minded readers, it became a political tract about performativity.”
George Chauncey, a historian at the University of Chicago and author of Gay New York (BasicBooks, 1994), says,"Many people had realized that the theoretical tools to explore questions of gender and sexuality were inadequate, but very few of us had the deep knowledge of these traditions or the insights that her work manifests.”
Precisely because she is so serious about her work, and about keeping herself out of that work, the fanzine came as a shock to Dr. Butler. She complained that the ‘zine, and a subsequent write-up in Lingua Franca, had reduced her work to sexual spectacle and undermined her scholarly aims -- especially damaging for a field as vulnerable as gay-and-lesbian studies. In a letter to the editor, she called the Lingua Franca story"an appalling and tasteless piece of journalism.” Routledge, her publisher, withdrew a full-page advertisement.
Today she says she is sorry that she didn’t know how to “orchestrate” her response better, to handle the matter with bravado."But, you know, a girl doesn’t have that all the time,” she says with a laugh."I was so theoretical in my presentation in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter that you barely got a glimpse of who I was, which then produced this desire to expose this hyperintellectual, you know, hidden person.”
Don’t hold your breath for her memoir, though. The confessional mode common in cultural studies and in gay-and-lesbian studies, although she admires those who do it well, is not for her."I’m out of the closet and have been out of the closet since I was 16, so it wasn’t a big deal for me. It wasn’t like I had a fabulous story to tell. You know, coming out is not a matter of saying you are gay; coming out is a matter of displaying your personal life to public view and doing it in a way that others could identify with.”
She claims that to some, her notoriety is a liability. Was she trying to become a popular icon? Did she have serious intellectual interests? She can’t remember how many philosophers have asked whether she’s still interested in philosophy."You know, what’s happened to philosophy, Judy?” she says, using the diminutive, which, to her mind, carries a patronizing quality.
“It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve allayed some of those fears,” she says."And no, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t mean Gender Trouble. I meant every word.”
