10/4/2023 0 Comments Judith butler birthdayThe semiotic is proposed by Kristeva as having subversive political implications in its capacity to disrupt the social order (language, for example), even if it cannot be the basis of a new order (for it to be so would entail a flirtation with psychosis). Kristeva thus shows herself to be ultimately Lacanian, even if she disagrees with Lacan on the role and status of the drives in Freudian theory. Rather than beginning by providing a general account of the argument in Gender Trouble, we shall focus on Butler’s critique of Julia Kristeva’s theory of the drive-based, semiotic, for it shows in a nutshell Butler’s general theoretical orientation.įor Butler, the semiotic is ultimately essentialist (and this is clearly a criticism), because of its connection to the drives – believed to be biological – and indebted, through opposition, to the socially sanctioned Symbolic: the Law of the Father, the sphere of the determination of ‘normal’ gender and sexuality. Perhaps partly stunned, despite her success, by the kind of criticism Martha Nussbaum mounted against her (Nussbaum 1999), Butler seems wedded lately to intervening in more public debates (on 9/11 and censorship, for example).Ĭritique of Kristeva – Critique of Essentialism In recent studies, Butler has engaged with queer theory, political theory and ethics. ![]() Her work has often been characterised as post-structuralist because of its concern to oppose all essentialist claims and to emphasise that gender relations are precisely that: relations, which implies that gender and sexuality are indeed constructed. Although an adept of literary theory and philosophy, it is as feminist theorist and inaugurator of queer theory that Butler has become well known. She sets the scene for this by invoking the idea of performative as the key to gender and sexuality as constructed. In the book, Butler critically engages with the key presuppositions of feminist theory and practice as regards gender and sexuality, arguing that these are irreducible to naturalised heterosexual categories. ![]() ![]() Thus – almost despite itself, because of the critical edge – it gave feminist studies, and subsequently, queer theory, a massive shot in the arm. She is the Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.īutler’s collection of essays, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, written in 1989, first published in 1990, and published with a new preface in 1999 sold over 100,000 copies world-wide and has been translated into a number of languages. Judith Butler (b.1956) received a PhD in philosophy from Yale in 1984, with a thesis on Hegelian influences in France.
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