27 pages • 54 minutes read
Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory
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Key FiguresCharacter Analysis
Judith Butler
Judith Pamela Butler is a nonbinary an American philosopher whose work has shaped the academic understanding of gender and queer identity. They have also worked on issues of hate speech and censorship, violence, grief, and self-knowledge. Butler graduated from Yale University, receiving BA (1978), MA (1982), and PhD (1984) degrees. They taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California, Berkeley, where they were appointed Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature in 1998. They also served as Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Their best-known works are Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and its sequel, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), in which Butler elaborates on the theory of gender propounded in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.”
Criticism of Butler’s work has involved its academic focus, the difficulty of the writing style, and its inability to directly affect social change. Outside of their academic work, they are an engaged political activist, involved in queer, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-war movements. They identify as a lesbian and prefer they/them pronouns.
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and member of a philosophical circle that at one time included both Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Her book The Second Sex was influential in spurring second-wave feminism, arguing that gender is a social rather than biological category and that the idea of the “mystery” of woman was an excuse for men not to understand women and treat them as equals. This type of “othering” of a category of identity is not restricted to gender, but its role in gender differentiation is essential to supporting patriarchy. The Second Sex’s most famous thesis is that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This argument reflects the basic principle of existentialism that human beings (consciously or not) create themselves. In other words, nothing about the human self or human society is natural or necessary. People come into the world like pieces of clay, which are then shaped by social forces. Existentialist philosophers like de Beauvoir called on their readers to take control of, and responsibility for, this process of formation. Though the legacy of her work is inextricable from the feminist movement, her preoccupation was with existentialism and the ethical relationships between self and other.
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By Judith Butler
