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Summer 2022 Event
The Judith Butler Deep Dive

The concluding lecture of the Judith Butler Deep Dive is now available as a standalone event. 

Please join us for this exciting (in-person) lecture by Professor Moya Lloyd (Department of Government, University of Essex): Thinking with Butler: Resonances and Reflections.

This lecture will focus on the contemporary relevance of Judith Butler’s work. It will briefly sketch the impact that their work has had on different fields, before reflecting on what makes that work relevant today. This will include consideration of what it means to be a ‘living author’ (Butler 2006: 281); of theorising as a mode of ‘making trouble’; and of reasons for the resignifiability of many of their ideas outside or beyond their initial frames. The lecture will draw throughout on specific examples of how Butler’s arguments resonate across current debates, including, in particular, in relation to gender.

Find out more and register.

The Gender Politics Reading Group is delighted to launch its inaugural 'Deep Dive' Event! The Deep Dive is series of 7 events, held over 6 weeks, designed to acquaint (or re-acquaint) academic staff and PGT students with the seminal works of a particularly notable feminist scholar. The Deep Dive will represent an unparalleled opportunity for time strapped academics to develop thoroughgoing and critical insights into feminist theory.

This year we will be exploring the work of Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler's work has revolutionised our understanding of subjectivity and identity, particularly with regards to sex, gender and sexuality. The contemporary significance of their work has been made apparent by their recent mention, and publication, in mainstream media.

Our exploration of Butler's work will occur through lectures and a reading list delivered and curated by Professor Moya Lloyd. Trained in the history of political thought, Professor Lloyd's research focuses on diverse aspects of contemporary political and social thought, including the body, gender, radical democracy, the human/human rights, the question of who counts, and the work of Judith Butler. She has written seven books, including 'Butler and Ethics' (EUP 2015).

This event will be hybrid: lectures will take place online, reading groups will take place in person (details provided following registration). There is scope for an online reading group if there is demand for this option (please email rebecca.hewer@ed.ac.uk).

With thanks to our event partners: genderED and Critique.

Timetable

Week 1: Doing gender, performative politics

Core readings:

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge 1990)

Chapter 1, ‘Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire’: 1-34. Chapter 3, Part iv, ‘Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions’: 128-41. Conclusion, ‘From parody to politics’: 142-49.

Supplementary readings and interviews

If you have the energy and/or time, reading the rest of chapter three would give you greater insight into how Butler arrives at her own position. Section iii on Wittig is particularly instructive. If you are interested in any of Butler’s earlier writings on gender, there are three articles that she published ahead of Gender Trouble that give an insight into the shaping of her thought. (There is some overlap between them):

• ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 35-49.
• ‘Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault’ in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell eds, Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1987): 128-42. Reprinted in the Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sarah Salih (with Judith Butler), (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004): 23-38.
• ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40:4 (1988): 519-31.

For a piece that attempts to situate Butler’s account of performativity alongside other accounts of performance, including West and Zimmerman’s idea of ‘doing gender’, there is my essay, ‘Performativity and Performance’ in Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth eds. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 572-92.

NB: the page numbers above are to the 1990 edition of Gender Trouble and not to the 1999 tenth anniversary edition, though the text itself is the same except for a new, second, preface.

Week 2: Gender performativity and drag revisited: the matter of bodies

Core readings:

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993)

Preface, ix-xii. Introduction, 1-16. [pp. 17-23, which complete the introduction cover the structure of the book, so could be set aside.] Chapter 4, ‘Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion’: 121-40.

Supplementary readings and interviews

For an alternative reading of Paris is Burning, see bell hooks, ‘Is Paris Burning?’ in her Black Looks: race and representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992): 145-56. The following interviews engage with themes from both Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter:

• Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, ‘Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler’, Radical Philosophy, 67 (1994): 32-39.
• Irene Costera Meijer and Baukje Prins, ‘How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview with Judith Butler’, Signs, 23:2 (1998): 275-86.

Some of the themes set out in Chapter 4 of Bodies That Matter are picked up in Chapter 8: ‘Critically Queer’. One of the most critical responses to Butler was Martha Nussbaum’s ‘The Professor of Parody: The hip defeatism of Judith Butler’, The New Republic, February 22, 1999 (https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody)

Week 3: Undoing gender, the ‘human’, and liveable lives

Core readings:

Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004)

‘Introduction: Acting in Concert’: 1-16. Chapter 1, ‘Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy’: 16-39.

Supplementary readings:

There are a number of really interesting essays in Undoing Gender, e.g., on whether kinship is necessarily heterosexual, on sex reassignment and transsexuality, on diagnoses of gender identity disorder and on norms and the regulation of gender that are well worth dipping into. The ‘Preface (1999)’, to the 10th Anniversary Edition of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999): vii-xxvi, provides useful context for some of the ideas that informed Undoing Gender, as well as offering her reflections on the writing of Gender Trouble.

Week 4: Mourning and vulnerability

‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4: (2003): 9-37. Reprinted as Chapter 2 of Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004): 19-49

Supplementary reading:

Sarah Ahmed, ‘Interview with Judith Butler’, Sexualities 19: 4 (12016): 482-92. The interview focuses on Gender Trouble and its impact in terms of shaping the field of Queer Studies but in it Butler also reflects on vulnerability. See also supplementary readings for week 5.

Week 5: Performativity, precarity, agency

Chapter 1, ‘Gender Politics and the Right to Appear’, in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015):  24-65. ‘An interview with Judith Butler’, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3304-an-interview-with-judith-butler  

Supplementary readings:

If you are interested in how Butler’s ideas on vulnerability and grievability develop, and their relation to agency resistance, then the following are worth a read:

• Chapter 1, ‘Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect’ in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009): 33-62.
• ‘Postscript: Rethinking Vulnerability, Violence, Resistance’, in The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind (London: Verso, 2020): 185-204. This chapter also picks up on the relationship between vulnerability and resistance covered also in the next supplementary reading.
• ‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance’, in Judith Butler et al. eds, Vulnerability in Resistance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016): 12-27.

Addendum: Psychoanalysis

Throughout her career Butler engages with and draws from a wide range of psychoanalytic writings (including those of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, and Joan Riviere). Very little of the above selection covers this aspect of her work, however.

• For those who might be interested, her initial thinking, particularly the notion of gender melancholia, which (in my view) is crucial to her understanding of gender, is set out in Chapter 2 of Gender Trouble (‘Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix’).
• Psychoanalytic themes (including her critique of the heteronormative assumptions of Lacanian theory) are then picked up again in several essays in Bodies That Matter (chapters 2, 3, and 8 in particular), Undoing Gender (e.g., Chapter 5), and Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
• Butler’s fullest engagement with psychoanalytic ideas can be found in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
• There is also a strong psychoanalytic thread running through her latest book, The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind (London: Verso 2020), as well as and Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), though neither focus on gender specifically.
• Chapter 4 of my book, Judith Butler: from norms to politics (Cambridge: Polity, 2007) provides an overview of Butler’s views on psychoanalysis and the gendered subject. It only covers texts published up to 2005.
• Vicki Kirby’s book, Judith Butler: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2006) details Butler’s engagement with psychoanalysis in some detail, including devoting a whole chapter to The Psychic Life of Power, but again only covers texts up to 2005.
   

  Moya Lloyd
  April 2022