ABSTRACT
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler argues that the categories of identity take social and symbolic form in a culture through repeated iteration. Sexual identity is performative. Butler is critical of forms of feminism that posit “women” as a group with a distinct identity, set of political interests, form of social agency, and so on. In developing her theory of performativity, Butler draws on Michel FOUCAULT’s theory of power. Arguing against a reductive view of power as the dominant force of law, Foucault conceives of power as a “multiple and mobile field of force relations, wherein far-reaching, but never completely stable, effects of domination are produced”. The ethical and political implications of Butler’s theory of identity politics have brought questions regarding the visual representations of the gendered subject into the foreground.
