ABSTRACT
Vendita galline km. 2 (1993) and Cazzi e canguri (pochissimi i canguri) (1994; translated as Uses and Abuses, 1995).
Contemporary US theorist and academic whose work during the 1990s became hugely influential in the interrogation of sexual identities, of the dualism of sex and gender, and the binarism of masculinity and femininity that Butler’s work puts into question, becoming instrumental in the forging of a new lesbian and gay cultural sensibility, aesthetic, and politic: ‘queer’. Butler became interested in the debates about the meaning of gender that occurred during the 1980s. Her first work, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-century France, had little impact but Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) became a bestseller, shaping debates about gender throughout the 1990s and catapulting Butler into the celebrity circuit of international star academics. In this volume Butler argued for the notion of gender as performance, as a kind of daily enactment that-by virtue of its performative nature-allowed for all kinds of different performances that rendered the conventional notions of masculinity and femininity as well as their anchorage in supposedly biological sex and acculturated gender problematic. Butler instantly became the celebrated theorist of ‘queer’ and while many attacked the seeming implication of the book that anyone could ‘play with gender’ as they pleased, the book was a landmark text in changing debates about sex and gender. Many lesbian performers began to interrogate gender identities in their work, among them Claire DOWIE and SPLIT BRITCHES, and ‘queer’ performers such as Kate BORNSTEIN gained new followings. In avant-garde lesbian and gay circles of the 1990s ‘queer’ became the new self-consciously in-your-face self-assertiveness of communities who felt that their identities and sexual activities had been the objects of censorship for too long. Answering her critics concerning the seemingly ludic and voluntaristic nature of gender play, which many questioned, Butler published Bodies that Matter in 1993, a text that argues that gender performance is about the ‘compulsory citation of norms’, which is much more constrained by socio-cultural and political factors than the original volume seemed to suggest. Butler has since continued to interrogate the relation between power, performance, and gendered identities in books such as Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997) and The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997). She has also published Antigone’s Claim (2000). Together with Joan Wallach Scott, one of the foremost lesbian feminist historians in the USA, Butler edited the influential Feminists Theorize the Political (1992). With Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek she has published Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000). She has taught at several universities in the United States and other countries, and is currently Chancellor’s Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
