Understanding Judith Butler

Understanding Judith Butler PDF Author: Anita Brady
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473903351
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A rather perfect textbook at the right level. It opens up issues of transgender very well and is critical in just the right tone. Much needed in media and cultural studies." - Angela McRobbie, Goldsmiths Acknowledged as one of the most influential thinkers of modern times, an understanding of Judith Butler′s work is ever more essential to an understanding of not just the landscape of cultural and critical theory, but of the world around us. Understanding Judith Butler, however, can be perceived as a complex and difficult undertaking. It needn′t be. Using contemporary and topical examples from the media, popular culture and everyday life, this lively and accessible introduction shows you how the issues, concepts and theories in Butler′s work function as socio-cultural practices. Giving due consideration to Butler′s earlier and most recent work, and showing how her ideas on subjectivity, gender, sexuality and language overlap and interrelate, this book will give you a better understanding not only of Butler′s work, but of its applications to modern-day social and cultural practices and contexts.

Understanding Judith Butler

Understanding Judith Butler PDF Author: Anita Brady
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473903351
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A rather perfect textbook at the right level. It opens up issues of transgender very well and is critical in just the right tone. Much needed in media and cultural studies." - Angela McRobbie, Goldsmiths Acknowledged as one of the most influential thinkers of modern times, an understanding of Judith Butler′s work is ever more essential to an understanding of not just the landscape of cultural and critical theory, but of the world around us. Understanding Judith Butler, however, can be perceived as a complex and difficult undertaking. It needn′t be. Using contemporary and topical examples from the media, popular culture and everyday life, this lively and accessible introduction shows you how the issues, concepts and theories in Butler′s work function as socio-cultural practices. Giving due consideration to Butler′s earlier and most recent work, and showing how her ideas on subjectivity, gender, sexuality and language overlap and interrelate, this book will give you a better understanding not only of Butler′s work, but of its applications to modern-day social and cultural practices and contexts.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler PDF Author: Moya Lloyd
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745654800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
With the publication of her highly acclaimed and much-cited book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler became one of the most influential feminist theorists of her generation. Her theory of gender performativity and her writings on corporeality, on the injurious capacity of language, on the vulnerability of human life to violence and on the impact of mourning on politics have, taken together, comprised a substantial and highly original body of work that has a wide and truly cross-disciplinary appeal. In this lively book, Moya Lloyd provides both a clear exposition and an original critique of Butler's work. She examines Butlers core ideas, traces the development of her thought from her first book to her most recent work, and assesses Butlers engagements with the philosophies of Hegel, Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray and de Beauvoir, as well as addressing the nature and impact of Butler's writing on feminist theory. Throughout Lloyd is particularly concerned to examine Butler's political theory, including her critical interventions in such contemporary political controversies as those surrounding gay marriage, hate-speech, human rights, and September 11 and its aftermath. Judith Butler offers an accessible and original contribution to existing debates that will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.

Gender Trouble

Gender Trouble PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136783245
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
With intellectual reference points that include Foucault and Freud, Wittig, Kristeva and Irigaray, this is one of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years and is perhaps the essential work of contemporary feminist thought.

Bodies that Matter

Bodies that Matter PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415903660
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
The author of "Gender Trouble" further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most material dimensions of sex and sexuality. Butler examines how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the matter of bodies, sex, and gender.

Precarious Life

Precarious Life PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839763035
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.

The Force of Nonviolence

The Force of Nonviolence PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788732782
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.

Judith Butler and Subjectivity

Judith Butler and Subjectivity PDF Author: Parisa Shams
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 981156051X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 85

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book contextualises philosophy by bringing Judith Butler’s critique of identity into dialogue with an analysis of the transgressive self in dramatic literature. The author draws on Butler’s reflections on human agency and subjectivity to offer a fresh perspective for understanding the political and ethical stakes of identity as formed within a complex web of relations with human and non-human others. The book first positions a detailed analysis of Butler’s theory of subject formation within a broader framework of feminist philosophy and then incorporates examples and case studies from dramatic literature to argue that the subject is formed in relation to external forces, yet within its formation lies a space for transgressing the same environments and relations that condition the subject’s existence. By virtue of a fundamental dependency on conditions and relations that bring human beings into existence, they emerge as political and ethical agents capable of resisting the formative forces of power and responding – ethically – to the call of others.

Undoing Gender

Undoing Gender PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113588076X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler's recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern--and fail to govern--gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to "do" one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies "undoing" dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.

Bodies That Matter

Bodies That Matter PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134711417
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most "material" dimensions of sex and sexuality. Deepening the inquiries she began in Gender Trouble, Butler offers an original reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain "sex" from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She offers a clarification of the notion of "performativity" introduced in Gender Trouble and explores the meaning of a citational politics. The text includes readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud on the formation of materiality and bodily boundaries; "Paris is Burning," Nella Larsen's "Passing," and short stories by Willa Cather; along with a reconsideration of "performativity" and politics in feminist, queer, and radical democratic theory.

Giving an Account of Oneself

Giving an Account of Oneself PDF Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823225054
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
What does it mean to lead a moral life? In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice—one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject. Butler takes as her starting point one’s ability to answer the questions “What have I done?” and “What ought I to do?” She shows that these question can be answered only by asking a prior question, “Who is this ‘I’ who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?” Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory. In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought. Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn’t an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves? In this invaluable book, by recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as “fallible creatures” to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.