The Phantasms of Judith Butler
Judith Butler, for many years a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at UC Berkeley might be among the most influential intellectuals alive today. Even if you have never heard of them (Butler identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns), you are living in their world, in which babies are “assigned” male or female at birth, and performativity is, at least on campus, an ordinary English word. Butler’s breakout 1990 book, Gender Trouble, argued that biological sex, like gender, is socially constructed, with its physical manifestations mattering only to the degree society assigns them meaning. The book is required reading in just about every women’s-, gender-, or sexuality-studies department. Butler has won a raft of international honors and been burned in effigy as a witch in Brazil. How many thinkers can say as much? A few decades ago, Butler was probably as famous outside academia for their impenetrable jargon-ridden prose as for anything they were trying to say. In 1998, they won first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest run by Philosophy and Literature, …
