Undoing Gender

Content warning: This section of the guide discusses anti-gay bias.

Judith Butler is a renowned theorist and philosopher, focusing on feminism, gender studies, and queer theory. They are often credited with pioneering the fields of gender and queer theory through their early work, Gender Trouble. Butler’s family is Jewish, and Butler cites an early relationship with Jewish philosophy in the aftermath of the Holocaust as an inciting component of their interest in philosophy. In the final chapter of Undoing Gender, Butler explains how they encountered philosophy through Spinoza, Kierkegaard, and Hegel, as well as how their interest in philosophy morphed into more distinct interests in the related fields of feminism, gender, and queer theory. At that time, Butler says that they did not know that they were already becoming integral to contemporary literary theory and that the bulk of the work that would normally be relegated to philosophy was already being pushed forward by these tertiary fields.

Butler’s idea of gender performativity first emerged in the essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” two years before the publication of Gender Trouble. Butler earned their Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Yale University in 1978 and their PhD in 1984.