Judith Butler

Bodies That Matter (Routledge, 1993) answers readers of Gender Trouble who took Butler to have argued the body out of existence. If gender is performative, what about matter? The reply is that materiality is itself produced and bounded by regulatory norms, and that performativity is citational, a repetition of conventions already in force rather than a costume picked each morning. The chapters read Plato, Freud, Lacan and Luce Irigaray beside Nella Larsen's Passing, short fiction by Willa Cather and Jennie Livingston's documentary Paris Is Burning, whose ball scene Butler treats as neither plain subversion nor plain capitulation, a reading much disputed since. Cleveland-born and Yale-trained, Butler joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1993 as Maxine Elliot Professor and co-founded its Program in Critical Theory. The Adorno Prize followed in 2012. Later books turn from gender to grief, vulnerability and public assembly.