The Judith Butler Reader

Judith Butler's work has challenged and changed the frames of reference within which people speak, think, and live categories of identity. Her innovative and politically far-reaching insight that gender is performative and that identity is a scene of construction continues to exert a crucial impact in numerous critical-theoretical fields, including politics, philosophy, feminist and queer theory, literary and cultural studies. Behind Butler's radical theorizations of gender, sex, sexuality, power, and "race" lies the urgent normative inquiry into the differential way the human is produced and effaced within the field of contemporary power. The Judith Butler Reader is a collaborative effort by Sara Salih and Judith Butler to bring together writings that span Butler's impressive career as a critical philosopher, including selections from both well-known and lesser-known works. Salih's introduction emphasizes the political and ethical importance of Butler's ideas, and she supplies editorial material that will assist students in their readings of theories that stand at the forefront of contemporary theoretical and political debates.

Acknowledgments. Introduction.
Section 1: Sex, Gender Performativity, and the Matter of Bodies.
1. Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault (1987).
2. Excerpts from Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987).
3. Excerpts from Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).
4. Imitation and Gender Insubordination (1990).
5. Excerpt from Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (1993).
Section 2: Fantasy, Censorship, and Discursive Power.
6. The Force of Fantasy: Mapplethorpe, Feminism, and Discursive (1990).
7. Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia (1993).
8. Excerpt from Excitable Speech: A Poltics of the Performative (1997).
Section 3: Subjection, Kinship, and Critique.
9. Excerpt from The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997).
10. Excerpt from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (2000).
11. Excerpt from Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000).
12. What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault's Virtue (2001).
Section 4: Making Difficulty Clear.
13. Changing the Subject: Judith Butler's Politics of Radical Resignification: Gary A. Olsen and Lynn Worsham.
Index