Butler Matters


Book Description

Since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler has had a profound influence on how we understand gender and sexuality, corporeal politics, and political action both within and outside the academy. This collection, which considers not only Gender Trouble but also Bodies That Matter, Excitable Speech, and The Psychic Life of Power, attests to the enormous impact Butler's work has had across disciplines. In analyzing Butler's theories, the contributors demonstrate their relevance to a wide range of topics and fields, including activism, archaeology, film, literature, pedagogy, and theory. Included is a two-part interview with Judith Butler herself, in which she responds to questions about queer theory, the relationship between her work and that of other gender theorists, and the political impact of her ideas. In addition to the editors, contributors include Edwina Barvosa-Carter, Robert Alan Brookey, Kirsten Campbell, Angela Failler, Belinda Johnston, Rosemary A. Joyce, Vicki Kirby, Diane Helene Miller, Mena Mitrano, Elizabeth M. Perry, Frederick S. Roden, and Natalie Wilson.




Bodies that Matter


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.




Bodies That Matter


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.




Bodies That Still Matter


Book Description

1. New essay by Butler, not published elsewhere, and new essays by other important scholars showing how they engage with Butler, such as Nancy, Cavarero, Fischer-Lichte, David-M nard. 2. Interdisciplinary focus on how Butler's ideas have been taken up in, and are relevant for various disciplines. 3. Intergenerational approach in which the new generation of critical theorists is staged besides established names.




Material Girls


Book Description

'A clear, concise, easy-to-read account of the issues between sex, gender and feminism . . . an important book' Evening Standard 'A call for cool heads at a time of great heat and a vital reminder that revolutions don't always end well' Sunday Times Material Girls is a timely and trenchant critique of the influential theory that we all have an inner feeling known as a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our biological sex. Professor Kathleen Stock surveys the philosophical ideas that led to this point, and closely interrogates each one, from De Beauvoir's statement that, 'One is not born, but rather becomes a woman' (an assertion she contends has been misinterpreted and repurposed), to Judith Butler's claim that language creates biological reality, rather than describing it. She looks at biological sex in a range of important contexts, including women-only spaces and resources, healthcare, epidemiology, political organization and data collection. Material Girls makes a clear, humane and feminist case for our retaining the ability to discuss reality, and concludes with a positive vision for the future, in which trans rights activists and feminists can collaborate to achieve some of their political aims.




How to Notice


Book Description

Slow down, notice more in small moments with small things. In How to Notice, Melissa A. Butler draws on over two decades of experience as an educator, leader, speaker, and facilitator of noticing-based practices to share a refreshing guide for expanded awareness, delight, and well-being. As whimsical as it is serious, How to Notice takes you on a slow and surprising journey that starts small (find an object, look closely, wonder about it), and steadily grows as you notice things you didn't quite expect and discover new layers of awareness deep inside yourself. Organized as a series of twenty small moments for practice over time, readers are invited to notice at their own pace and slowly integrate this into their daily lives. There's plenty of space to rest and reflect along the way, and the book includes supplemental material for extension and application. Reading How to Notice is an embodiment of play, with each moment of practice inviting readers to try something new, shift their perspective, wonder with whimsy, and find surprise in the smallest of things. How to Notice is an exploration of overlaps: small-big, whimsy-serious, poetic-practical, simple-deep, you-me, nothing-everything. The book is gentle in its balance of guided direction and open-ended play. The tone is accessible as it infuses light, easy, meandering energy into the ideas it shares. The text speaks into being the playful whimsy of its practices in ways that are subtle and surprising. Readers may bring any of their other practices with them (mindfulness, yoga, prayer, walking, meditation, relaxation, appreciation) and no prior experiences, practices, or understandings are required. No matter what you already know or already practice, this book offers a unique approach that will inspire you to explore and reimagine various practices in your life. How to Notice is a book for right now. This is a decade for play and reinvention, for serious work done lightly, for deep connection to the roots of ourselves and each other, for new ways of understanding energy and matter, for liberation of being, for transforming everything from a place of deep and radical alignment with the wholeness of who we are. Because How to Notice is a small book written in small moments to practice over time, it is a good gift book for friends, family, and clients. The book itself feels like a small object-a friend to hold and keep close. It's a gentle offering, a supportive nudge to help people find more lightness of being in their daily lives. This is a book for conversations and collaborative practice. Perfect for a book club, creative class, mindfulness community, or other small group looking for fresh methods and ideas to support ongoing practice towards deeper collective well-being. Ideal for well-being practitioners, therapists and coaches, educators, creatives, collectors and curators, caregivers, leaders. "An invitation to slowness." "A mental and spiritual retreat." "Joyful practice of observation." "Beautifully written and innocently approachable." "If you want to know yourself better and enjoy life more - grab and read this book..."




Judith Butler and Organization Theory


Book Description

2020 will mark thirty years since the first publication of Judith Butler’s ground-breaking book, Gender Trouble. Here, and in subsequent work, Butler argues that gender and other forms of identity can best be understood as performative acts. These acts are what bring our subjectivities into existence, enabling us to be recognized as viable employable social beings, worthy of rights, responsibilities and respect. The three decades since the publication of Gender Trouble have witnessed Butler become one of the most widely cited and controversial figures in contemporary feminist thinking. While it is only in her most recent work that Butler has engaged directly with themes such as work and organization, her writing has profound implications for thinking, and acting, on the relationship between power, recognition and organization. Whilst her ideas have made important in-roads into work, organization and gender studies that are discussed here, there is considerable scope to explore further avenues that her concepts and theories open up. These inroads and avenues are the focus of this book. Judith Butler and Organization Theory makes a substantial contribution to the analysis of gender, work and organization. It not only covers central issues in Butler’s work, it also offers a close reading of the complexities and nuances in her thought. It does so by ‘reading’ Butler as a theorist of organization, whose work resonates with scholars, practitioners and activists concerned to understand and engage with organizational life, organization and organizing. Drawing from a range of illustrative examples, the book examines key texts or ‘moments’ in the development of Butler’s writing to date, positing her as a thinker concerned to understand and address the ways in which our most basic desire for recognition comes to be organized within the context of contemporary labour markets and workplaces. It examines insights from Butler’s work, and the philosophical ideas she draws on, considering the impact of these on work, organization and management studies thus far; it also explores some of the many ways in which her thinking might be mobilized in future, considering what scope there is for a non-violent ethics of organization, and for a (re)assembling of the relationship between vulnerability and resistance within and through organizational politics.




Gender Trouble


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.




Undoing Gender


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.




The Force of Nonviolence


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.