Judith Butler Early life and education Where did Butler study? she attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics, Where did she go to college? Bennington College
When did she graduate from Bennington?
When did Judith Butler graduate from Bennington?
Judith Butler was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to a family of Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent. Most of her maternal grandmother's family perished in the Holocaust. As a child and teenager, she attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics, where she received her "first training in philosophy". Butler stated in a 2010 interview with Haaretz that she began the ethics classes at the age of 14 and that they were created as a form of punishment by her Hebrew school's Rabbi because she was "too talkative in class". Butler also stated that she was "thrilled" by the idea of these tutorials, and when asked what she wanted to study in these special sessions, she responded with three questions preoccupying her at the time: "Why was Spinoza excommunicated from the synagogue? Could German Idealism be held accountable for Nazism? And how was one to understand existential theology, including the work of Martin Buber?"  Butler attended Bennington College and then Yale University where she studied philosophy, receiving her B.A. in 1978 and her Ph.D. in 1984. She spent one academic year at Heidelberg University as a Fulbright-Scholar. She taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. In 2002 she held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. In addition, she joined the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Visiting Professor of the Humanities in the spring semesters of 2012, 2013 and 2014 with the option of remaining as full-time faculty.  Butler serves on the editorial board or advisory board of academic journals including JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. CANNOTANSWER
receiving her B.A. in 1978
Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. In 1993, Butler began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where they have served, beginning in 1998, as the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. They are also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School.

Butler is best known for their books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), in which they challenge conventional notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship. Their work is often studied and debated in film studies courses emphasizing gender studies and performativity in discourse.

Butler has supported lesbian and gay rights movements, and they have spoken out on many contemporary political issues, including criticism of Israeli politics.

Early life and education
Judith Butler was born on February 24, 1956, in Cleveland, Ohio, to a family of Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent. Most of their maternal grandmother's family perished in the Holocaust. Butler's parents were practicing Reform Jews. Their mother was raised Orthodox, eventually becoming Conservative and then Reform, while their father was raised Reform. As a child and teenager, Butler attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics, where they received their "first training in philosophy". Butler stated in a 2010 interview with Haaretz that they began the ethics classes at the age of 14 and that they were created as a form of punishment by Butler's Hebrew school's Rabbi because they were "too talkative in class".  Butler also stated that they were "thrilled" by the idea of these tutorials, and when asked what they wanted to study in these special sessions, they responded with three questions preoccupying them at the time: "Why was Spinoza excommunicated from the synagogue? Could German Idealism be held accountable for Nazism? And how was one to understand existential theology, including the work of Martin Buber?"

Butler attended Bennington College before transferring to Yale University, where they studied philosophy and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1978 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1984. They spent one academic year at Heidelberg University as a Fulbright Scholar. Butler taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. In 2002, they held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. In addition, they joined the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Visiting Professor of the Humanities in the spring semesters of 2012, 2013 and 2014 with the option of remaining as full-time faculty.

Butler serves on the editorial board or advisory board of several academic journals, including Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

Overview of major works

Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1988)
In the essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory" Judith Butler proposes that gender is performative. Because gender identity is established through behavior, there is a possibility to construct different genders via different behaviors.

Gender Trouble (1990)

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally, in multiple languages.  Gender Trouble discusses the works of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.

Butler offers a critique of the terms gender and sex as they have been used by feminists. Butler argues that feminism made a mistake in trying to make "women" a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler writes that this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations.  Butler believes that feminists should not try to define "women" and they also believe that feminists should "focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement." Finally, Butler aims to break the supposed links between sex and gender so that gender and desire can be "flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors". The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as a performance, not an essence, is one of the foundations of queer theory.

Imitation and Gender Insubordination (1991)
This is Butler's contribution to Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, a collection of the writings of gay and lesbian social theorists. Butler argues that no transparent revelation is afforded by the terms "gay" or "lesbian" yet there is a political imperative to do so. Butler employs "the concepts of play/performance, drag, and imitation to describe the formation of gender and sexuality as continually created subjectivities always at risk of dissolution from non-performance."

Bodies That Matter (1993)
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" seeks to clear up readings and supposed misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice. Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, which is a form of citationality:

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.

Excitable Speech (1997)

In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Butler surveys the problems of hate speech and censorship. They argue that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and that in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance.

Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state's power to censor.

Deploying Foucault's argument from the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid. As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th-century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality they sought to control. Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic "I" is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech".

Undoing Gender (2004)
Undoing Gender collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people for a more general readership than many of their other books. Butler revisits and refines their notion of performativity and focuses on the question of undoing "restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life".

Butler discusses how gender is performed without one being conscious of it, but says that it does not mean this performativity is "automatic or mechanical". They argue that we have desires that do not originate from our personhood, but rather, from social norms. The writer also debates our notions of "human" and "less-than-human" and how these culturally imposed ideas can keep one from having a "viable life" as the biggest concerns are usually about whether a person will be accepted if their desires differ from normality. Butler states that one may feel the need of being recognized in order to live, but that at the same time, the conditions to be recognized make life "unlivable". The writer proposes an interrogation of such conditions so that people who resist them may have more possibilities of living.

In Butler's discussion of intersex issues and people, Butler addresses the case of David Reimer, a person whose sex was medically "reassigned" from male to female after a botched circumcision at eight months of age. Reimer was "made" female by doctors, but later in life identified as "really" male, married and became a stepfather to his wife's three children, and went on to tell his story in As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, which he wrote with John Colapinto.  Reimer died by suicide in 2004.

Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself; in other words, the limits of self-knowledge. Primarily borrowing from Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Laplanche, Adriana Cavarero and Emmanuel Levinas, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject. Butler theorizes the subject in relation to the social – a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms, as precisely the very condition of that subject's formation, the resources by which the subject becomes recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in the first place.

Butler accepts the claim that if the subject is opaque to itself the limitations of its free ethical responsibility and obligations are due to the limits of narrative, presuppositions of language and projection.

Instead Butler argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself. Any concept of responsibility which demands the full transparency of the self to itself, an entirely accountable self, necessarily does violence to the opacity which marks the constitution of the self it addresses. The scene of address by which responsibility is enabled is always already a relation between subjects who are variably opaque to themselves and to each other. The ethics that Butler envisions is therefore one in which the responsible self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes the limits of its capacity to give an account of itself to others, and respects those limits as symptomatically human. To take seriously one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation means then to critically interrogate the social world in which one comes to be human in the first place and which remains precisely that which one cannot know about oneself. In this way, Butler locates social and political critique at the core of ethical practice.

Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) 
In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler discusses the power of public gatherings, considering what they signify and how they work. They use this framework to analyze the power and possibilities of protests, such as the Black Lives Matter protests regarding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014.

The Force of Nonviolence (2020) 
In The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind, Butler connects the ideologies of nonviolence and the political struggle for social equality. They review the traditional understanding of "nonviolence," stating that it "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." Instead of this understanding, Butler argues that "nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field."

Reception

Butler's work has been influential in feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, and continental philosophy. Yet their contribution to a range of other disciplines—such as psychoanalysis, literary, film, and performance studies as well as visual arts—has also been significant. Their theory of gender performativity as well as their conception of "critically queer" have not only transformed understandings of gender and queer identity in the academic world, but have shaped and mobilized various kinds of political activism, particularly queer activism, across the globe. Butler's work has also entered into contemporary debates on the teaching of gender, gay parenting, and the depathologization of transgender people. Before election to the papacy, Pope Benedict XVI wrote several pages challenging Butler's arguments on gender. In several countries, Butler became the symbol of the destruction of traditional gender roles for reactionary movements. This was particularly the case in France during the anti-gay marriage protests. Bruno Perreau has written that Butler was literally depicted as an "antichrist", both because of their gender and their Jewish identity, the fear of minority politics and critical studies being expressed through fantasies of a corrupted body.

Some academics and political activists maintain that Butler's radical departure from the sex/gender dichotomy and Butler's non-essentialist conception of gender—along with their insistence that power helps form the subject—revolutionized feminist and queer praxis, thought, and studies. Darin Barney of McGill University wrote that:

In 1998, Denis Dutton's journal Philosophy and Literature awarded Butler first prize in its fourth annual "Bad Writing Competition", which set out to "celebrate bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles." Butler's unwitting entry, which ran in a 1997 issue of the scholarly journal Diacritics, ran thus:

Some critics have accused Butler of elitism due to their difficult prose style, while others claim that Butler reduces gender to "discourse" or promotes a form of gender voluntarism. Susan Bordo, for example, has argued that Butler reduces gender to language and has contended that the body is a major part of gender, in opposition to Butler's conception of gender as performative. A particularly vocal critic has been feminist Martha Nussbaum, who has argued that Butler misreads J. L. Austin's idea of performative utterance, makes erroneous legal claims, forecloses an essential site of resistance by repudiating pre-cultural agency, and provides no "normative theory of social justice and human dignity." Finally, Nancy Fraser's critique of Butler was part of a famous exchange between the two theorists.  Fraser has suggested that Butler's focus on performativity distances them from "everyday ways of talking and thinking about ourselves. ... Why should we use such a self-distancing idiom?"

Butler responded to criticisms of their prose in the preface to the 1999 edition of their book, Gender Trouble.

More recently, several critics—most prominently, Viviane Namaste
—have criticised Judith Butler's Undoing Gender for under-emphasizing the intersectional aspects of gender-based violence. For example, Timothy Laurie notes that Butler's use of phrases like "gender politics" and "gender violence" in relation to assaults on transgender individuals in the United States can "[scour] a landscape filled with class and labour relations, racialised urban stratification, and complex interactions between sexual identity, sexual practices and sex work", and produce instead "a clean surface on which struggles over 'the human' are imagined to play out".

German feminist Alice Schwarzer speaks of Butler's "radical intellectual games" that would not change how society classifies and treats a woman; thus, by eliminating female and male identity Butler would have abolished the discourse about sexism in the queer community. Schwarzer also accuses Butler of remaining silent about the oppression of women and homosexuals in the Islamic world, while readily exercising their right to same-sex-marriage in the United States; instead, Butler would sweepingly defend Islam, including Islamism, from critics.

Political activism
Much of Butler's early political activism centered around queer and feminist issues, and they served, for a period of time, as the chair of the board of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.  Over the years, Butler has been particularly active in the gay and lesbian rights, feminist, and anti-war movements. They have also written and spoken out on issues ranging from affirmative action and gay marriage to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay.  More recently, Butler has been active in the Occupy movement and has publicly expressed support for a version of the 2005 BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign against Israel. They emphasize that Israel does not and should not be taken to represent all Jews or Jewish opinion.

On September 7, 2006, Butler participated in a faculty-organized teach-in against the 2006 Lebanon War at the University of California, Berkeley. Another widely publicized moment occurred in June 2010, when Butler refused the Civil Courage Award (Zivilcouragepreis) of the Christopher Street Day (CSD) Parade in Berlin, Germany at the award ceremony. They cited racist comments on the part of organizers and a general failure of CSD organizations to distance themselves from racism in general and from anti-Muslim excuses for war more specifically. Criticizing the event's commercialism, Butler went on to name several groups that they commended as stronger opponents of "homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and militarism".

In October 2011, Butler attended Occupy Wall Street and, in reference to calls for clarification of the protesters' demands, they said:

People have asked, so what are the demands? What are the demands all of these people are making? Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused, or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And the impossible demands, they say, are just not practical. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible – that the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible.

Butler is an executive member of FFIPP – Educational Network for Human Rights in Israel/Palestine. They are also a member of the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. In mainstream US politics, they expressed support for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Adorno Prize affair
When Butler received the 2012 Adorno Prize, the prize committee came under attack from Israel's Ambassador to Germany Yakov Hadas-Handelsman; the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's office in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff; and the German Central Council of Jews. They were upset at Butler's selection because of Butler's remarks about Israel and specifically Butler's "calls for a boycott against Israel". Butler responded saying that "[Butler] did not take attacks from German Jewish leaders personally". Rather, they wrote, the attacks are "directed against everyone who is critical against Israel and its current policies".

In a letter to the Mondoweiss website, Butler asserted that they developed strong ethical views on the basis of Jewish philosophical thought and that it is "blatantly untrue, absurd, and painful for anyone to argue that those who formulate a criticism of the State of Israel is anti-Semitic or, if Jewish, self-hating".

Comments on Hamas and Hezbollah 

Butler was criticized for statements they had made about Hamas and Hezbollah. Butler was accused of describing them as "social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left." They were accused of defending "Hezbollah and Hamas as progressive organizations" and supporting their tactics.

Butler responded to these criticisms by stating that their remarks on Hamas and Hezbollah were taken completely out of context and, in so doing, their established views on non-violence were contradicted and misrepresented. Butler describes the origin of their remarks on Hamas and Hezbollah in the following way:
I was asked by a member of an academic audience a few years ago whether I thought Hamas and Hezbollah belonged to "the global left" and I replied with two points. My first point was merely descriptive: those political organizations define themselves as anti-imperialist, and anti-imperialism is one characteristic of the global left, so on that basis one could describe them as part of the global left. My second point was then critical: as with any group on the left, one has to decide whether one is for that group or against that group, and one needs to critically evaluate their stand.

Comments on Black Lives Matter 

In a January 2015 interview with George Yancy of The New York Times, Butler discussed the Black Lives Matter movement. They said:
What is implied by this statement [Black Lives Matter], a statement that should be obviously true, but apparently is not? If black lives do not matter, then they are not really regarded as lives, since a life is supposed to matter. So what we see is that some lives matter more than others, that some lives matter so much that they need to be protected at all costs, and that other lives matter less, or not at all. And when that becomes the situation, then the lives that do not matter so much, or do not matter at all, can be killed or lost, can be exposed to conditions of destitution, and there is no concern, or even worse, that is regarded as the way it is supposed to be...When people engage in concerted actions across racial lines to build communities based on equality, to defend the rights of those who are disproportionately imperiled to have a chance to live without the fear of dying quite suddenly at the hands of the police. There are many ways to do this, in the street, the office, the home, and in the media. Only through such an ever-growing cross-racial struggle against racism can we begin to achieve a sense of all the lives that really do matter. 
The dialogue draws heavily on their 2004 book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.

Avital Ronell sexual harassment case
On May 11, 2018, Butler led a group of scholars in writing a letter to New York University following the sexual harassment suit filed by a former NYU graduate student against his advisor Avital Ronell. The signatories acknowledged not having had access to the confidential findings of the investigation that followed the Title IX complaint against Ronell. Nonetheless, they accused the complainant of waging a "malicious campaign" against Ronell. The signatories also wrote that the presumed "malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare" for a highly regarded scholar. "If she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties, the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed." Butler, the chief signatory, invoked their title as President Elect of the Modern Language Association. James J. Marino, a professor at Cleveland State University and a member of the MLA, started a petition to demand Butler's resignation or removal from their post. He argued that "Protesting against one instance of punishment is only a means to the larger end of preserving senior faculty's privilege of impunity. ... [Butler] was standing up for an old, corrupt, and long-standing way of doing business. The time for doing business that way is over. We should never look back." Some three months later, Butler apologized to the MLA for the letter. "I acknowledged that I should not have allowed the MLA affiliation to go forward with my name," Butler wrote to the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I expressed regret to the MLA officers and staff, and my colleagues accepted my apology. I extend that same apology to MLA members."

Comments on the anti-gender movement and trans-exclusionary radical feminism
Butler said in 2020 that trans-exclusionary radical feminism is "a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen." In 2021 they described the anti-gender movements as fascist trends and cautioned self-declared feminists from allying with such movements in targeting trans, non-binary, and genderqueer people. Butler also explored the issue in a 2019 paper in which they argued that "the confusion of discourses is part of what constitutes the fascist structure and appeal of at least some of these [anti-gender] movements. One can oppose gender as a cultural import from the North at the same time that one can see that very opposition as a social movement against further colonization of the South. The result is not a turn to the Left, but an embrace of ethno-nationalism."

The Guardian interview
On September 7, 2021, The Guardian published an interview of Butler by Jules Gleeson that included Butler's critique of trans-exclusionary feminists ("gender critical feminists" or "TERFs"). In response to a question about the Wi Spa controversy, Butler stated that "The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times." Within a few hours of publication, three paragraphs including this statement were removed, with a note explaining "This article was edited on 7 September 2021 to reflect developments which occurred after the interview took place."

The Guardian was then accused of censoring Judith Butler for having compared TERFs to fascists. British writer Roz Kaveney called it "a truly shocking moment of bigoted dishonesty", while British transgender activist and writer Juno Dawson, among others, observed that The Guardian had inadvertently triggered the Streisand effect, in which an attempt to censor yields the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of a topic. The next day, The Guardian acknowledged "a failure in our editorial standards".

Personal life

Butler is a lesbian, legally non-binary, and goes by she or they pronouns, but said in 2020 that they prefer "they", and indicated that they were "never at home" with being assigned "female" at birth. They live in Berkeley with their partner Wendy Brown and son, Isaac.

Selected honors and awards
Butler has had a visiting appointment at Birkbeck, University of London (2009–).

1999: Guggenheim Fellowship
2007: Elected to the American Philosophical Society
2008: Mellon Award for their exemplary contributions to scholarship in the humanities
2010: "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World", Utne Reader
2012: Theodor W. Adorno Award
2013: Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa, University of St. Andrews
2013: Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa, McGill University
2014: Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa, University of Fribourg
2014: Named one of PinkNews's top 11 Jewish gay and lesbian icons
2015: Elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy
2018: Doctorate of Letters, honoris causa, University of Belgrade
2018: Butler delivered the Gifford Lectures with their series entitled 'My Life, Your Life: Equality and the Philosophy of Non-Violence'
2019: Elected as Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Publications
All of Butler's books have been translated into numerous languages; Gender Trouble, alone, has been translated into twenty-seven languages. In addition, they have co-authored and edited over a dozen volumes—the most recent of which is Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013), coauthored with Athena Athanasiou. Over the years Butler has also published many influential essays, interviews, and public presentations. Butler is considered by many as "one of the most influential voices in contemporary political theory," and as the most widely read and influential gender theorist in the world.

The following is a partial list of Butler's publications.

Books
  [Their doctoral dissertation.]

Book chapters
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
  A collection of essays on the work of Avital Ronell.
 
  Details.

Notes

References

Further reading

Chambers, Samuel A. and Terrell Carver. 'Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics. New York: Routledge, 2008. 
Cheah, Pheng, "Mattering," Diacritics, Volume 26, Number 1, Spring 1996, pp. 108–139.
 
Kirby, Vicki.  Judith Butler: Live Theory.  London: Continuum, 2006. 
Eldred, Michael, [http://www.arte-fact.org/mtphysfm.html 'Metaphysics of Feminism: A Critical Note on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble] 2008.
  From the paper's abstract: In this paper we contribute to these [sexualization of culture] debates by presenting 'technologies of sexiness', a theoretical framework that draws on Foucauldian theorizing of technologies of the self and Butler's work on performativity.
  Pdf. Considers performativity from a linguistic perspective.
Perreau, Bruno.  Queer Theory: The French Response, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2016. 
Salih, Sarah. The Judith Butler Reader. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2004. 
—. Routledge Critical Thinkers: Judith Butler. New York: Routledge, 2002. 
Schippers, Birgit. The Political Philosophy of Judith Butler. New York: Routledge, 2014. 
Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

External links

 Biography – University of California, Berkeley
 
 approach the notion of affinity through a discussion of "Disruptive Kinship," co-sponsored by Villa Gillet and the School of Writing at The New School for Public Engagement.
 Interview of Judith Butler about their new book "Frames of War" on New Statesman
 Review of "Giving an Account of Oneself. Ethical Violence and Responsibility", by Judith Butler, Barcelona Metropolis Autumn 2010. 
"Dictionary of Literary Biography on Judith P. Butler (page 3)"
Interview with Judith Butler about politics, economy, control societies, gender and identity (2011) 

1956 births
Living people
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American philosophers
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American philosophers
American democratic socialists
American ethicists
American feminist writers
American literary critics
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
American political philosophers
American social commentators
Anti-Zionism in the United States
American Ashkenazi Jews
Columbia University faculty
Continental philosophers
Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy
Critical theorists
Critics of neoconservatism
Critics of religions
Cultural critics
Environmental philosophers
Epistemologists
European Graduate School faculty
Feminist philosophers
Feminist studies scholars
Feminist theorists
Framing theorists
Gender studies academics
Jewish American academics
Jewish American social scientists
Jewish American writers
Jewish anti-Zionism in the United States
Jewish ethicists
Jewish feminists
Jewish socialists
Jewish women writers
Jews and Judaism in Cleveland
Lesbian academics
Lesbian scientists
Lesbian feminists
American lesbian writers
LGBT academics
LGBT and Judaism
LGBT Jews
LGBT people from Ohio
LGBT scientists from the United States
Literary theorists
Literature educators
Mass media theorists
Metaphysicians
Moral philosophers
Non-binary writers
Ontologists
Palestinian solidarity activists
Phenomenologists
Philosophers from Ohio
Philosophers of culture
Philosophers of education
Philosophers of ethics and morality
Philosophers of history
Philosophers of Judaism
Philosophers of literature
Philosophers of psychology
Philosophers of science
Philosophers of sexuality
Philosophy writers
Political philosophers
Post-Zionists
Postmodern feminists
Poststructuralists
Queer theorists
Social critics
Social philosophers
Transfeminists
Transgender studies academics
University of California, Berkeley faculty
Wesleyan University faculty
Women literary critics
Writers from Cleveland
Writers from Shaker Heights, Ohio
Yale University alumni
LGBT philosophers
American women critics
Yvette Hardman Edmondson (born Yvette Hardman) was the editor of Limnology and Oceanography the premier journal of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (1968 to 1986) and was an aquatic scientist known for her research on bacteria in aquatic systems.

Education and personal life 
Edmondson graduated from the Walden School in New York City in 1932. She obtained her undergraduate degree in literature from Bennington College in 1936, which was the first class to graduate from Bennington College. In 1938, Edmondson obtained an M.S. in Bacteriology from University of Minnesota and minor in Agricultural Biochemistry with a thesis examining filamentous bacteria in lakes. Edmonson then moved to the University of Wisconsin Madison where she worked with Elizabeth McCoy and Perry Wilson. She completed a Ph.D. in Bacteriology in 1940 with a dissertation titled "The influence of solid surfaces upon lake bacteria", research that was later published in the scientific literature.

In the first term of her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin Madison, she met Walles T. Edmondson ('Tommy') whom she helped collect rotifers for his research. They were married in New Haven on September 26, 1941 while Tommy was working working at Yale University.

In 1990, a newsletter from the University of Wisconsin asked Edmondson about the lack of women in sciences in 1930s and 1940s and her response was:

Career 
Following her Ph.D., Edmondson was a teaching fellow in science at Bennington College and she remained there during World War Two. In 1945 a Science news article described her leave of absence from Bennington to work at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on salt water ponds. There she first worked with her husband quantifying how the addition of nutrients altered the growth of phytoplankton with the goal of estimating options for aquaculture; she focused on how oysters responded to higher levels of food that resulted from fertilization of the water. In 1937, Edmondson (then Yvette Hardman) was a visiting investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where she worked with Selman Waksman and others on marine microbiology. During the same period, Kenneth Thimann, Edmondson, and Babette Radner published their work on the production of anthrocyanins by cultures of Spirodela. In 1949, Yvette and her husband moved to Seattle when Tommy took a position at the University of Washington.

Edmondson worked with the ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson and co-authored Hutchinson's final Treatise on Limnology that was published in 1993. In 1971, Edmondson dedicated a special issue of Limnology and Oceanography to the life and accomplishments of G. Evelyn Hutchinson. Edmondson also memorialized Hutchinson in Limnology and Oceanography after his death in 1991.

From 1968 (volume 13) until 1986 (volume 31), Edmondson was the editor of Limnology & Oceanography, the journal of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography. In her work as editor, Edmondson was deliberate in sharing details about the scope of the journal, the types of manuscripts acceptable for publication, the key role of reviewers that may be unnoticed by a manuscript's authors, and a detailed accounting of each step in the review process at the journal. While some authors, e.g., the microbiologist Richard Morita,  were disappointed to learn their manuscripts did not meet the criteria for the journal, Edmondson's work as editor was recognized in the obituary Robert Paine wrote for the Limnology and Oceanography Bulletin upon the occasion of her death in 2006 when he emphasized her contributions to the evolution of the journal, a portion of which she had described in her final issue as editor.

Honors 
 Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanographys Distinguished Service Award renamed the Tommy and Yvette Edmondson Distinguished Service Award (2009)
 University of Washington award: W.T. and Yvette H. Edmondson Graduate Student Award for graduate student research in biological limnology
Distinguished Service Award, American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (1999)
Alumni award, Bennington College (1979)

Reference section

External links 
 Photo of Yvette Hardman in Bennington College's collection of entering students (1932-1939)

2006 deaths
1915 births
Academic journal editors
American microbiologists
Bennington College alumni
University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni
University of Minnesota alumni
University of Washington faculty Andrea Woodner is an American artist, architect, and philanthropist. She is the founder of the New York City-based Design Trust for Public Space, a nonprofit organization which "brings together government agencies, community groups, and private-sector experts to transform and evolve the city's landscape."

Early life 
Andrea Woodner is the daughter of Ruth Lyon and Ian Woodner. She has two siblings, Dian and Jonathan Woodner.

Woodner was raised in New York City and loved art from an early age, often visiting the Frick Collection during her teenage years. She earned a BA with a concentration in ceramics and sculpture from Bennington College in the class of 1970. Later, she took classes at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, then earned a master's in architecture from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

Career 
In 1995, Woodner founded the nonprofit organization Design Trust for Public Space to connect design thought and incubation to the public good of New York City. She chaired the organization's board of directors until January 2016, when she was succeeded by Eric Rothman. She continues to be active in fundraising for Design Trust.

Upon their father's death in November 1990, Andrea and Dian Woodner inherited the Ian Woodner Family Collection. In 1991, the Woodner sisters variously sold and donated 143 works of art from his collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, including drawings by Albrecht Dürer, Benvenuto Cellini, and Giorgio Vasari. In July 2000, the sisters donated nearly 100 works of art by Odilon Redon to the Museum of Modern Art, including paintings, pastels, watercolors, drawings, prints and illustrated books.

Woodner's art has been exhibited at the Palmer Gallery of Vassar College.

References 

Living people
20th-century American women artists
American women architects
Year of birth missing (living people)
Bennington College alumni
Harvard Graduate School of Design alumni
Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation alumni
American women philanthropists
20th-century American philanthropists
20th-century American artists
Architects from New York City
Artists from New York City
Philanthropists from New York (state)
21st-century American women