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International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, Vol. 6, Nos. 1/2, 2001

Introduction to the Special Issue: Butler Matters:Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and QueerStudies SinceGender Trouble

Warren J. Blumenfeld1,3 and Margaret Soenser Breen2

Since the publication ofGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentityin 1990, Judith Butler has affected (and effectively shaped) many differentfields of inquiry, including gender and sexuality studies, feminist and queer theory,and cultural studies. Both within and outside the academy, her work has had aprofound influence on people’s understandings of gender and sexuality, corporealpolitics, and political action.

Butler is, however, not without her critics. In 1999, distinguished philosopherand classicist Martha Nussbaum delivered a scathing attack on Butler inThe NewRepublic. Nussbaum declared that Butler’s work on destabilized gender categoriesrepudiated the feminist charge to improve the real, material conditions of women;she dismissed Butler’s writing as inaccessible and irresponsible wordplay. Whilethis special double issue of theInternational Journal of Sexuality and GenderStudiesbegins and ends with essays that forcefully answer these claims, one mayalso turn to Butler herself for a response to Nussbaum. In her 1999 preface toGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler writes, “Despitethe dislocation of the subject that the text performs, there is a person here: I wentto many meetings, bars, and marches and saw many kinds of genders, understoodmyself to be at the crossroads of some of them, and encountered sexuality atseveral of its cultural edges” (p. xvi). There is, in other words, an experientialground to Butler’s work; there is a vital link between her social concern andher writing. As the articles in this collection consistently demonstrate, an acutepolitical awareness of material reality and historical circumstance informs hertheory.

1Editor, International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies.2Department of English, University of Connecticut.3Correspondence should be directed to Warren J. Blumenfeld, P.O. Box 929, Northampton, MA 01061-0929; e-mail: blumenfeld@educ.umass.edu.

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Judith Butler received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1984; her disserta-tion is titled “Recovery and Invention: The Projects of Desire in Hegel, Koj`eve,Hyppolite, and Sartre.” She is currently Maxine Eliot Professor in Rhetoric andComparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Rhetoric at the Universityof California at Berkeley, and is past Professor of Humanities at Johns HopkinsUniversity. Her credentials and honors are seemingly endless. Her scholastic hon-ors include a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship, a Duncan Fellowship for Women inPhilosophy, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship.She is the recipient of a Critic’s Choice Award forGender Trouble: Feminism andthe Subversion of Identity, a Crompton-Noll Award, and an Award for Excellencein Undergraduate Teaching at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to the im-pressive list of published books that appears at the end of this “Introduction” (see“Judith Butler: Selected Writings—Books”), her work has appeared in a numberof collections and distinguished journals includingTelos, Philosophical Review,Berkshire Review, International Philosophical Quarterly, Praxis, Diacritics, Rad-ical Philosophy, History and Theory, Ethics, GLQ, differences, Transition, andYale Literary Magazine.

Given this prolific output and the profound impact that this work has hadon any number of disciplines, it is perhaps unsurprising that a significantly highproportion of the essays that are submitted to theInternational Journal of Sexualityand Gender Studiesfor consideration directly reference Judith Butler. So, in thefall of 1999, on the ten-year anniversary of the publication ofGender Trouble:Feminism and the Subversion of Identityand on the release of the book’s secondedition, we felt it fitting to dedicate a special double issue of the Journal to theimpact of Judith Butler and her work. We distributed on a number of worldwidewebsites a “Call for Papers” targeting individuals who had a special interest in,generally, feminist, queer, and cultural studies, and specifically, the work of JudithButler. We were enormously gratified by the depth of interest in this project and bythe quality of submissions we received. The essays included in this volume attestto the enormous impact Judith Butler’s work has had across disciplines, and theseessays will, we believe, advance the discourse for many years to come.

This essay collection considers a number of Butler’s works, includingGen-der Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity(1990, 1999),Bodies thatMatter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”(1993),Excitable Speech: A Politics ofthe Performative(1997), andThe Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection(1997a). The essays themselves range from analyses of Butlerian theory, to articleson archaeology, film, and Renaissance representations of the body, to politicizedexaminations of bodily abjection, performativity, and poststructuralism. We divideButler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies SinceGen-der Trouble into four distinct though overlapping sections: Introduction, Theory,Interdisciplinary Applications, and Politics.

Section I (Introduction) begins with an interview. The interview consists of anemail exchange between the editors of this volume and Judith Butler in which we

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forwarded questions solicited from members of the Journal’s editorial board andpotential contributors to this special issue. The interview covers a lot of ground:from questions regarding theoretical dis/connections between Butler’s work andthat of other lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer writers, to concernswith queer theory’s representations of bodily abjection and race and class posi-tioning, to queries regarding the accessibility and political impact of her work.Like the interview that it follows, Frederick Roden’s essay onGender Trouble:Feminism and the Subversion of Identitydemonstrates the wide-ranging relevanceof Butler’s work to scholars and activists alike. Focusing on the terms “perfor-mativity” and “materiality,” Roden considers how Butler’s discussions of theseterms have been misunderstood and how the political import of her work has,in turn, gone unrecognized or been discounted. The key example that he cites isMartha Nussbaum’s (1999) attack. This attack, which Roden also understands as amore general indictment of poststructuralism, fails to recognize how destabilizedidentities can themselves attest to individual agency and resistance to social op-pression. Feminist struggle does not, in other words, simply depend on essentialistnotions of gender identity. As Roden concludes, “. . . just as feminism can containa Catharine MacKinnon and a Pat Califia, it can also benefit from both Butleriandestabilizations of identity and pragmatic calls to activism for the improvement ofthe material conditions of women around the world.”

Section II. (Theory) contains two essays that explore some of the theoreti-cal considerations raised in the introduction. In the first essay, Kirsten CampellexaminesThe Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, which, she argues,constitutes an important political and theoretical project. For Campbell, though, thecrucial connection that this book makes between Foucauldian and psychoanalytictheories is in need of further development. She writes, “Butler’s use of psycho-analysis does not fully engage with the complexity of its theory of the subject orwith the implications of that theory for her political project.” Campbell concludesthat Butler must continue to examine and extend “the problematic relationshipbetween the political subject of Foucault and the unconscious subject of Freud.”Following Campbell’s essay is Angela Failler’s “Excitable Speech: Judith Butler,Mae West, and Sexual Innuendo.” Simultaneously drawing on Butler’sExcitableSpeech: A Politics of the Performativeand paying homage to 1930s film star MaeWest, Failler examines sexual innuendo as a speech act. Together, Butler’s theoryand West’s sexual suggestiveness provoke Failler to consider the linguistic agencythat performative speech acts engender.

Section III. (Interdisciplinary Applications) in turn includes three essays that,beginning with Elizabeth M. Perry and Rosemary A. Joyce’s “Providing a Past for‘Bodies That Matter’: Judith Butler’s Impact on the Archaeology of Gender,” drawon Butler’s discussions of performativity. In the first case, Perry and Joyce’s essayoffers an overview of recent archaeological writing that focuses on gender differ-ence, especially as discussed inGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentity andBodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Specifically,

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the essay examines how archaeologists employing Butler’s concepts of abjectionand gender performance in order to understand the production and regulation ofgender in prehistoric cultures have extended Butler’s work, especially with regardto “the material dimensions of gender performance.” Following Perry and Joyce,Belinda Johnston, in “Renaissance Body Matters: Judith Butler and the Sex ThatIs One,” applies Butler’s work on performativity in order to examine the staging ofgender in Renaissance England. Johnston holds that “IfGender Trouble. . .offersa framework for thinking about Renaissance practices of theatricality, then it isBodies that Matter. . . that offers a framework for questioning those notions andfor negotiating one of the mostvexedissues in Renaissance studies, the sexedbody.” Johnston addresses these concerns with theatricality and gendering in heranalysis of the staging of female witchcraft. Arguing against the “one-sex” modelof the body that dominates Renaissance studies, she focuses on how witchcraft inEarly Modern England proved “a key site in the struggle tomaterialisegender,to split the one-sex body in two, inaugurating binary sexual difference.” Round-ing out this section is Robert Shail’s essay, “Examining Visual Representationsof Masculinity: Methodology and Judith Butler,” which moves our attention fromtheater to film. This essay considers 1950s and ‘60s British film star Dirk Bogarde.Shail argues thatGender Trouble’s discussions of performativity lend insight intoBogarde’s on-screen subversions of conventional definitions of masculinity andsexuality.

Section IV. (Politics), which closes out our special double issue on Butler,begins with Natalie Wilson’s “Butler’s Corporeal Politics: Matters of PoliticizedAbjection.” This essay considers Butler’s concept of politicized abjection as pre-sented inBodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Through read-ings of two novels, Katherine Dunn’sGeek Love(1989) and Barbara Gowdy’sMister Sandman(1996), Wilson discusses the abject body’s potential to functionas an active agent capable of subverting corporeal and gender norms. In so doing,Wilson demonstrates the centrality of politicized abjection to Butler’s concept ofperformativity. Like Wilson, Edwina Barvosa-Carter is interested in agency andperformativity. In her essay “Strange Tempest: Agency, Poststructuralism, and theShape of Feminist Politics to Come,” Barvosa-Carter examines how these conceptshave affected feminism, particularly feminist political practice. She then suggestshow scholarship that combines “Butler-informed political visions with traditionalaccounts of feminist political practice” anticipates feminist politics of the future.Finally, this collection ends much as it began: with an apologia for Butler’s the-ory that answers Martha Nussbaum’s (1999)New Republiccritique. In “ChangingSigns: The Political Pragmatism of Poststructuralism,” Robert Alan Brookey andDiane Helene Miller refute the attack on Butler in specific and poststructuralismin general, and insist on the political value of her work. For Brookey and Miller,Butlerian theory informs a political pragmatism wherein homophobic discrimina-tion rather than sexual identity proves the primary issue in the struggle for sexualrights.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors wish to thank the talented authors who contributed to this col-lection as well as the following individuals for their assistance and support in thepublication of this special issue of theInternational Journal of Sexuality and Gen-der Studies: Jonathan Alexander, Harriette Andreadis, David Eberly, Marian Eide,Paul S. Franklin, Fakhri Haghani, Lynda Hall, W. S. Hampl, David Hansen-Miller,Catherine Mills, Robert Mitchell, Clare Hemmings, Pauline Park, Juli Parker,Marcel Stoetzler.

REFERENCES

Butler, J. (1990, 1999).Gender trouble: Feminism and the limits of identity. New York: Routledge.Butler, J. (1993).Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.”New York: Routledge.Butler, J. (1997).Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York: Routledge.Butler, J. (1997a).The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press.Dunn, K. (1989).Geek love. London: Abacus.Gowdy, B. (1996).Mister sandman. Vermont: Steeroforth Press.Nussbaum, M. (1999). The professor of parody: The hip defeatism of Judith Butler.The New Republic

(22 February), 37–45.

Judith Butler: Selected Writings—Books

Butler, J. (2000).Antigone’s claim: Kinship between life and death. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

Butler, J., Laclau, E., & Zizek, S. (2000).Contingency, hegemony, universality: Contemporary dia-logues on the left. London & New York: Verso.

Butler, J. (1997).Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York & London: Routledge.Butler, J. (1997).The psychic life of power: Theories of subjection. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University

Press.Butler, J. (1993).Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.”New York and London:

Routledge.Butler, J. (1990; 1999).Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York & London:

Routledge.Butler, J. (1987; 1999).Subjects of desire: Hegelian reflections in twentieth-century France. New York:

Columbia University Press.

For further references, see the following website:http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/∼scctr/Wellek/butler/