Judith Butler Reader

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published widely in the fields of continental philosophy, literary theory, feminist and queer theory, and cultural politics. Her books include Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence (Verso, 2003) and Undoing Gender (Routledge, 2004). Sara Salih is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is editor of The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (2000) and author of Judith Butler (2002).

"Judith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time. The Judith Butler Reader provides an exemplary selection from across the whole range of Butler's writings: gender identity, performativity, subjectivity, discursive power, kinship, and critique. In making available in one place the full breadth of Butler's thought, Salih's reader will prove an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike." J. M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research "These important essays represent the aspirational and analytic agendas of Judith Butler's remarkable work. Hers is a unique voice of courage and conceptual ambition that addresses public life from the perspective of psychic reality, encouraging us to acknowledge the solidarity and the suffering through which we emerge as subjects of freedom." Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University

• 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