Butler Matters

Margaret Sönser Breen is Associate Professor of English and Women Studies at the University of Connecticut, USA and Warren J. Blumenfeld, Assistant Professor of Multicultural Education and International Curriculum Studies at Iowa State University, USA.

'Overall, the collection explores the rich and fruitful results of engagement with Butler's work... the collection is a fine companion to Butler's texts... I would recommend the interview and the more applied chapters as a particularly effective way to teach Butler to advanced undergraduate and graduate students... I would also recommend portions of the text [...] for the important questions they raise about the politics of Butler's uncomfortably foundational status in post-structuralist feminist and queer theory.' Association for Feminist Anthropology ’... a timely edited collection of essays assessing the critic's impact on feminist and queer studies... searching and provoking questions... clearly invaluable to researchers in this field... provoking some revealing answers... a valid contribution to the study of queer theory...’ The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

• Contents: Foreword. Part I Introduction: Introduction to the collection, Margaret Sönser Breen; 'There is a person here': an interview with Judith Butler, Warren J. Blumenfeld and Margaret Sönser Breen, with Susanne Baer, Robert Alan Brookey, Lynda Hall, Vicki Kirby, Robert Shail, and Natalie Wilson; Becoming Butlerian: on the discursive limits (and potentials) of Gender Trouble, Frederick S. Roden. Part II Language, Melancholia, and Subjectivity: When all that is solid melts into language, Vicki Kirby; Judith Butler and the images of theory, Mena Mitrano; The plague of the subject: subjects, politics, and the power of psychic life, Kirsten Campbell; Excitable speech: Judith Butler, Mae West, and sexual innuendo, Angela Failler. Part III Body Matters: Archaeology, Literature, and Pedagogy: Past performance: the archaeology of gender as influenced by the work of Judith Butler, Elizabeth M. Perry and Rosemary A. Joyce; Renaissance body matters: Judith Butler and the sex that is one, Belinda Johnston; Gender Trouble in the literature classroom: unintelligible genders in The Metamorphosis and The Well of Loneliness, Margaret Sönser Breen; Butler's corporeal politics: matters of politicized abjection, Natalie Wilson. Part IV Agency, Poststructuralism, and Pragmatism: Strange tempest: agency, poststructuralism, and the shape of feminist politics to come, Edwina Barvosa-Carter; Changing signs: the political pragmatism of poststructuralism, Robert Alan Brookey and Diane Helene Miller. Index.