Abstract
This chapter reviews four books by Judith Butler: Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997); The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997); Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993); Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). For a long time, academic feminism in America has been closely allied to the practical struggle to achieve justice and equality for women. Feminist theory has been understood by theorists as not just fancy words on paper; theory is connected to proposals for social change. Thus feminist scholars have engaged in many concrete projects relating to issues such as rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment, trafficking of women and girls in prostitution, and social and political equality of lesbians and gay men. Some theorists have left the academy altogether, feeling more comfortable in the world of practical politics, where they can address these urgent problems directly. Butler's work relies heavily on some of history's leading thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Louis Althusser, Monique Wittig, Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J. L. Austin, and Saul Kripke. Her main idea is that gender is a social artifice.
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