Judith Butler

Judith Butler, born in 1956, is an American feminist and queer philosopher and a gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, the debate on academic freedom, and literary theory. Butler has held academic appointments at Wesleyan University, George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University, and since 1993 has taught in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, where Butler became the Maxine Elliot Professor in 1998. In 2000 Butler co-wrote Contingency, Hegemony, Universality with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek.