Başak Ertür, a legal scholar and a Turkish translator of Butler’s, told me that more than nine hundred people filled an auditorium in Ankara to hear them speak: “Not just academics but L.G.B.T.Q. activists, antiwar activists, sex workers.”
Butler told me that they had little notion of what was happening at first. “Someone from the Village Voice asked, ‘What are you thinking about the new directions in queer theory?’ I said, ‘What’s queer theory?’ They thought I was being Socratic.”
Brown still worries about the costs of Butler’s celebrity, the memes crowding out the meanings. “Neither the person nor the richness of the work can cohabit with celebrity—they just can’t,” she said. “I think that the ‘gender-troubled Judith’ and the ‘anti-Zionist Judith’ and the ‘activist Judith’ can miss that this is a person formed by philosophical questions and readings. Careful and close reading, which you generally do by yourself. ‘Gender Trouble’ came out of what we then called gay and lesbian emancipation. But it was not born in the lesbian bar. No, they took it home and wrote it, alone. It is a part of them that I think vanishes sometimes in the hullabaloo.”
That book, inciter of hullabaloo and produced in private by a thirty-four-year-old junior professor, is itself now thirty-four years old. It drew on Derrida’s reading of the Oxford philosopher of language J. L. Austin and his speech-act theory. Austin had anatomized “performative utterances”: linguistic acts that don’t depict reality but enact it, as when you promise something by using the words “I promise.” Butler broadened the notion to behavior, arguing that gender was something people did performatively. The incorrect reading of “performativity,” which remains the popular one, posits gender as a kind of costume, chosen or discarded for some theatre-in-the-round. What Butler was describing was more obdurate, involving constraint as well as agency. For Butler, the question was “What is done to me, and what is it I do with what is done to me?”
“Butler made thinking so expansively about gender possible,” Paisley Currah, a political scientist and the author of a recent book about transgender identity and the law, told me. “We’re all kind of rearranging what they say and not quite agreeing and responding to it or doing something a little bit different.” Academics in other disciplines, too, found the notion generative. The literary scholar Saidiya Hartman told me that “Gender Trouble” influenced her own thinking about the “coerced performance in Blackness, the performance imposed upon our bodies.”
Joan Scott, as a historian, situates “Gender Trouble” historically: “The seventies and eighties are the start of the critical exploration of gender identity. Feminism starts out with consciousness-raising and asking, What are women? The whole enterprise of critical work is to refuse the singular identity of women, men, gender, race, whatever. All of that, the book is looking to complexify.” Butler has called identity politics a “terrible American conceit” that proceeds “as if becoming visible, becoming sayable, is the end of politics.”
This critique didn’t necessarily register. “I wrote a whole book calling into question identity politics, only then to be constituted as a token of lesbian identity,” Butler told Artforum. “Either people didn’t really read the book or the commodification of identity politics is so strong that whatever you write, even when it’s explicitly opposed to that politics, gets taken up by that machinery.”
In a deeply wooded part of Codornices Park, a creek was running fast and high. A child with long, loose hair swung over it, on a rope hanging from a tree, observed by two small, serious-faced friends, caked to the neck in mud.
“My son played here,” Butler said. We took a winding path to a rose garden. The ground was soft and cratered, full of murky pools. In time, we arrived at the roses, but there were no roses, not yet. We toured the thorns instead, and admired the names of the varieties: Jekyll, Bubble Bath, Perfume Factory.
Brown and Butler took teaching jobs at Berkeley in the nineties, and raised their son amid a web of friends and their children. “It is important for all three of us that our understanding of ourselves as a family is more than nuclear,” Brown said.
“They were lesbians who had a child, had jobs, careers, and they let themselves be seen,” the poet Brenda Shaughnessy, a former student of Brown’s, told me. “I remember people called Judy ‘the rabbi,’ ” for their willingness to think through deep questions, to offer advice.
Former students spoke of the support Butler offered as immediate and material; graduate students who had worried about losing their stipend for protesting on campus told me that Butler promised to find money in their budget to support them if necessary. Hartman, whose first teaching job was at Berkeley, called them a “lifeline”: “Scholars of color are supposed to repair the institution, not lead a life of the mind. I had seen people become overwhelmed and die doing that work. Judith protected me. Judith used their power. I was given room to do my work.”
Butler and I were walking along a narrowing rill when the muddy ground turned slick and I started sliding backward. They steadied me. A while later, I noticed that they were walking oddly, their arm held out at an unnatural angle. “I am trying to be subtle,” Butler told me. “My imitation of a nonintrusive, permanent bannister.”
After their son was born, Butler would write with the baby in the carrier, those years so flush with momentum that there was no need to question when or how to write. When the baby cried, Butler learned to wait a beat or two and then match him vocally at a particular note. “He would hold it with me,” they recalled. “Or then we’d hold it together. We’d pass it back and forth. Or I’d take him into a song. Hebrew songs have these really elongated vowels.” Butler stopped and sang out, “ ‘Baruuuuuuuuch ataaaah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha-olam.’ He would be very assuaged by those kinds of sounds.”
Butler went on, “My question to him was never ‘What have I made?’ or ‘How did I make you?’ The question was always ‘Who are you? Who the fuck are you?’ Here’s this independent creature. Yes, I helped bring him into the world, but what do I have to do with this? Sometimes I think, Well, I’m not the biological parent, but I think everybody feels that way. He’s not a reflection of me or on me. I’m constantly getting to know him. It’s really important to keep that question open: Who are you? Don’t fill it in too quickly.”
The author of “Gender Trouble” became an icon of another form of trouble in the decade after the book’s publication. Here was a thinker who was highly visible and yet wrote in the fiercely furled language of Continental philosophy and post-structuralism. Some took Butler to be emblematic of the hieratic and hermetic nature of the humanities writ large. They were awarded first prize in a Bad Writing Contest held by the journal Philosophy and Literature, which cited such turns of phrase as “The insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony.” In a 1999 review in The New Republic, Martha Nussbaum wrote, “It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are.”
And yet other people worried about the malign influence of that style, treating it as a covert contagion. You speak this way. They listen to you. In truth, difficulty is only one part of Butler’s prose. This, too, is Butler, one of their best-known passages, from “Undoing Gender,” as direct as any love song:
Still others have relished Butler’s difficulty, as a road to hard-won revelation. “Gender Trouble” enacts “an anti-common sense,” the novelist and scholar Jordy Rosenberg writes. “You have to subject yourself to the difficulty of its language in order to begin to unstitch the only-seemingly coherent logic of gender, order, and discourse that you have grown accustomed to, that has been made natural to you—no, through which you, your gender, has been made to seem natural.”
For a time, Butler fought back, defending their style. Now they shrug, and joke: “Sorry about the sentences.”
What they don’t shrug off is that, as Butler says of their early books, “I was not good on trans.” Almost from the beginning, there were critics who objected to Butler’s depiction of transness as a social critique, rather than as lived experience, a sense of self, deeply known. Some argued that Butler did not account for those who sought and found comfort in a gender category, or that the emphasis on the philosophy of gender ignored the more pressing material concerns—and dangers—facing trans people. Butler’s stance has evolved, but there are activists who fear that the early characterizations, and the misinterpretation of performativity, have had a pernicious staying power.
“I had fun, but it was the kind of fun I don’t like.”
Cartoon by Barbara Smaller
“That notion that queer identity is inherently subversive, which presupposes that there is a natural order, that the very identity of trans people is a provocation—it’s become the dominant narrative, and it has had a huge impact on legal advocacy,” Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told me. “It has convinced the public that gender identity is self-definition.”
Butler has never been stinting with amplifications, apologies, adjustments: their career can be read as a long act of deeply engaged self-criticism. In “Bodies That Matter” (1993), the book that followed “Gender Trouble,” Butler sought to clarify the nature of the performative, and to fill in other lacunae. In a similar spirit, they returned to the notion of the speech act, taking it up, turning it over, and looking at it anew, in “Excitable Speech” (1997), in which they examined arguments concerning hate speech and pornography, acknowledging that language can wound but urging caution about laws aimed at expression deemed hateful or obscene; even pornography, Butler argued, can be read against itself—its meaning isn’t controlled by its creators.