Judith Butler is the author of the 1991 essay 'IMITATION AND GENDER INSUBORDINATION,' in which she critiques a variety of themes including queerness, identity, and performativity.
Butler is a philosopher from Cleveland, Ohio, who was born in 1956.
She earned her PhD in philosophy from Yale University and studied philosophy at Bennington College in Vermont. She came out as a lesbian when she was 16 years old and later became a well-known lesbian and political activist.
Her writings are widely regarded as the most significant publication in gender studies and have influenced other fields. It is also regarded as a foundational text of the queer theory. Her work challenges readers to rethink the modern world' basic identity categories.
The essay and the author want us to rethink the most fundamental aspects of human identity to improve society. Throughout the article, Butler asks sceptical questions about sex, gender, and sexuality and how these define people's identities. She asks us, readers, why do we represent ourselves and others as straight, homosexual, or simply male or female?
At the beginning of the essay, she tells how she does not understand the concept of 'theories' and is not interested in being positioned as its defender. Then she explains how "coming out" has a purpose for those who finally embrace themselves, but it also comes with a lot of risks. She asks, "What or who is it that is out" and "Can sexuality even remain sexuality once it submits to a criterion of transparency and disclosure, or does it perhaps cease to be sexuality precisely when the semblance of full explicitness is achieved?"
Here she is trying to tell that though you are coming out and telling people what you as a person identify as you only "come out" to create a fresh and unique "closet." The "you" to whom you speak now has access to a separate opacity region. According to her, the point of opacity has altered. Although you came out, the other person has no idea what it means to you. She questions that although you have come out of the closet, but into what? Another closet? She says, "Being "out" must produce the closet again and again in order to maintain itself as "out."
Though Butler is not against using the terms "lesbian" or "gay", she argues that if "lesbians" and "gay men" have traditionally been labelled as impossible identities, classification errors, natural disasters within juridical-medical discourses, then why do instrumental uses of "identity" do not become regulatory imperatives?
Butler then tells us how at the age of sixteen, she was a lesbian, and that's all that she has been. She explains how the "I" doesn't play its lesbianism as a role. Rather, the "I" is insistently recreated as a lesbian "I" via the repetitive play of this sexuality; ironically, it is exactly the recurrence of that play that establishes the instability of the very category that it produces.
She continues by stating that society's belief that heterosexuality is the original and homosexuality is a copy is incorrect. Instead, there is no original; heterosexuality is a replica of an unexistent original. Butler claims that gender and sexuality are always performative, not only when they can be performed. To put it another way, being heterosexual does not cause one to act heterosexually.
I quote one of Butler's statements, " Drag is not the putting on of a gender that belongs properly to some other group, i.e. an act of expropriation or appropriation that assumes that gender is the rightful property of sex, that "masculine" belongs to "male" and "feminine" belongs to "female." There is no "proper" gender, a gender proper to one sex rather than another, which is in some sense that sex's cultural property. Where that notion of the "proper" operates, it is always and only improper! Installed as the effect of a compulsory system." This means that one can feel more or less of their womanliness or manliness and that these categories are not natural but assumed identities.
Butler's views on gender, sexuality, and identity have transformed the way critics view texts, even though her work has sparked several debates among academic activists and ordinary readers. It also makes readers reconsider beliefs they've held their whole lives, beliefs they've taken for granted as basic realities of existence.
Butler's questions are all the more relevant as we battle with new challenges concerning the responsibilities and rights of women and individuals of all sexual orientations.
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