Judith Butler

A highly respected scholar of gender theory, feminist theory, and philosophy, Judith Butler presents her ideas on "undoing" gender in this thought-provoking lecture. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), one of her best known publications, Butler notes that feminism's assertion that women comprise a group with common characteristics and interests performed "an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations." She argues, instead, for "undoing gender" or opening up possibilities for forming and choosing individual identity.

Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000); The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997); and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993), as well as numerous articles.

Cosponsored by Ohio State's Departments of Women's Studies, English, Comparative Studies, and Philosophy, the Mershon Center Citizenship Project, and the Wexner Center.