International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, Vol. 6, Nos.

1/2, 2001

Introduction to the Special Issue: Butler Matters: Judith Butlers Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies Since Gender Trouble
Warren J. Blumenfeld1,3 and Margaret Soenser Breen2

Since the publication of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990, Judith Butler has affected (and effectively shaped) many different elds of inquiry, including gender and sexuality studies, feminist and queer theory, and cultural studies. Both within and outside the academy, her work has had a profound inuence on peoples understandings of gender and sexuality, corporeal politics, and political action. Butler is, however, not without her critics. In 1999, distinguished philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum delivered a scathing attack on Butler in The New Republic. Nussbaum declared that Butlers work on destabilized gender categories repudiated the feminist charge to improve the real, material conditions of women; she dismissed Butlers writing as inaccessible and irresponsible wordplay. While this special double issue of the International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies begins and ends with essays that forcefully answer these claims, one may also turn to Butler herself for a response to Nussbaum. In her 1999 preface to Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler writes, Despite the dislocation of the subject that the text performs, there is a person here: I went to many meetings, bars, and marches and saw many kinds of genders, understood myself to be at the crossroads of some of them, and encountered sexuality at several of its cultural edges (p. xvi). There is, in other words, an experiential ground to Butlers work; there is a vital link between her social concern and her writing. As the articles in this collection consistently demonstrate, an acute political awareness of material reality and historical circumstance informs her theory.
1 Editor,

International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies. of English, University of Connecticut. 3 Correspondence should be directed to Warren J. Blumenfeld, P.O. Box 929, Northampton, MA 010610929; e-mail: blumenfeld@educ.umass.edu.
2 Department

1
1566-1768/01/0400-0001$19.50/0
C

2001 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

Blumenfeld and Breen

Judith Butler received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1984; her dissertation is titled Recovery and Invention: The Projects of Desire in Hegel, Koj` eve, Hyppolite, and Sartre. She is currently Maxine Eliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley, and is past Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Her credentials and honors are seemingly endless. Her scholastic honors include a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship, a Duncan Fellowship for Women in Philosophy, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship. She is the recipient of a Critics Choice Award for Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, a Crompton-Noll Award, and an Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to the impressive list of published books that appears at the end of this Introduction (see Judith Butler: Selected WritingsBooks), her work has appeared in a number of collections and distinguished journals including Telos, Philosophical Review, Berkshire Review, International Philosophical Quarterly, Praxis, Diacritics, Radical Philosophy, History and Theory, Ethics, GLQ, differences, Transition, and Yale Literary Magazine. Given this prolic output and the profound impact that this work has had on any number of disciplines, it is perhaps unsurprising that a signicantly high proportion of the essays that are submitted to the International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies for consideration directly reference Judith Butler. So, in the fall of 1999, on the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and on the release of the books second edition, we felt it tting to dedicate a special double issue of the Journal to the impact of Judith Butler and her work. We distributed on a number of worldwide websites a Call for Papers targeting individuals who had a special interest in, generally, feminist, queer, and cultural studies, and specically, the work of Judith Butler. We were enormously gratied by the depth of interest in this project and by the quality of submissions we received. The essays included in this volume attest to the enormous impact Judith Butlers work has had across disciplines, and these essays will, we believe, advance the discourse for many years to come. This essay collection considers a number of Butlers works, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990, 1999), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), and The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997a). The essays themselves range from analyses of Butlerian theory, to articles on archaeology, lm, and Renaissance representations of the body, to politicized examinations of bodily abjection, performativity, and poststructuralism. We divide Butler Matters: Judith Butlers Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies Since Gender Trouble into four distinct though overlapping sections: Introduction, Theory, Interdisciplinary Applications, and Politics. Section I (Introduction) begins with an interview. The interview consists of an email exchange between the editors of this volume and Judith Butler in which we

Introduction to the Special Issue

forwarded questions solicited from members of the Journals editorial board and potential contributors to this special issue. The interview covers a lot of ground: from questions regarding theoretical dis/connections between Butlers work and that of other lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer writers, to concerns with queer theorys representations of bodily abjection and race and class positioning, to queries regarding the accessibility and political impact of her work. Like the interview that it follows, Frederick Rodens essay on Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity demonstrates the wide-ranging relevance of Butlers work to scholars and activists alike. Focusing on the terms performativity and materiality, Roden considers how Butlers discussions of these terms have been misunderstood and how the political import of her work has, in turn, gone unrecognized or been discounted. The key example that he cites is Martha Nussbaums (1999) attack. This attack, which Roden also understands as a more general indictment of poststructuralism, fails to recognize how destabilized identities can themselves attest to individual agency and resistance to social oppression. Feminist struggle does not, in other words, simply depend on essentialist notions of gender identity. As Roden concludes, . . . just as feminism can contain a Catharine MacKinnon and a Pat Calia, it can also benet from both Butlerian destabilizations of identity and pragmatic calls to activism for the improvement of the material conditions of women around the world. Section II. (Theory) contains two essays that explore some of the theoretical considerations raised in the introduction. In the rst essay, Kirsten Campell examines The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, which, she argues, constitutes an important political and theoretical project. For Campbell, though, the crucial connection that this book makes between Foucauldian and psychoanalytic theories is in need of further development. She writes, Butlers use of psychoanalysis does not fully engage with the complexity of its theory of the subject or with the implications of that theory for her political project. Campbell concludes that Butler must continue to examine and extend the problematic relationship between the political subject of Foucault and the unconscious subject of Freud. Following Campbells essay is Angela Faillers Excitable Speech: Judith Butler, Mae West, and Sexual Innuendo. Simultaneously drawing on Butlers Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative and paying homage to 1930s lm star Mae West, Failler examines sexual innuendo as a speech act. Together, Butlers theory and Wests sexual suggestiveness provoke Failler to consider the linguistic agency that performative speech acts engender. Section III. (Interdisciplinary Applications) in turn includes three essays that, beginning with Elizabeth M. Perry and Rosemary A. Joyces Providing a Past for Bodies That Matter: Judith Butlers Impact on the Archaeology of Gender, draw on Butlers discussions of performativity. In the rst case, Perry and Joyces essay offers an overview of recent archaeological writing that focuses on gender difference, especially as discussed in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Specically,

Blumenfeld and Breen

the essay examines how archaeologists employing Butlers concepts of abjection and gender performance in order to understand the production and regulation of gender in prehistoric cultures have extended Butlers work, especially with regard to the material dimensions of gender performance. Following Perry and Joyce, Belinda Johnston, in Renaissance Body Matters: Judith Butler and the Sex That Is One, applies Butlers work on performativity in order to examine the staging of gender in Renaissance England. Johnston holds that If Gender Trouble . . . offers a framework for thinking about Renaissance practices of theatricality, then it is Bodies that Matter . . . that offers a framework for questioning those notions and for negotiating one of the most vexed issues in Renaissance studies, the sexed body. Johnston addresses these concerns with theatricality and gendering in her analysis of the staging of female witchcraft. Arguing against the one-sex model of the body that dominates Renaissance studies, she focuses on how witchcraft in Early Modern England proved a key site in the struggle to materialise gender, to split the one-sex body in two, inaugurating binary sexual difference. Rounding out this section is Robert Shails essay, Examining Visual Representations of Masculinity: Methodology and Judith Butler, which moves our attention from theater to lm. This essay considers 1950s and 60s British lm star Dirk Bogarde. Shail argues that Gender Troubles discussions of performativity lend insight into Bogardes on-screen subversions of conventional denitions of masculinity and sexuality. Section IV. (Politics), which closes out our special double issue on Butler, begins with Natalie Wilsons Butlers Corporeal Politics: Matters of Politicized Abjection. This essay considers Butlers concept of politicized abjection as presented in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Through readings of two novels, Katherine Dunns Geek Love (1989) and Barbara Gowdys Mister Sandman (1996), Wilson discusses the abject bodys potential to function as an active agent capable of subverting corporeal and gender norms. In so doing, Wilson demonstrates the centrality of politicized abjection to Butlers concept of performativity. Like Wilson, Edwina Barvosa-Carter is interested in agency and performativity. In her essay Strange Tempest: Agency, Poststructuralism, and the Shape of Feminist Politics to Come, Barvosa-Carter examines how these concepts have affected feminism, particularly feminist political practice. She then suggests how scholarship that combines Butler-informed political visions with traditional accounts of feminist political practice anticipates feminist politics of the future. Finally, this collection ends much as it began: with an apologia for Butlers theory that answers Martha Nussbaums (1999) New Republic critique. In Changing Signs: The Political Pragmatism of Poststructuralism, Robert Alan Brookey and Diane Helene Miller refute the attack on Butler in specic and poststructuralism in general, and insist on the political value of her work. For Brookey and Miller, Butlerian theory informs a political pragmatism wherein homophobic discrimination rather than sexual identity proves the primary issue in the struggle for sexual rights.

Introduction to the Special Issue

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editors wish to thank the talented authors who contributed to this collection as well as the following individuals for their assistance and support in the publication of this special issue of the International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies: Jonathan Alexander, Harriette Andreadis, David Eberly, Marian Eide, Paul S. Franklin, Fakhri Haghani, Lynda Hall, W. S. Hampl, David Hansen-Miller, Catherine Mills, Robert Mitchell, Clare Hemmings, Pauline Park, Juli Parker, Marcel Stoetzler.

REFERENCES
Butler, J. (1990, 1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the limits of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1997a). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dunn, K. (1989). Geek love. London: Abacus. Gowdy, B. (1996). Mister sandman. Vermont: Steeroforth Press. Nussbaum, M. (1999). The professor of parody: The hip defeatism of Judith Butler. The New Republic (22 February), 3745.

Judith Butler: Selected WritingsBooks

Butler, J. (2000). Antigones claim: Kinship between life and death. New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, J., Laclau, E., & Zizek, S. (2000). Contingency, hegemony, universality: Contemporary dialogues on the left. London & New York: Verso. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York & London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power: Theories of subjection. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York and London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1990; 1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York & London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1987; 1999). Subjects of desire: Hegelian reections in twentieth-century France. New York: Columbia University Press. For further references, see the following website: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/scctr/Wellek/butler/