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British Journal of Sociology of

Education
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Troubling identities: reflections on Judith Butler's

philosophy for the sociology of education
Online Publication Date: 01 September 2006
To cite this Article: (2006) 'Troubling identities: reflections on Judith Butler's
philosophy for the sociology of education', British Journal of Sociology of
Education, 27:4, 421 424
To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/01425690600802873
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01425690600802873

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British Journal of Sociology of Education

Vol. 27, No. 4, September 2006, pp. 421424

EDITORIAL

Troubling identities: reflections on

Judith Butlers philosophy for the
sociology of education
British
10.1080/01425690600802873
CBSE_A_180231.sgm
0142-5692
Taylor
2006
40Editorial
27
Nicole.Newton@tandf.co.uk
NicoleNewton
00000September
and
&
Journal
Francis
(print)/1465-3346
Francis
of the
2006
LtdSociology
(online)
of Education

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORIAL GROUP: Miriam David (coordinator), Amanda

Coffey, Paul Connolly, Anoop Nayak and Diane Reay
The Executive Editors have decided to devote this special issue of the British Journal
of Sociology of Education (BJSE) to examining Judith Butlers work and its contribution to the field. The aim is to provide an accessible introduction to its theoretical and
empirical potential and the power of the ideas for engendering research, and particularly ethnographic studies in education. Judith Butler has perhaps been unique and
important in bringing together a variety of social philosophies and critical theories,
mainly from France, that educational researchers and sociologists of education use.
We therefore hope that this volume will be both a valuable teaching resource and a
useful introduction to colleagues working in the field who have not necessarily
engaged with this kind of work or with Judith Butlers specific philosophical
approach.
Judith Butler is an internationally renowned post-structuralist and feminist philosopher and public intellectual. She has made major contributions to feminism, political philosophy and ethics. She is Maxine Eliot Professor in the Departments of
Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.
She also has a professorial appointment at the European Graduate School.
Troubling Gender is the title of this special issue, in recognition of the key concepts
that come from her original book in 1990. That book employed the works of Simone
de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray and
Jacques Derrida, and perhaps most significantly Michel Foucault. Butler has been
creative and challenging, developing a remarkable capacity for synthesising ideas and
theories from French philosophy, but most especially in interpreting and developing
the ideas of Michel Foucault, and the school of thought now known as post-structuralism and, in some cases, postmodernism. In keeping with the tone of Butlers first
book, this special issue of BJSE also hopes to inspire, cajole and disturb in ways that
are productive and thought-provoking for students and scholars alike.
To question the very foundational presuppositions of western feminism
meant opening it up to what others would later name queer theory, critiquing the
ISSN 0142-5692 (print)/ISSN 1465-3346 (online)/06/04042104
2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01425690600802873

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422 Editorial
imperialism of a western feminist theory that purported to represent all women.
Thus Gender Trouble took forward debates about gender and sexuality from French
philosophy and began to question the interplay between social construction and
biological essence. Butler presented two key arguments in this early work, which
caught the social science imagination among many generations of scholars; namely,
the concepts of:

performativity; that is, the idea that identity does not prefigure action but is constituted through action, discourses or the words we speak and behavea new theory
of subjectivity.
queer theory; that is, about gender relations not only within and between gay men
and lesbians, but also the recognition that all sexualities are performative and
brought into being through discourse.

The concept of performativity is at the core of Butlers work. It extends beyond the
doing of gender and can be understood as a fully fledged theory of subjectivity.
Butlers more recent work relies on performativity as a theoretical matrix.
Given the ways in which Judith Butlers rich work has been developed and used
among sociologists of education, this special issue is devoted to demonstrating the
enduring potential of her corpus of work for studies within educational arenas. This
issue also has a more specific purposeto provide a key collection for undergraduate
and postgraduate students, so many of whom are keen to develop an understanding
of the significance of Butlers thinking in contemporary sociology of education.
Despite numerous research studies of Butlers work, and its relations to work in the
French schools of philosophyespecially, but not only, those of Foucault and Beauvoirthere are relatively few publications that assist readers unfamiliar with her
philosophy to engage with her conceptual framework. This special issue therefore
aims to explain Butlers ideas and concepts and show how her philosophical ideas
might be applied within sociology of education. The papers also illustrate how
Butlers philosophy can be used to frame theoretical and empirical research questions
and how it can be employed in the analysis of data.
With these aims in mind, contributors from mainly Anglophone countries were
asked to write a paper on a particular aspect of Butlers work that has contemporary
relevance to sociologists of education and educational researchers. Once the papers
had been reviewed and accepted, they were sent to Judith for her review and overarching comments or response. Thus this special issue stands in contrast with BJSEs
previous special issues on theorists and sociologists of educationnamely, Basil
Bernstein (2002, BJSE 23(4)) and Pierre Bourdieu (2004, BJSE 25(4))since it can
be seen as very much engaging with work that remains in progress and change.
Bronwyn Davies, who herself is a prominent and renowned feminist scholar
within the sociology of education, based in Australia, explores one of Butlers key
concepts in her contribution to this special issuethat of subjectification, or more
simply subjectionand the processes of becoming a subject, with all the vulnerabilities entailed, within schooling. Davies explains the ways in which Butler has
extended and clarified Foucauldian concepts of subjectivation and then draws on

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Editorial

423

conversations and encounters with teachers and students in classrooms in Australia

to illustrate and draw out these ideas in relation to education. She concludes with a
statement about to use these ideas to develop more ethical practices within
classrooms in schools and universities around reflexive notions of responsibility that
contrast with current neo-liberal notions of self and responsibility.
Valerie Heys paper is divided into two parts. First, using her own pedagogical
approach to students interests in Butler, she offers a clear and cogent explanation,
thus making more accessible Butlers developing scholarly work from French philosophies on performativitywhat Hey calls here citation and its relation to understandings of gender identification within sociology of education. Secondly, Hey draws on
her own empirical work within the sociology of education and that of other feminists.
Hey contrasts this with work by other feminist post-structuralists and ethnographers,
and thus examines its potential for feminist ethnographies within education and
schools. Hey revisits her work on girls and friendships to illustrate the ways in which
young womens relations with each other make sense of themselves and their
gendered relations in provocative and generative ways.
Anoop Nayak and Mary Jane Kehily focus on Butlers work on identity and the
ways in which this has been troubling in thinking and rethinking gender, illustrating
these ideas with some of their own ethnographic studies of young people in school. In
particular, they take up and trouble what traditionally have been knowable categories
as man, woman, girl or boy and explore how Butler has enabled them to use these
ideas about identity as a type of doing or becoming manifest only through action.
Nayak and Kehily provide examples of this from their joint and several studies of
young peoples enactment of stylised forms of gender embodiment. They state, quite
simply, Gender is, then, an act of problematic being and unfulfilled becoming and
this leads them to suggest areas for future researchusing these ideas and thinking
through understanding gestures and performative acts, exploring expressions of
psychic processes and both inner dramas and stylised performances.
Mary Lou Rasmussen draws on Butlers more recent work on gender melancholia, and especially the ways in which she has explored psychoanalytic notions of the
psyche in relation to subjection and in critiquing other philosophers, such as Levinas.
Rasmussen deploys these ideas to illustrate why expressions of non-normative gender
identities in educational contexts might be troubling and cause consternation. She
develops an in-depth understanding, using these ideas creatively in a discussion of a
particular television programme in Australia called Play School about how two mothers radical ideas were expressed and used in schools for young children, and how they
were viewed and reviewed. Rasmussen also considers the ethical implications of how
these transgressive and provocative pedagogical expressions can be developed and
deployed to challenge traditional moral values around heterosexuality.
Emma Renold explores creatively and imaginatively Butlers ideas about how
gender is routinely spoken about through a hegemonic heterosexual matrix in young
childrens educational settings. Drawing upon her own ethnographic fieldwork about
primary school children and the sexualisation of gender and the gendering of sexuality, she demonstrates the ways in which the heterosexual matrix regulates boygirl

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424 Editorial
intimacies, from play and friendships to physical proximity. Renold provides multiple
illustrations of how notions of tomboy, romance and girlfriends or boyfriends are
taken up by these young children in play situations. She also suggests that this kind
of analysis of childrens gendered and sexual cultures and identity-work could
usefully and fruitfully contribute to further work on how what she calls discourses of
generation (early or middle childhood and young people) intersect with discourses
of gender and sexuality.
Deborah Youdell, in the final paper of this special issue, takes another reading of
Butlers work on subjectification and performativity, demonstrating its uses with her
own ethnographic studies in an Australian high school. In particular, she explores
how these ideas might contribute to critiques of educational inequalities. Youdell
places Butlers readings on subjection in relation to other French philosophers,
namely Althusser and Foucault. Youdell then uses this reading of Butler in her
Australian study of schooling in a multi-cultural context to exemplify the rendering
of subjects either inside or outside of the educational endeavour or even outside of
student-hood. She argues that this particular analysis offered adds another layer of
understanding to existing analyses of enduring patterns of raced educational
inequality and exclusion. Youdell focuses on how the teachers are involved in
practices of Whiteness that subjectivate racednationedreligioned students and
these students are involved in practices of insurrection as they are subjectivated.
Butlers essay as a response provides a remarkable overview of the rich potential of
her work, and how she understands ethnographic work within sociology of education
and her ideas in relation to speech and forming subjectivity in relation to the body,
especially of children and young adults. She picks out two key overarching ideas,
namely the formative period of gender and sexual relationality and what is being
signalled by these around dominant gender and sexual norms and how these relate to
childrens performances in schooling. She concludes an argument that addressing
these questions becomes a pedagogy of political education.
Together, the articles that make up this special issue celebrate something of
Butlers ability to perform philosophical ideas and engage with social and political
concepts, while also pointing to new directions for the use and development of
specific theoretical and conceptual tools.