(born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and literary theory. Since 1993, she has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is now Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. She is also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School.
Academically, Butler is most well known for her books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, which challenge notions of gender and develop her theory of gender performativity. This theory now plays a major role in feminist and queer scholarships. Her works often implemented in film studies courses emphasizing gender studies and the performativity in discourse. She has also actively supported lesbian and gay rights movements and been outspoken on many contemporary political issues. In particular, she is vocal critic of Israeli politics and its effect on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, emphasizing that Israel does not and should not be taken to represent all Jews or Jewish opinion.
Butler’s work has been extraordinarily influential in feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, and continental philosophy. Yet her contribution to range of other disciplines–such as psychoanalysis, literary, film, and performance studies as well as visual arts–has also been significant. Her theory of gender performativity as well as her conception of “critically queer” have not only transformed understandings of gender and queer identity in the academic world, but have shaped and mobilized various kinds of political activism, particularly queer activism, across the globe. Butler’s work has also entered into contemporary debates on the teaching of gender, gay parenting, and the depathologization of transgender people.
Wikipedia
was a major figure in two successive waves of 20th century French thought–the structuralist wave of the 1960s and then the poststructuralist wave. By the premature end of his life, Foucault had some claim to be the most prominent living intellectual in France.
Foucault’s work is transdisciplinary in nature, ranging across the concerns of the disciplines of history, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. At the first decade of the 21st century, Foucault is the author most frequently cited in the humanities in general. In the field of philosophy this is not so, despite philosophy being the primary discipline in which he was educated, and with which he ultimately identified. This relative neglect is because Foucault’s conception of philosophy, in which the study of truth is inseparable from the study of history, is thoroughly at adds with the prevailing conception of what philosophy is.
Foucault’s work can generally be characterized as philosophically oriented historical research; towards the end of his life, Foucault insisted that all his work was part of a single project of historically investigating the production of truth. What Foucault did across his major works was to attempt to produce an historical account of the formation of ideas, including philosophical ideas. Such an attempt was neither a simple progressive view of the history, seeing it as inexorably leading to our present understanding, nor a thoroughgoing historicism that insists on understanding ideas only by the immanent standards of the time. Rather, Foucault continually sought for a way of understanding the ideas that shape our present not only in terms of the historical function these ideas played, but also by tracing the changes in their function through history.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
