The Judith Butler Reader

"Judith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time. The Judith Butler Reader provides an exemplary selection from across the whole range of Butler's writings: gender identity, performativity, subjectivity, discursive power, kinship, and critique. In making available in one place the full breadth of Butler's thought, Salih's reader will prove an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike." J. M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research

"These important essays represent the aspirational and analytic agendas of Judith Butler's remarkable work. Hers is a unique voice of courage and conceptual ambition that addresses public life from the perspective of psychic reality, encouraging us to acknowledge the solidarity and the suffering through which we emerge as subjects of freedom." Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University

Judith Butler's work has challenged and changed the frames of reference within which people speak, think, and live categories of identity. Her innovative and politically farreaching insight that gender is performative and that identity is a scene of construction continues to exert a crucial impact in numerous critical-theoretical fields, including politics, philosophy, feminist and queer theory, literary and cultural studies. Behind Butler's radical theorizations of gender, sex, sexuality, power, and "race" lies the urgent normative inquiry into the differential way the human is produced and effaced within the field of contemporary power.

The Judith Butler Reader is a collaborative effort by Sara Salih and Judith Butler to bring together writings that span Butler's impressive career as a critical philosopher, including selections from both well-known and lesser-known works. Salih's introduction emphasizes the political and ethical importance of Butler's ideas, and she supplies editorial material that will assist students in their readings of theories that stand at the forefront of contemporary theoretical and political debates.