Editing Judith Butler (section)

==Overview of major works==
{{Original research|discuss=Original research|date=June 2021}}

===''Performative Acts and Gender Constitution'' (1988)===
In the essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," Judith Butler proposes that [[gender performativity|gender is performative]] – that is, gender is not so much a static identity or role, but rather comprises a set of acts which can evolve over time.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Butler |first=Judith |date=December 1988 |title=Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893 |journal=Theatre Journal |volume=40 |issue=4 |pages=519–520 |doi=10.2307/3207893 |jstor=3207893 }}</ref> Butler states that because gender identity is established through behavior, there is a possibility to construct different genders via different behaviors.<ref name="Jones2018">{{cite web | url = https://www.openculture.com/2018/02/judith-butler-on-gender-performativity.html | first = Josh | last = Jones | date = 7 February 2018 | title = Theorist Judith Butler Explains How Behavior Creates Gender: A Short Introduction to "Gender Performativity" | website = Open Culture | access-date = 8 July 2021}}</ref> <blockquote>"...if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |title=Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory |date=December 1988 |publisher=The Johns Hopkins University Press |pages=520 |language=en}}</ref></blockquote>Butler concludes their essay with a personal reflection on the strengths and limitations of widespread feminist theories which function on a solely binary perception of gender. Butler critiques what they call the "reification" of sexual difference within a heterosexual framework, and articulates their concern with how this framework affects the accurate presentation (or lack thereof) of "femaleness" across a diverse array of experiences, including those of women.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Butler |first=Judith |date=December 1988 |title=Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893 |journal=Theatre Journal |volume=40 |issue=4 |pages=530 |doi=10.2307/3207893 |jstor=3207893 }}</ref><blockquote>"As a corporeal field of cultural play, gender is a basically innovative affair, although it is quite clear that there are strict punishments for contesting the script by performing out of turn or through unwarranted improvisations. Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds."<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Butler |first=Judith |date=December 1988 |title=Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893 |journal=Theatre Journal |volume=40 |issue=4 |pages=531 |doi=10.2307/3207893 |jstor=3207893 }}</ref></blockquote>Throughout this text, Butler derives influence from French philosophers such as [[Simone de Beauvoir]] and [[Maurice Merleau-Ponty]], particularly de Beauvoir's ''[[The Second Sex]]'' and Merleau-Ponty's "The Body in its Sexual Being." Butler also cites works by [[Gayle Rubin]], [[Mary Anne Warren]], and their own piece "Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's ''Second Sex''" (1986), among others.

===''Gender Trouble'' (1990)===
{{Main|Gender Trouble}}

''Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity'' was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally, in multiple languages.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Loizidou|first=Elena|date=2007-04-11|title=Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics|pages=1|doi=10.4324/9780203945186|isbn=978-0-203-94518-6}}</ref> Similar to "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," ''Gender Trouble'' discusses the works of [[Sigmund Freud]], [[Simone de Beauvoir]], [[Julia Kristeva]], [[Jacques Lacan]], [[Luce Irigaray]], [[Monique Wittig]], [[Jacques Derrida]], and [[Michel Foucault]].<ref name="Direk-2020">{{cite book |last=Direk |first=Zeynep |title=Ontologies of Sex: Philosophy in Sexual Politics |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Ep7pDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA112 |series=Reframing the boundaries |date=15 June 2020 |publisher=Rowman & Littlefield |pages=112 |isbn=978-1-78660-664-8 |oclc=1122448218 |chapter=4. Different Ontologies in Queer Theory}}</ref>

Butler offers a critique of the terms ''gender'' and ''sex'' as they have been used by feminists.<ref>{{cite book|title=Judith Butler| chapter=A Dictionary of Critical Theory |url=http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?entry=t306.e100&srn=1&ssid=460269119#FIRSTHIT|publisher=Oxford reference Online Premium|isbn=978-0-19-953291-9|date=January 2010|doi=10.1093/acref/9780199532919.001.0001}}</ref> Butler argues that feminism made a mistake in trying to make "women" a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler writes that this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations. Butler believes that feminists should not try to define "women" and they also believe that feminists should "focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement."<ref>{{cite book|title=Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender|url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/|publisher=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|year=2017}}</ref> Finally, Butler aims to break the supposed links between sex and gender so that gender and desire can be "flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors" (David Gauntlett).<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Butler |first=Paul |date=2004 |title=Embracing AIDS: History, Identity, and Post-AIDS Discourse |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/20866614 |journal=JAC |volume=24 |issue=1 |pages=102 |jstor=20866614 }}</ref> The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as performative, not an essence, has become one of the foundations of [[queer theory]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last=He |first=Li |date=2017 |title=The Construction of Gender: Judith Butler and Gender Performativity |url=https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/25878697.pdf |journal=Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research |volume=124 |pages=4 |via=Atlantis Press}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Browne |first=Evie |date=2019 |title=ALIGN Guide: Gender norms, LGBTQI issues and development |url=https://www.alignplatform.org/2-queer-theory-and-gender-norms |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240229031241/https://www.alignplatform.org/2-queer-theory-and-gender-norms#js-page |archive-date=February 29, 2024 |access-date=February 28, 2024 |website=Advancing Learning and Innovation on Gender Norms (ALIGN) |url-status=live }}</ref>

===''Imitation and Gender Insubordination'' (1991)===
''Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories'' is a collection of writings of gay and lesbian social theorists. Butler's contribution argues that no transparent revelation is afforded by using the terms "gay" or "lesbian" yet there is a political imperative to do so.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Imitation and Gender Insubordination|url=http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/FILM%20165A.W11/film%20165A%5BW11%5D%20readings%20/Judith_Butler__Imitation_and_Gender_Insubordination.pdf|access-date=November 29, 2021|archive-date=April 1, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220401031510/http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/FILM%20165A.W11/film%20165A%5BW11%5D%20readings%20/Judith_Butler__Imitation_and_Gender_Insubordination.pdf|url-status=dead}}</ref> Butler employs "the concepts of play/performance, drag, and imitation" to describe the formation of gender and sexuality as continually created subjectivities always at risk of dissolution from non-performance."<ref>{{Cite web|last=Ellis|first=Jason W.|date=2014-04-14|title=Recovered Writing, PhD in English, Queer Studies, Presentation on Judith Butler's "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" and Introduction to Bodies That Matter Feb. 6, 2008|url=https://dynamicsubspace.net/2014/04/14/recovered-writing-phd-in-english-queer-studies-presentation-on-judith-butlers-imitation-and-gender-insubordination-and-introduction-to-bodies-that-matter-feb-6-2008/|access-date=2021-11-29|website=Dynamic Subspace|language=en}}</ref>

===''Bodies That Matter'' (1993)===
''Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex'' seeks to clear up readings and supposed misinterpretations of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.<ref>For example, {{Cite journal | last=Jeffreys | first=Sheila | author-link=Sheila Jeffreys | title = The queer disappearance of lesbians: Sexuality in the academy | journal = [[Women's Studies International Forum]] | volume = 17 | issue = 5 | pages = 459–472 | doi = 10.1016/0277-5395(94)00051-4 | date = September–October 1994 }}</ref> As such, Butler aims to answer questions of this vein that may have been raised from their previous work ''Gender Trouble''. Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of [[Jacques Derrida|Derrida]]'s theory of iterability, which is a form of [[citationality]]:<blockquote>Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed ''by'' a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.<ref>{{cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |url=https://archive.org/details/bodiesthatmatter00butl |title=Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" |publisher=Routledge |year=1993 |isbn=978-0-415-90365-3 |location=New York |page=[https://archive.org/details/bodiesthatmatter00butl/page/95 95] |author-link=Judith Butler |url-access=registration}}</ref></blockquote>Butler also explores how gender can be understood not only as a performance, but also as a "constitutive constraint," or constructed character. They ask how this conceptualization of an individual's gender contributes to notions of bodily intelligibility, or comprehension, by other individuals. Butler continues to discuss bodily intelligibility by means of sex as a "materialized" entity, upon which cultural, collective ideals of gender can be built. From this angle, Butler interrogates value conscription upon various bodies as determined theories and practices of heterosexual predominance.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |title=Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex |date=1993 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=9780415610155 |edition=1st |location=New York, NY |publication-date=May 13, 2011 |pages=x-xii |language=en}}</ref> <blockquote>If gender consists of the social meanings that sex assumes, then sex does not accrue social meanings as additive properties but, rather, is replaced by the social meanings it takes on; sex is relinquished in the course of that assumption, and gender emerges, not as a term in a continued relationship of opposition to sex, but as the term which absorbs and displaces "sex," the mark of its full substantiation into gender or what, from a materialist point of view, might constitute a full de-substantiation.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |title=Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex |date=1993 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=9780415610155 |edition=1st |location=New York, NY |publication-date=May 13, 2011 |pages=5 |language=en}}</ref></blockquote>While continuing to draw upon sources such as those of [[Plato]], [[Luce Irigaray|Irigaray]], [[Jacques Lacan|Lacan]], and [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]] (as they did for ''Gender Trouble''), Butler also draws upon pieces of documentary film and literature for ''Bodies That Matter''. Such pieces include the film ''[[Paris Is Burning (film)|Paris is Burning]]'', short stories by [[Willa Cather]], and the novel ''[[Passing (novel)|Passing]]'' by Nella Larsen.

===''Excitable Speech'' (1997)===
{{further|Performativity#Judith Butler}}

In ''Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative'', Butler surveys the problems of [[hate speech]] and censorship. They argue that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and that in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance.<ref name="Jagger">{{cite book |last=Jagger|first=Gill |title=Judith Butler: Sexual politics, social change and the power of the performative |url=https://archive.org/details/judithbutlersexu00jagg|url-access=limited|year=2008 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York | pages=[https://archive.org/details/judithbutlersexu00jagg/page/n121 115]–8 |isbn=978-0-415-21975-4 |ol=OL10187608M |lccn=2007032458}}</ref>

Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar [[Catharine MacKinnon]]'s argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state's power to censor.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative|last=Butler|first=Judith|publisher=Routledge|year=1997|isbn=978-0-415-91588-5|location=New York|pages=[https://archive.org/details/excitablespeechp0000butl/page/22 22]|quote="Similarly, MacKinnon's appeal to the state to construe pornography as performative speech and, hence, as the injurious conduct of representation, does not settle the theoretical question of the relation between representation and conduct, but collapses the distinction in order to enhance the power of state intervention over graphic sexual representation."|url=https://archive.org/details/excitablespeechp0000butl/page/22}}</ref>

Deploying [[Michel Foucault|Foucault]]'s argument from the first volume of ''[[The History of Sexuality]]'', Butler states that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid.<ref>{{cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |author-link=Judith Butler |title=Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative |url=https://archive.org/details/excitablespeechp0000butl |url-access=registration |year=1997 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York | pages=[https://archive.org/details/excitablespeechp0000butl/page/129 129–33] |isbn=978-0-415-91588-5}}</ref> As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th-century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality they sought to control.<ref>For example, {{cite book |last=Foucault |first=Michel |author-link=Michel Foucault |others=Trans. Robert Hurley |title=The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol 1. |url=https://archive.org/details/historysexuality02fouc |url-access=limited |orig-year=1976 |year=1990 |publisher=Vintage |location=New York | page=[https://archive.org/details/historysexuality02fouc/page/n27 23] |quote=A censorship of sex? There was installed [since the 17th century] rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex, capable of functioning and taking effect in its very economy.}}</ref> Extending this argument using [[Derrida]] and [[Jacques Lacan|Lacan]], Butler says that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic "I" is a mere effect of a primitive censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech".<ref>{{cite book |last=Butler |first=Judith |author-link=Judith Butler |title=Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative |url=https://archive.org/details/excitablespeechp0000butl |url-access=registration |year=1997 |publisher=Routledge |location=New York | page=[https://archive.org/details/excitablespeechp0000butl/page/140 140] |isbn=978-0-415-91588-5}}</ref>

===''Precarious Life'' (2004)===

''Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence'' opens a new line in Judith Butler's work that has had a great impact on their subsequent thought, especially on books like ''Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?'' (2009) or ''Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly'' (2015), as well as on other contemporary thinkers.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Lorey |first1=Isabell |author-link=Isabell Lorey|title=State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious |date=2015 |publisher=Verso Books |location=London |isbn=9781781685969}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last1=Puar |first1=Jasbir K. |author-link=Jasbir Puar|title=Terrorist Assemblages Homonationalism in Queer Times |date=2007 |publisher=Duke University Press |location=Durham, NC |isbn=9780822390442}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Han |first1=Clara |title=Precarity, precariousness, and vulnerability |journal=Annual Review of Anthropology |date=2018 |volume=47 |issue=47 |pages=331–343 |doi=10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041644 |s2cid=149738954 |doi-access=free }}</ref> In this book, Butler deals with issues of precarity, vulnerability, grief and contemporary political violence in the face of the [[War on terror]] and the realities of [[Guantanamo Bay detention camp|prisoners at Guantanamo Bay]] and similar detention centers. Drawing on Foucault, they characterize the form of power at work in these places of "indefinite detention" as a convergence of [[sovereignty]] and [[governmentality]]. The "[[state of exception]]" deployed here is in fact more complex than the one pointed out by [[Giorgio Agamben|Agamben]] in his ''Homo Sacer'', since the government is in a more ambiguous relation to law —it may comply with it or suspend it, depending on its interests, and this is itself a tool of the state to produce its own sovereignty.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Butler |first1=Judith |title=Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence |date=2004 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn= 978-1-84467-544-9 |language=en|pages=55, 61–62, 66, 83}}</ref> Butler also points towards problems in [[international law]] treatises like the [[Geneva Conventions]]. In practice, these only protect people who belong to (or act in the name of) a recognized state, and therefore are helpless in situations of abuse toward [[Statelessness|stateless people]], people who do not enjoy a recognized citizenship or people who are labelled "terrorists", and therefore understood as acting on their own behalf as irrational "killing machines" that need to be held captive due to their "dangerousness".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Butler |first1=Judith |title=Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence |date=2004 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn= 978-1-84467-544-9 |language=en|pages=86–87, 73–74, 76}}</ref>

Butler also writes here on vulnerability and precariousness as intrinsic to the human condition. This is due to our inevitable interdependency from other precarious subjects, who are never really "complete" or autonomous but instead always "dispossessed" on the Other. This is manifested in shared experiences like [[grief]] and loss, that can form the basis for a recognition of our shared human (vulnerable) condition.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Butler |first1=Judith |title=Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence |date=2004 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn= 978-1-84467-544-9 |language=en|pages=20}}</ref> However, not every loss can be mourned in the same way, and in fact not every life can be conceived of as such (as situated in a condition common to ours).<ref>{{cite book |last1=Butler |first1=Judith |title=Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence |date=2004 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn= 978-1-84467-544-9 |language=en|pages=32–33}}</ref> Through a critical engagement with [[Emmanuel Levinas|Levinas]], they will explore how certain representations prevent lives from being considered worthy of being lived or taken into account, precluding the mourning of certain Others, and with that the recognition of them and their losses as equally human.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Butler |first1=Judith |title=Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence |date=2004 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn= 978-1-84467-544-9 |language=en|pages=147}}</ref> This preoccupation with the dignifying or dehumanizing role of practices of framing and representations will constitute one of the central elements of ''Frames of War'' (2009).

===''Undoing Gender'' (2004)===
{{Main|Undoing Gender}}
''Undoing Gender'' collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people for a more general readership than many of their other books. Butler revisits and refines their notion of performativity and focuses on the question of undoing "restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life".{{Citation needed|date=March 2023}}

Butler discusses how gender is performed without one being conscious of it, but says that it does not mean this performativity is "automatic or mechanical". They argue that we have desires that do not originate from our personhood, but rather, from social norms. The writer also debates our notions of "human" and "less-than-human" and how these culturally imposed ideas can keep one from having a "viable life" as the biggest concerns are usually about whether a person will be accepted if their desires differ from normality. Butler states that one may feel the need of being recognized in order to live, but that at the same time, the conditions to be recognized make life "unlivable". The writer proposes an interrogation of such conditions so that people who resist them may have more possibilities of living.<ref>Butler, Judith (2004). Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge</ref>

In Butler's discussion of intersex issues and people, Butler addresses the case of [[David Reimer]], a person whose sex was medically [[Sex assignment#Assignment in cases of infants with intersex traits, or cases of trauma|reassigned]] from male to female after a botched [[circumcision]] at eight months of age. Reimer was "made" female by doctors, but later in life identified as "really" male, married and became a stepfather to his wife's three children, and went on to tell his story in ''[[As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl]]'', which he wrote with [[John Colapinto]]. Reimer died by suicide in 2004.<ref>{{cite magazine | url = http://slate.com/id/2101678/ | title = Gender Gap: What were the real reasons behind David Reimer's suicide? | last = Colapinto | first = J | author-link = John Colapinto | magazine = [[Slate (magazine)|Slate]] | date = June 3, 2004 | access-date = February 13, 2009 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110916170908/http://www.slate.com/id/2101678/ | archive-date = September 16, 2011 | url-status = dead }}</ref>

===''Giving an Account of Oneself'' (2005)===
In ''Giving an Account of Oneself'', Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself; in other words, the limits of self-knowledge. Primarily borrowing from [[Theodor Adorno]], [[Michel Foucault]], [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], [[Jean Laplanche]], [[Adriana Cavarero]] and [[Emmanuel Levinas]], Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject. Butler theorizes the subject in relation to the social&nbsp;– a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms, as precisely the very condition of that subject's formation, the resources by which the subject becomes recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in the first place.

Butler accepts the claim that if the subject is opaque to itself the limitations of its free ethical responsibility and obligations are due to the limits of narrative, presuppositions of language and projection.

{{blockquote|You may think that I am in fact telling a story about the prehistory of the subject, one that I have been arguing cannot be told. There are two responses to this objection. (1) That there is no final or adequate narrative reconstruction of the prehistory of the speaking "I" does not mean we cannot narrate it; it only means that at the moment when we narrate we become speculative philosophers or fiction writers. (2) This prehistory has never stopped happening and, as such, is not a prehistory in any chronological sense. It is not done with, over, relegated to a past, which then becomes part of a causal or narrative reconstruction of the self. On the contrary, that prehistory interrupts the story I have to give of myself, makes every account of myself partial and failed, and constitutes, in a way, my failure to be fully accountable for my actions, my final "irresponsibility," one for which I may be forgiven only because I could not do otherwise. This not being able to do otherwise is our common predicament (page 78).}}

Instead Butler argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself. Any concept of responsibility which demands the full transparency of the self to itself, an entirely accountable self, necessarily does violence to the opacity which marks the constitution of the self it addresses. The scene of address by which responsibility is enabled is always already a relation between subjects who are variably opaque to themselves and to each other. The ethics that Butler envisions is therefore one in which the responsible self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes the limits of its capacity to give an account of itself to others, and respects those limits as symptomatically human. To take seriously one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation means then to critically interrogate the social world in which one comes to be human in the first place and which remains precisely that which one cannot know about oneself. In this way, Butler locates social and political critique at the core of ethical practice.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Butler|first=Judith|s2cid=143558617|date=2001|title=Giving an Account of Oneself|journal=Diacritics|volume=31|issue=4|pages=22–40|jstor=1566427|doi=10.1353/dia.2004.0002}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|last=Butler, Judith|title=Giving an account of oneself|date=2005|publisher=Fordham University Press|isbn=978-0-8232-3523-0|edition=1st|location=New York|lccn=2005017141|oclc=191818345|ol=OL23241953M}}</ref>

=== ''Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly'' (2015) ===
{{Distinguish|Performative activism}}
In ''Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly'', Butler discusses the power of public gatherings, considering what they signify and how they work.<ref name="Notes-Assembly">{{cite book |last1=Butler |first1=Judith |title=Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly |date=2015 |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-674-49556-2 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hgRuCwAAQBAJ |language=en}}</ref> They use this framework to analyze the power and possibilities of protests, such as the [[Black Lives Matter]] protests regarding the deaths of [[Shooting of Michael Brown|Michael Brown]] and [[Killing of Eric Garner|Eric Garner]] in 2014.

=== ''The Force of Nonviolence'' (2020) ===
In ''The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind'', Butler connects the ideologies of nonviolence and the political struggle for social equality. They review the traditional understanding of "nonviolence," stating that it "is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power."<ref name="Force of Nonviolence">{{cite book |last1=Butler |first1=Judith |title=The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind |date=2020 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn=978-1-78873-279-6 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-n6WDwAAQBAJ |language=en}}</ref> Instead of this understanding, Butler argues that "nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field."<ref name="Force of Nonviolence" />

=== ''Who's Afraid of Gender?'' (2024) ===
{{Main|Who's Afraid of Gender?}}
In ''Who's Afraid of Gender?'', Butler explores the roots of current anti-trans rhetoric, which they define as a "phantasm" that aligns itself with emerging authoritarian movements.<ref name="Rottenberg-2003" /> Butler was inspired to write this book after being attacked in 2017 in Brazil while speaking, at least one of whom shouted at Butler, saying "Take your ideology to hell!"<ref name="Halberstam-2014" /> Butler is interested in the literal demonization of [[gender]] by analyzing the historical context of the [[anti-gender movement]].<ref name="EGS-2019" /> The book has been described as "the most accessible of their books so far, an intervention meant for a wide audience".<ref>{{cite news |last1=Mackay |first1=Finn |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/13/whos-afraid-of-gender-by-judith-butler-review-the-gender-theorist-goes-mainstream |access-date=2 July 2024 |title=Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler review – the gender theorist goes mainstream |work=[[The Guardian]] |date=13 March 2024}}</ref>