GATED at the lecture presented by Judith Butler

Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave 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.

Butler is best known for her books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), in which she challenges conventional notions of gender and develops her theory of gender performativity. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship.

In the lecture in UCD on 31 January, under the title ‘The Ethics and Politics of Non-Violence’, and sub-title ‘Destruction in the Political: Reflections with Freud’ Butler re-read Freud as a political philosopher and examined his work in the light of possibilities of political resistance. In the Q and A session Butler emphasised that civil disobedience is not an act of passivity but an active act of refusal and that promoted the idea of aggressive non-violence and an action of overwhelming as a resistance strategy.