Judith Butler

Celebrity radical theorist Judith Butler has been called “the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today” by Cornel West. Their seminal books “Gender Trouble” and “Bodies that Matter” have reshaped our understanding of gender and sexuality by introducing the concept of “performativity.” Their latest, “The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political,” makes what John Freeman calls “a fresh new case for what a destructive obstacle our pervasive individualism is to nonviolent action—and the change possible with it.” Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and also the author of “Frames of War,” “Precarious Life,” “The Psychic Life of Power,” and “Excitable Speech.”