Judith Butler is an influential post-structuralist and feminist philosopher whose work spans feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. Her scholarship delves into literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, and sexuality studies. Butler also explores 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka, and themes of loss, mourning, and war. More recent work engages with Jewish philosophy and critiques of state violence.
Judith Butler explores the fear of gender as a catalyst for reactionary politics globally, highlighting how anti-gender ideology movements manipulate this fear to challenge reproductive justice and undermine rights for trans and queer individuals. The book critiques the demonization of gender by authoritarian regimes and connects it to broader issues like critical race theory and xenophobia. Offering a hopeful vision, Butler calls for solidarity among those fighting for equality, making this a crucial intervention in contemporary social justice discourse.
At once profound, accessible, and utterly essential-an animated conversation
between two eminent thinkers illuminating what we mean when we talk about
living.
Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and all its consequences—political, social, ecological, economic—challenge us to develop a new account of interdependency. Butler argues for a radical social equality and advocates modes of resistance that seek to establish new conditions of livability and a new sense of a shared world.
"Situating non-violence at the cross-roads of the ethical and political, The Force of Non-Violence brings into focus the ethical binds that emerge within the force field of violence. Non-violence is very often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethic with an unrealistic relation to existing forms of power. This book argues for an aggressive form of non-violence that struggles with psychic ambivalence and seeks to embody social ideals of inter-dependency and equality. Only through a critique of individualism can the ethical and political ideal of non-violence be understood in relation to the ideal of equality and the demand for grievability. In this psychosocial and philosophical reflection that draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin, Butler argues that to oppose violence now requires understanding its different modalities, including the regulation of the grievability of lives. The book shows how "racial and demographic phantasms" enter into the rationale for inflicting state violence and other modes of "letting die" by investing violence in those who are most severely exposed to its effects and subjugated to its lethal power. The struggle for non-violence is found in modes of resistance and movements for social transformation that separate off aggression from its destructive aims to affirm the living potentials of radical egalitarian politics"-- Provided by publisher
Sarah Calhoun is the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Elector Andrew Calhoun,
one of Appalachees military heroes and one of the electors who gets to decide
who will next ascend asthe Emperor of the New World. None of that matters to
Sarah. She has a natural talent for hexing and one bad eye, and all she wants
is to be left aloneespecially by outsiders. But Sarahs world gets turned on
its head at the Nashville Tobacco Fair when a Yankee wizard-priesttries to
kidnap her. Sarah fights back with the aid of a mysterious monk named
Thalanes, who is one of the not-quite-human Firstborn, the Moundbuilders of
the Ohio. It is Thalanes who reveals to
Sarah Calhoun paid a hard price for her entry onto the stage of the Empire's politics, but she survived. Now she rides north into the Ohio and her father's kingdom, Cahokia. To win the Serpent Throne, she'll have to defeat seven other candidates, win over the kingdom's regent, and learn the will of a hidden goddess--while mastering her people's inscrutable ways and watching her own back. In New Orleans, a new and unorthodox priest arises to plague the chevalier and embody the curse of the murdered Bishop Ukwu. He battles the chevalier's ordinary forces as well as a troop of Old World mamelukes for control of the city and the mouth of the great Mississippi River. Dodging between these rival titans, a crew of Catalan pirates--whose captain was once a close associate of Mad Hannah Penn--grapples with the chevalier over the fate of one of their mates. Meanwhile, a failed ceremony and a sick infant send the Anishinaabe hunter Ma'iingan on a journey across the Empire to Cavalier Johnsland, to a troubled foster child named Nathaniel. Ma'iingan is promised that Nathaniel is a mighty healer and can save his imperiled baby, but first Nathaniel--a pale young man with a twisted ear who hears the voices of unseen beings--must himself be rescued, from oppression, imprisonment, and madness
Exploring the complexities of sex and gender, this work delves into the cultural codes surrounding femininity and the mythology of sex. Originally intended for a general audience in the 1970s, it offers unique insights into gender dynamics, prefiguring concepts later articulated by Judith Butler. After being shelved for over forty years due to a publisher's closure, this feminist classic highlights Strathern's engagement with key feminist thinkers and critiques various fields, enhancing our understanding of late twentieth-century feminist discourse.
In Frames of War, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of state violence, a process integral to the way in which the West wages modern war. This portrayal has saturated our understanding of human life, and has led to the exploitation and abandonment of whole peoples, who are cast as existential threats rather than as living populations in need of protection. These people are framed as already lost, to imprisonment, unemployment and starvation, and can easily be dismissed. In the twisted logic that rationalizes their deaths, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of ‘the living.’ This disparity, Butler argues, has profound implications for why and when we feel horror, outrage, guilt, loss and righteous indifference, both in the context of war and, increasingly, everyday life. This book discerns the resistance to the frames of war in the context of the images from Abu Ghraib, the poetry from Guantanamo, recent European policy on immigration and Islam, and debates on normativity and non-violence. In this urgent response to ever more dominant methods of coercion, violence and racism, Butler calls for a re-conceptualization of the Left, one that brokers cultural difference and cultivates resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of state violence and its vicissitudes.
