Judith Butler. Unmaking gender. Identity, sexuality and secularism

Conference, seminar, reading workshop and course

By radicalizing theoretical instruments introduced by Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Beauvoir and Wittig, Judith Butler was able to, at the end of the 1980s, carry out one of the most incisive philosophical readings of gender and sexual identity to date. The idea that gender is far from being an anatomical or psychological truth appears in her classic Gender Trouble where it is treated as cultural fiction; as a performative effect resulting from the stylized repetition of acts that then become natural and produce the illusion of substance. This inedited definition went on to provoke what we consider today a "performative twist" in feminist study. Its critical power would reach into the far-off domains of post-colonial theory, visual study, and literary analysis.

In the past few years, in Bodies that Matter, Antigone's Claim, and her most recent publication, Undoing Gender, Judith Butler has developed some of the most provocative reflections on the legal status of sexual identity, the political organization of inter- and trans-sexuality, the normalization of the body, the transformation of parent/child, couple and familial institutions, the rights of sexual minorities, as well as identity in the face of cultural, legal and religions imperatives. This seminar, accompanied by a variety of operative reading groups in institutions throughout the city, will allow participants to approach a complex philosophical work which will help us to understand recent transformations in feminism and critical theory: from gay/lesbian identity politics to queer theory and transgender movements.