Who is Judith Butler: Born on the 24th February, 1956, Cleveland, OhioButler identifies herself as an anti-Zionist Jewish American. She came out as a lesbian at the age of 14.She earned her PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984, same place she got her BA. Currently she is Maxine Elliot professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at University of California, Berkley.The most common subject associated with Butler is queer theory, but she has also written on subjects like language, political philosophy, Jewish philosophy and psychoanalysis.Butler was a member of a guerrilla theatre group called LIPS , which she says she enjoyed because it stood for nothing.In 2004 she received the Brudner Prize at Yale.Gender Trouble: 1990 book by philosopherJudith Butler. Influential in academic feminismandqueer theory, it is credited with creating the notion ofgender performativity. It is considered to be one of the canonical texts of queer theory andpostmodernpoststructuralfeminismWomen as a subject of Feminism: Butler beginsGender Troublewith an attack on one of the central assumptions of feminist theory: the supposition that there exists an Identityand a subject that requires representation in politicsandlanguage.For Butler, "women" and "woman" are fraught categories, complicatedby class , ethnicity, sexuality, and other facets of Identity. Foucault points out that juridical systems of power produces the subjects they subsequently come to represent. (Butler,1990:pp,376)Juridical notions of power appear to regulate political life in purely negative termsthat is, through the limitation, prohibition, regulation, control, and even protection of individuals related to that political structure through the contingent and retractable operation of choice. In such cases, an uncritical appeal to such a system for the emancipation of women will be clearly self-defeating.(ibid:376) By conforming to a requirement of representational politics that feminism articulate a stable subject, feminism thus opens itself to charges of gross misrepresentation.(ibid,378)Perhaps, paradoxically, representation will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject of women is nowhere presumed.(ibid,379)Criticism: An initial criticism on queer theory is that precisely "queer" does not refer to any specific sexual status or gender object choice. Example: Halperin (1995) allows that straight persons may be "queer," which some believe, robs gays and lesbians of the distinctiveness of what causes them to be marginalized. It desexualizes identity, when the issue is precisely about a sexual identity (Jagose, 1996).Since queer theory refuses any reference to standard ideas of normality, cannot make crucial distinctions. Example, queer theorists usually argue that one of the advantages of the term "queer" is that it includes transsexuals, sado-masochists, and other marginalized sexualities.Typically, critics of queer theory are concerned that the approach obscures or glosses altogether the material conditions that underpin discourse. Tim Edwards(1998) argues that queer theory extrapolates too broadly from textual analysis in undertaking an examination of the social.Adam Green(2002) argues that queer theory ignores the social and institutional conditions within which lesbians and gays live.Example, queer theory dismantles social contingency in some cases (homosexual subject positions) while recuperating social contingency in others (racialized subject positions).