Daily Dialectic

"The Butler did it"

Rosie Trappes, University of Queensland

08 April 2015

Judith Butler is well known for her work in gender theory for her account of the way gender and sexuality are constructed through an exclusionary and violent process of reiteration of the heterosexual norms of femininity and masculinity. Butler broadens her focus in her later work to the category of the human. She argues that the world has been divided into the humans and a denied realm of those who fail to fit into the norm: ‘inhuman humans’, ‘unliveable lives’. In this talk I want to take a look at Butler’s account of this strange realm of people and how it relates to Butler’s notion of vulnerability.