Reading Group: Judith Butler

The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice will host a study group on the work of Judith Butler at at Pollyanna 圖書館 Library, 221A. This six-session study group is convened in anticipation of her academic visit and public lecture at UBC in the Winter of 2019.

Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the Hannah Arendt Chair at The European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. From 2018–20, Butler will serve as the Vice President of the Modern Languages Association, New York, and from 2020–21 she will serve as the MLA’s President.

Butler rose to prominence in 1990 with Gender Trouble, a book that unearthed and interrogated foundational assumptions of gender in philosophy and feminist theory. Butler’s scholarship challenges the confines of disciplinary thinking, reading across philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. Butler is also known for her commitment to political activism and her vocal opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

This study group will engage with Butler’s writings from the last two decades, which advanced from her critical early works on gender and sex to engagements with theories of self, the nation, political agency, and transformative politics. As an exercise in collective learning, this program engages with the Belkin Gallery’s Beginning with the Seventies, a series of four exhibitions that are based upon a multi-year research project investigating the 1970s, an era when social movements of all kinds—feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ and Indigenous rights, access to health services and housing—began to coalesce into models of self-organization that overlapped with the production of art and culture.

No registration is necessary to participate. All sessions of the study group are open to all and free to attend. Each session will be facilitated by study leaders who have selected texts from Butler’s work as primary readings paired alongside supplementary materials.

For access to study materials please email librarian@polly-anna.ca.

Reading Schedule

September 25, facilitated by Madeleine Reddon

Judith Butler, “Unwritten Laws, Aberrant Transmissions,” Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death

October 9, facilitated by Sheila Giffen – Please note that this session will be held at 236 East Pender Street

Judith Butler, “An Account of Oneself” and “Foucault’s Critical Account of Himself,” Giving an Account of Oneself

Michel Foucault, “How Much Does it Cost for Reason to Tell the Truth?” Foucault Live (1989)

November 6, facilitated by Magnolia Pauker

Judith Butler, “Responsiveness as Responsibility,” “The Political Promise of the Performative,” “The Political Affects of Plural Performativity” and “The University, the Humanities, and the Book Bloc,” Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013)

Gayle Rubin with Judith Butler, “Sexual Traffic,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (1994)

November 20, facilitated by Marianne Nicholson

Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler, excerpt, Who Sings the Nation-state? Language, Politics, Belonging (2007)

January 22, facilitated by John Culbert

Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015)

Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler, excerpt, Who Sings the Nation-state? Language, Politics, Belonging (2007)

February 12, facilitated by Vincent Tao – CANCELLED

Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015)

Markus Kip, “Solidarity,” Keywords for Radicals (2016)

Asad Haider, “Universality,” Mistaken Identity (2018)