Judith Butler appeared on City Arts and Lectures on June 13 in conversation with Poulomi Saha.
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and former Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They served as Founding Director of the Program in Critical Theory as well as the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Since their foundational philosophical critique of gender and sexuality, Gender Trouble, Butler has been a singularly important contributor to our contemporary understanding of those categories, including what it can mean to be queer. Their book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, examines why recent authoritarian governments and transexclusionary feminists have focused so much of their energy and ire on gender.
Poulomi Saha is associate professor of English and co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. They are currently at work on their second book, Fascination, which investigates the obsession with, and fear of, Indian spirituality across American history, touching on everything from Thomas Jefferson to the docuseries Wild, Wild Country.