What if gender wasn't a predetermined reality, but a fluid construct formed by culture, history, and individual identity? This is a question that drives the work of Judith Butler, a gender theorist and distinguished professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

While acknowledging the biological realities of sex, Butler promotes the concept of gender as performative — something that is enacted and shaped through our actions and interactions. This view, although challenging to traditional perspectives, is instrumental in the discourse on queer, trans, and women's rights. Butler encourages a shift in societal conversation to include diverse gender identities.

This transformation, they believe, allows us to work toward a society where equality, freedom, and justice are at the forefront, reinforcing the foundations of our democratic society.

0:00 What is gender theory?

1:34 Sex and gender: What’s the difference?

2:29 Learning from genocide

3:34 Queer theory in the 1970s & ’80s

4:56 Big ideas in gender theory’s evolution

7:06 Gender is “performative”: What that means

9:04 The resistance to trans rights

10:37 Countering the attack on gender

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About Judith Butler:

Judith Butler is a post-structuralist philosopher and queer theorist. They are most famous for the notion of gender performativity, but their work ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, mourning and war.

They have received countless awards for their teaching and scholarship, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Rockefeller fellowship, Yale's Brudner Prize, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.

Their books include "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity," "Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex," "Undoing Gender," and "Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?"

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