Judith Butler was born in 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio. They are a feminist philosopher and gender-studies scholar, best known for their books Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993). Butler is a leading public intellectual, and their theories on the performative nature of gender have influenced political, philosophical and cultural discourse worldwide.
When were you happiest?
I was happiest kayaking in Canada as a young person – lake swimming in the summer.
Who are your heroes?
When I was young, I certainly read comic books and liked the figures who had super-human strength. When I was older, I remember admiring Martin Luther King Jr for his principles and his strength – but he was very human to me, perhaps the best human I could imagine.
What’s your earliest memory?
I do not have a particular memory. I remember running down the street where I lived in a storm when I was about four or five. I remember getting lost at the circus. But these are both memories of when I could walk. So there are memories that are apparently lost to me.
What book last changed your thinking?
My thinking is often changed by what I read. I would say that Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These showed me how a novella can make a strong moral argument and political critique by the way that it unfolds, and that a narrative can be an argument.
Who would paint your portrait?
Perhaps a youth collective.
What TV show could you not live without?
I could live without all of them.
What would be your Mastermind specialist subject?
I believe I have an original interpretation of one paragraph in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live?
I would like to live beyond time and place. This is one of the reasons I read Franz Kafka.
What political figure do you look up to?
The author Arundhati Roy, for her political principles and her courageous and elegant use of language in fiction and in public life.
What’s your theme tune?
I am not sure what a theme tune is, so it seems I do not have one.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Yield when you are about to break everything.
What’s currently bugging you?
Trump and Trumpism is bugging me. Also the allure of fascism in everyday life.
What single thing would make your life better?
Many things: more joy, more music, a new political regime, the future of democracy.
In another life, what job might you have chosen?
I would have been a lawyer or a psychoanalyst.
Are we all doomed?
No, but we have a struggle before us. Feeling doomed is one very understandable mood from which we have to emerge collectively.
“Who’s Afraid of Gender?” by Judith Butler is published in paperback by Allen Lane on 20 March
[See also: Katharine Birbalsingh: “They’re going to destroy our schools”]
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This article appears in the 12 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Reformation