Academic whose work during the 1990s became hugely influential in the interrogation of sexual identities, of the dualism of sex and gender, and the binarism of masculinity and femininity that Butler's work puts into question, becoming instrumental in the forging of a new lesbian and gay cultural sensibility, aesthetic, and politic: "queer".

Butler received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. In the late-80s, between different teaching/research appointments (most notably at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University), she was involved in "poststructuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

To question the very foundational presuppositions of Western feminism meant opening it up to what others would later name queer theory, and critiquing the imperialism of a Western feminist theory that purports to represent "all" women. In 1990, Butler's book Gender Trouble burst onto the scene and became an instant hit, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages.

The book critically employs the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. The book was popular enough that it even inspired an intellectual fanzine, Judy!, that poked fun at her academic celebrity status.

Butler's next book, Bodies That Matter, seeks to clear up confusions produced by both willful and inadvertent misreadings of both her work in Gender Trouble and poststructuralist feminism in general. To disrupt readings of the gender performative that simplistically view gender enactment as a daily voluntaristic "choice," Butler strengthens the performative theory of gender with a consideration of the status of repetition. Here she cites Derrida's theory of iterability or citationality, and goes on to work out a theory of performativity as citationality.

She has taught at several universities in the US and other countries, and is currently Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She also has a professorial appointment at the European Graduate School, where she sometimes teaches. She is currently working on essays pertaining to Jewish Philosophy, focusing on pre-Zionist criticisms of state violence. She continues to write on cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics. She is the partner of Prof. Wendy Brown (see).