14 Jun 2012
dOCUMENTA (13)‘s open and ongoing bibliography includes the following publications from Judith Butler listed here with descriptions from the publishers themselves.
Undoing Gender, 2004. Routledge
Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler’s recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern–and fail to govern–gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. Available from: Amazon UK £22.87
Amazon USA $30.03
Amazon DE euro 54.53
Amazon Canada CDN$ 29.78
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, 1997. Routledge
With the same intellectual courage with which she addressed issues of gender, Judith Butler turns her attention to speech and conduct in contemporary political life, looking at several efforts to target speech as conduct that has become subject to political debate and regulation. Reviewing hate speech regulations, anti-pornography arguments, and recent controversies about gay self-declaration in the military, Judith Butler asks whether and how language acts in each of these cultural sites. Available from: Amazon UK £22.87
Amazon USA $33.58
Amazon DE euro 67.11 
Amazon Canada CDN$ 44.18
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, 1993. Routledge
In Bodies That Matter, renowned theorist and philosopher Judith Butler argues that theories of gender need to return to the most material dimension of sex and sexuality: the body. Butler offers a brilliant reworking of the body, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the “matter” of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain sex from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She clarifies the notion of “performativity” introduced in Gender Trouble and via bold readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud explores the meaning of a citational politics. She also draws on documentary and literature with compelling interpretations of the film Paris is Burning, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and short stories by Willa Cather. Available from:Amazon UK £13.64
Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990. Routledge.
One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, ‘essential’ notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category ‘woman’ and continues in this vein with examinations of ‘the masculine’ and ‘the feminine’. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler’s concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. Available from: Amazon UK £13.64
The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, 1997. Stanford University Press.
This work combines social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in novel ways, offering a more sustained analysis of the theory of subject formation implicit in such other works of the author as Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Available from: Amazon UK £21.38
Giving an Account of Oneself, 2005. Fordham University Press
What does it mean to lead an ethical life under vexed social and linguistic conditions? In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice—one responsive to the need for critical autonomy yet grounded in the opacity of the human subject. Available from: Amazon UK £17.05
Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, 2009 Verso
Analyzing the different frames through which we experience war, Butler calls for a reorientation of the Left. In this urgent response to violence, racism and increasingly aggressive methods of coercion, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of armed conflict, a process integral to how the West prosecutes its wars. In doing so, she calls for a re-conceptualization of the Left, one united in opposition and resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of interventionist military action. Available from: Amazon UK £8.69
