Center for Gender & Sexuality Law | Columbia Law School

Symposium Honoring the Contributions of Judith Butler

A Symposium Honoring Judith Butler's Contributions to the Scholarship and Practice of Gender and Sexuality Law
March 5, 2010

Each year the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law devotes a day-long symposium to the significant contributions of a senior scholar to the literature of gender and/or sexuality law and theory. The 2010 symposium recognized the work of Judith Butler, the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her works have had significant, and in many cases paradigm shifting influence in the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. The symposium explored Butler’s work on gender, sexuality, kinship, terrorism, torture, war and free speech.

Her work of greatest influence in law includes:
Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies That Matter (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Giving An Account of Oneself (2005), and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009).

Bodies of Law:

• Janet Halley, Harvard Law School
• Kathryn Abrams, UC Berkeley, School of Law
• Dean Spade, University of Seattle Law School

Kinship, Friendship & Ethics of the Self:

• Joan Scott, Institute for Advanced Study
• Morris Kaplan, SUNY Purchase, Philosophy
• David Eng, University of Pennsylvania, English

Power and Performativity:

• Martha Umphrey, Amherst College, Jurisprudence & Social Thought
• Amy Adler, NYU Law School
• Ritu Birla, University of Toronto, History

Keynote by Judith Butler: