[17] After receiving their PhD, Butler revised their doctoral dissertation to produce their first book, entitled Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (1987).

[20] In addition, they joined the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Visiting Professor of the Humanities in the spring semesters of 2012, 2013 and 2014 with the option of remaining as full-time faculty.

"[30]Butler concludes their essay with a personal reflection on the strengths and limitations of widespread feminist theories which function on a solely binary perception of gender.

[31]"As a corporeal field of cultural play, gender is a basically innovative affair, although it is quite clear that there are strict punishments for contesting the script by performing out of turn or through unwarranted improvisations.

Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds.

[40] Butler employs "the concepts of play/performance, drag, and imitation" to describe the formation of gender and sexuality as continually created subjectivities always at risk of dissolution from non-performance.

"[41] Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex seeks to clear up readings and supposed misinterpretations of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.

In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state's power to censor.

[47] Deploying Foucault's argument from the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Butler states that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid.

[51][52][53] In this book, Butler deals with issues of precarity, vulnerability, grief and contemporary political violence in the face of the War on terror and the realities of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and similar detention centers.

The writer also debates our notions of "human" and "less-than-human" and how these culturally imposed ideas can keep one from having a "viable life" as the biggest concerns are usually about whether a person will be accepted if their desires differ from normality.

Primarily borrowing from Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Laplanche, Adriana Cavarero and Emmanuel Levinas, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject.

They review the traditional understanding of "nonviolence," stating that it "is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power.

[70][71] Some academics and political activists see in Butler a departure from the sex/gender dichotomy and a non-essentialist conception of gender—along with an insistence that power helps form the subject—an idea whose introduction purportedly brought new insights to feminist and queer praxis, thought, and studies.

[83] A particularly vocal critic has been feminist Martha Nussbaum, who has argued that Butler misreads J. L. Austin's idea of performative utterance, makes erroneous legal claims, forecloses an essential site of resistance by repudiating pre-cultural agency, and provides no "normative theory of social justice and human dignity.

"[86] More recently, several critics — such as semiotician Viviane Namaste[87] — have criticised Judith Butler's Undoing Gender for under-emphasizing the intersectional aspects of gender-based violence.

For example, Timothy Laurie notes that Butler's use of phrases like "gender politics" and "gender violence" in relation to assaults on transgender individuals in the United States can "[scour] a landscape filled with class and labour relations, racialized urban stratification, and complex interactions between sexual identity, sexual practices and sex work", and produce instead "a clean surface on which struggles over 'the human' are imagined to play out".

[92][93][94][95] Bruno Perreau has written that Butler was literally depicted as an "antichrist", both because of their gender and their Jewish identity, the fear of minority politics and critical studies being expressed through fantasies of a corrupted body.

[96] Much of Butler's early political activism centered around queer and feminist issues, and they served, for a period of time, as the chair of the board of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.

[9] They have also written and spoken out on issues ranging from affirmative action and gay marriage to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay.

More recently, Butler has been active in the Occupy movement and has publicly expressed support for a version of the 2005 Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

[109] When Butler received the 2012 Theodor W. Adorno Award, the prize committee came under attack from Israel's Ambassador to Germany, Yacov Hadas-Handelsman; the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's office in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff;[110] and the German Central Council of Jews.

[108]After the start of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, Butler published an essay entitled "The Compass of Mourning" in which they "condemn without qualification" the "terrifying and revolting massacre" while at the same time arguing that the attacks by Hamas should be seen in the context of the "horrors of the last seventy years".

"[117][118][119] Writing for Haaretz, Chaim Levinson rejected Butler's framing of the matter within a context of colonialism, saying that term is "the emptiest word in Western intellectual discourse today".

[120] Speaking at a public event in Paris on March 3, 2024, Butler stated that the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel was an uprising, an instance of armed resistance, rather than an act of terrorism.

Only through such an ever-growing cross-racial struggle against racism can we begin to achieve a sense of all the lives that really do matter.The dialogue draws heavily on their 2004 book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.

[124] On May 11, 2018, Butler joined a group of scholars in writing a letter to New York University following the sexual harassment suit filed by a former NYU graduate student against his advisor Avital Ronell.

James J. Marino, a professor at Cleveland State University and a member of the MLA, started a petition to demand Butler's resignation or removal from their post.

In response to a question about the Wi Spa controversy, the Press Gazette stated that Butler, in the Guardian article, said: "The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times.

"[132] Within a few hours of publication, three paragraphs including this statement were removed, with a note explaining: "This article was edited on 7 September 2021 to reflect developments which occurred after the interview took place.