Judith Butler

In this course

Butler appears in the course primarily as a poststructuralist theorist whose critique of humanism and representationalism sets up debates about agency, materiality, and the nature-culture divide that become central to reconsidering AI and cybernetic systems. The readings invoke Butler alongside Foucault to challenge conventional epistemologies, suggesting that understanding how power constitutes subjectivity and embodiment is crucial for theorizing non-human or machinic agency beyond humanist frameworks. Her work enables discussions of how concepts like the "human" are performatively constructed rather than natural, a move that destabilizes easy distinctions between biological and artificial systems.

Background

Judith Butler is an American feminist, queer philosopher, and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, and the fields of feminist and queer theory, academic freedom, and literary theory.

Mentioned in 1 reading