Changes

Butler received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984, and her dissertation was subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s, 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 criticizing the [[imperialism]] of a Western feminist theory that purports to represent "all" women. In 1990, Butler's book ''[[Gender Trouble]]'' burst onto the scene, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages. The book critically discusses the works of [[Simone de Beauvoir]], [[Julia Kristeva]], [[Sigmund Freud]], [[Jacques Lacan]], [[Luce Irigaray]], [[Jacques Derrida]], and, most significantly, [[Michel Foucault]]. (At the same time, like most of Butler's work, it is regarded by some readers to be written in an unnecessarily complex, dense style). The book was popular enough that it even inspired an intellectual fanzine, ''[[Judy!]]'', that poked fun at her academic celebrity status.