Judith Butler (b.1956, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, lives and works in Berkeley, California, USA) is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Co-Director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Judith Butler is the author of, among others, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), Excitable Speech (1997) and Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (co-written with Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and Wendy Brown in 2009). She is also active in gender and sexual politics and human rights, anti-war politics and Jewish Voice for Peace. Butler is presently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities.