ABSTRACT
American philosopher and literary theorist, Judith Butler (1956–) is one of the leading thinkers in gender studies and her theories of gendered and sexed identity have had a long-lasting influence on this field and beyond. As the Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, her work also concerns language, politics, psychoanalysis, ethics, film and literary studies. It is for her ideas on gender, however, that she is best known, and she positions herself primarily as a feminist theorist (Butler, Osbourne and Segal, 1994). It is in relation to gender that her work (so far) has been most relevant to consumer research, and therefore, the focus of this chapter will be on this aspect of her work.
