Metaphors That Matter - Critical Reflections on Judith Butler

This volume provides the first forum where political theorists engage in a series of critical encounters with Judith Butler's wide-ranging body of work. It brings together essays by 13 distinguished contributors, who address Butler's writing on topics ranging from feminism and phenomenology, to capitalism and culture, to law, rights and the livable life. Butler's work from the start has been profoundly philosophical, and therefore in principle multi-disciplinary. Rather than claim her as a political theorist, this book instead exhibits the diversity of responses that political theorists have had to her work. The theorists in this collection are not merely surveying or synthesising Butler's writings. Instead, they use Butler's thought, putting it to work in diverse ways. These include philosophical issues of great abstraction; cross-cultural and interdisciplinary issues in comparative social thought; macro-issues in public policy and international politics; and contemporary politics as reflected and pursued in TV and cinematic drama. While not under-rating Butler's achievements in reorienting the study of sex, gender and sexuality, this book situates that work, as Butler does, in relation to further issues, further controversies, further interventions in precarious politics'. This book, along with its companion volume Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics (by Samuel A. Chambers and Terrell Carver), makes a primary and fundamental contribution to political theory, just as it should have widespread implications for numerous fields: from women's studies, gender studies, and lesbian and gay studies, to queer theory feminist theory, and cultural studies.Carver, Terrell is the author of 'Metaphors That Matter - Critical Reflections on Judith Butler' with ISBN 9780415384421 and ISBN 0415384427.