In late 2017, I read about an article about an academic with the startling headline, “Judith Butler discusses being burned in an effigy at Brazil protest”. It was my first introduction to the strength of feeling that the field of gender studies — and Butler — would soon come to evoke.
The 68-year-old American philosopher and academic (who prefers to use they/them pronouns) is best known for the idea that gender is performative — in other words, that it is not immutable, but something we are socialised into by a range of institutions and actions throughout our lives.
