Judith Pamela Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist, especially known for her theory of the performative nature of gender and sex. Born into a European-Jewish family, she had her early education in a Hebrew school, where she was introduced to philosophy at the age of fourteen. Later, she studied the subject at Yale University, eventually earning her doctorate degree from there at the age of twenty-eight. At thirty-four, she published her first major work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, adding a sequel (Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex) to it three years later. As of 2020, she has published 23 books in addition to numerous articles and book chapters, which have had great influence not only in the fields of political philosophy, ethics, and literary theory, but also on the feminist and queer movements. Currently serving as the Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, she is also on the editorial board or advisory board of several academic journals.