Judith Butler and Film

At a time when the representational expansion of women and LGBTQIA+ people in media coincides with the rise of global “anti-gender” ideologies, Judith Butler’s writings on gender, precarity, and liveability hold new urgency. Judith Butler and Film is the first book to examine the reciprocal relationship between Butler’s theories and cinema, situating film within the broader context of Butler’s philosophy and its interactions with popular media. Tracing the presence of film in Butler’s work – from Paris Is Burning and Boys Don’t Cry to Divine’s queer terrorism in John Waters’ films, and from Hollywood’s star system to documentaries featuring Butler – Gürbüz reveals cinema as both object and method of inquiry into Butlerian thought. Bringing this dialogue up to the present, the book branches into Butler’s 2024 bestseller Who Is Afraid of Gender? and their recent appearances in popular online media, underscoring the immediacy of Butler’s thought in today’s cultural landscape.

Moving beyond established frameworks in film theory while drawing on counter-cinema, trans* cinema discourse, and the psychic life of film, Judith Butler and Film repositions cinema as a potential site of embodied transformation and collective imagination—a medium through which egalitarian futures can be envisioned and felt.