JUDITH BUTLER TO DISCUSS ABU GHRAIB PHOTOGRAPHS

Critical theorist Judith Butler, one of the most influential figures in the contemporary American intellectual landscape, will inaugurate the Distinguished Scholars Lecture Series sponsored by the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics and the History of Art on Thursday, April 14, at 4:30 p.m. Her talk, "Torture and the Ethics of Photography," will take place in Thomas Great Hall and is free and open to the public. Butler will also participate in a seminar with students in the Graduate Group.

Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1990 book Gender Trouble had an enormous impact on feminist thinking and is often cited as one of the founding texts of queer theory. In Gender Trouble and subsequent publications, Butler advances a theory of identity, particularly gender identity, as performative. Identity, she argues, is not an essential core upon which gender and other social constructions hang, but is actually created by acting out those conventions.

Butler's recent work focuses on ethics, violence and "an effort to formulate a theory of responsibility for a subject who cannot always know herself." In 2004, Butler published two books. According to reviewers, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence "critiques the use of violence that has emerged as a response to loss in post-9/11 America"; Undoing Gender "revisits the problem of kinship in light of new challenges to the family form, interrogates the meaning and purposes of the incest taboo, and challenges the ways in which intersexuality and transsexuality are pathologized."

In her lecture at Bryn Mawr, Butler will discuss, but not show, the widely disseminated photographs of prisoners abused by U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, drawing on the work of Susan Sontag and Emmanuel Levinas. During her visit to campus, Butler will also meet with students in an interdepartmental Graduate Group seminar taught by Assistant Professor of Classics Catherine Conybeare and Assistant Professor of History of Art Homay King.

Butler is the first in a series of distinguished lecturers funded by a challenge grant to the Graduate Group. The grant of $441,600, which requires the College to raise matching funds of $1.76 million, will provide an endowment and bridge-funding for curricular innovation, graduate fellowships, and museum and library internships as well as regular visits by distinguished scholars.

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