Judith Butler

Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) introduced the theory of gender performativity — the idea that gender is produced through repeated acts rather than expressing some prior essence — and reshaped feminist and queer theory well beyond philosophy departments. Long based at UC Berkeley, where they helped found the Program in Critical Theory, Butler has also written on mourning, nonviolence, and war, and has been an outspoken, and controversial, critic of Israeli policy toward Palestinians and of what they see as the limits of Zionism.