Portal:Gender studies/Selected biography
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Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is the Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, and her dissertation was subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s, between different teaching/research appointments (such as at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University), she was involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (born May 2, 1950) is an American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory (queer studies), and critical theory. Influenced by feminism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, her work reflects an abiding interest in a wide range of issues and topics, including queer performativity and performance; experimental critical writing; the works of Marcel Proust; non-Lacanian psychoanalysis; artists’ books; Buddhism and pedagogy; the affective theories of Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein; and material culture, especially textiles and texture.
Olympe de Gouges (May 7, 1748 – November 3, 1793), born Marie Gouze, was a playwright and journalist whose feminist writings reached a large audience. A proponent of democracy, she demanded the same rights for French women that French men were demanding for themselves. In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror for attacking the regime of Maximilien Robespierre in print.
Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by the pen name bell hooks, is an African American author, feminist, and social activist. Her writing has focused on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. She has published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern female perspective, she has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.
Evelyn Fox Keller (born 1936) is an American physicist, author, and feminist and is currently a Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Keller has also taught at New York University and in the department of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Keller received her B.A. in physics from Brandeis University in 1957 and continued her studies in theoretical physics at Harvard University graduating with a Ph.D. in 1963. She became interested in molecular biology during a visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory while completing her Ph.D. dissertation. Her subsequent research has focused on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.
John D'Emilio (born 1948, New York City) is a professor of history and of women's and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has taught previously at George Washington University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1982, where his advisor was Kenneth T. Jackson. A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow from 1995 to 1997, he served as the Founding Director of the Policy Institute at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
D'Emilio was awarded the Stonewall Book Award in 1984 for his most widely cited book, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, which is considered the definitive history of the U.S. homophile movement from 1940 to 1970. His book Lost Prophet: Bayard Rustin and the Quest for Peace and Justice in America won the Stonewall Book Award for non-fiction in 2004. He was the 2005 recipient of the Brudner Prize at Yale University.
Elspeth Probyn (born 1958) is the Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Sydney. She received her Doctorate in Communications from Concordia University, 1989. She lectures and publishes in fields including cultural studies, media studies and sociology, with a particular focus on food, sexuality and the body. She also writes a fortnightly column in the Higher Education Supplement section of national newspaper The Australian. She has previously taught in Canada and the USA, and is of Welsh and Canadian background.
She was elected an Ordinary Member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2002.
Simone de Beauvoir (French pronunciation: [simɔn də boˈvwaʀ] in French) (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986) was a French author and philosopher. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.
In the essay Woman: Myth and Reality, Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by putting a false aura of "mystery" around them. She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them, and that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy. She wrote that this also happened on the basis of other categories of identity, such as race, class, and religion. But she said that it was nowhere more true than with sex in which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (July 3, 1860 – August 17, 1935) was a prominent American novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and non fiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women, and she served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle.
In January 1896, Gilman attended the 28th Annual Women’s Suffrage Convention in Washington, D.C., where Lester Frank Ward, the leading reform Darwinist at the time, hosted a reception on her behalf. Two years later, she published Women and Economics, a theoretical treatise which argued, among other things, that women are subjugated by men, that motherhood should not preclude a woman from working outside the home, and that housekeeping, cooking, and child care should be professionalized. “The ideal woman," Gilman wrote, "was not only assigned a social role that locked her into her home, but she was also expected to like it, to be cheerful and gay, smiling and good-humored.”
Gayle S. Rubin (born 1949) is a cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and influential theorist of sex and gender politics. She has written on a range of subjects including feminism, sadomasochism, prostitution, pornography and lesbian literature, as well as anthropological studies and histories of sexual subcultures.
Rubin coined the phrase "sex/gender system", which she defines as "the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied".
