Key Words: Butler; Post-Structuralism; Queer Theory; Power; Performativity; Ethics
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Abstract Judith Butler is one of the most influential late 20th and early 21st century philosophers in regards to left wing politics, as well as an active campaigner for social justice within the US and worldwide. Her academic work has been foundational to the academic discipline of queer theory and has been extensively critiqued and applied across a hugely wide range of disciplines. In addition, Butler’s work itself is extensive covering topics such as gender, sexuality, race, literary theory and warfare. This article can only serve as a taster for the potential application of her work in relation to nursing, which is in its infancy. This introduction covers three of the potentially most productive themes in Butler’s work, namely: power, performativity and ethics. Each of these themes are critically explored in turn, sometimes in relation to their actual application in nursing literature, but also in relation to their potential for producing novel critiques of nursing practice. Suggestions are made about how Butler’s work can develop nursing research and practice. The article concludes with a short summary of Butler’s key works as well as suggested reading for people interested in examining how her theories have been applied across different academic settings.
Key words: Butler; post-structuralism; queer theory; power; performativity; ethics. Introduction and context This paper explores the works and theories of one particular author Judith Butler, and how her theories could be used in nursing research, drawing from examples from the author’s own work on the nurse-patient relationship in palliative and supportive care as well as a sample of other literature where Butler’s work is currently being used productively.
Whilst this paper focuses on Butler’s academic writings, her work extends beyond this and some more general background information is useful in providing context to her theoretical ideas. Butler is currently appointed as the Maxine Elliot Professor in the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkley. Her work as a corpus is problematic to categorise with one label, partly because it spans around 25 years, but also because it has covered a wide range of different subject areas. However, many people have considered her to have been one of the founding theorists in queer theory, and one of the leading thinkers in post-structural, political and feminist philosophy. She came to prominence in part through her rejection of the distinction between sex as a biological construct and gender as a social construct, arguing instead that “perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (Butler, 1990, p.10). This was and still remains a radical shift away from other feminist theories on sex and gender, as to put it simply Butler argues that the physical characteristics of bodies cannot automatically be understood as being in a pre-existing state of either male or female, and that understanding the physical anatomy of bodies as sex is infact a social construction, and therefore sex is and always was gender. This rejection of concepts like sex as pre-existing and natural and instead insisting on examining them as socially constructed concepts remains a key feature throughout Butler’s work.
In more recent years Butler has turned to being concerned with engaging in robust critiques of racism, ethics and warfare with particular reference to the Israel- Palestine conflict and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Butler’s work is so prolific, reviewing each and every book, paper, interview and commentary would be impossible in a journal article. Therefore, this article will focus on three of Butler’s key theoretical areas that run across the majority of her works and are of particular relevance to nursing: power, knowledge and subjectivity; performativity; and ethics.
Power, knowledge and subjectivity Butler’s understanding of power is heavily influence by Foucault’s work which posits that knowledge is linked to power by using knowledge to regulate the conduct of others and in a reciprocal way power then regulates what is viable as knowledge. As such, power and knowledge then feed on each other becoming indistinguishable (Foucault, 1980). For example, building on the discussion of gender and sex above, Butler suggests that the knowledge about biological characteristics of sex organs exerts power over the definition of gender and legitimists the male-female binary through reference to medical and social norms. In turn this delegitimises other ways of understanding gender such as transgenderism, inter-sex, and non-binary expressions of gender, this frequently results in individuals being classed as deviating from accepted norms and needing some sort of medical or surgical correction. As such power and knowledge produce certain legitimised ways of expressing one’s gender in relation to one’s body; and in line with Foucault this is conceptualised as something that pervades society and subjects, something which Foucault terms capillary forms of power (Foucault, 1980). However, within Foucault’s work it is never quite clear how subjects come into being, instead within all of his work the subjects and social situations that he examines can generally be characterised as consisting of already-acting adult subjects where no account of their entering into the social word is given.
In her book The Psychic Life of Power (Butler, 1997b) Butler moves away from specific discussion of gender, and instead extends Foucauldian theories of power/knowledge in a more generalised way by exploring how power is not only productive of certain ways of being, but is instead foundational to the formation of subjects themselves. For the purposes of Butler’s theories subjectivity can be thought of as a collection of discourses on areas such as sexuality, race, gender, disability/ability, class etc. Importantly, all these discourses will be suffused by power and knowledge legitimising certain discourses over others. As such one must become subjected to the power and knowledge that various discourses convey in order to be understandable and enter into everyday social relations with others, and to fail to do so risks a variety of actions being taken and sanctions being enforced to make one comply. For example, to return to one of Butler’s key concerns gender, genital ambiguity at birth was and still is subject to knowledge about the gender binary which often results in surgery to achieve normative genital presentation. Equally, later on in life gender ambiguity is frequently met with violence and prejudice, thus again (albeit in a different way) sanctioning non-normative gendered ways of being. Finally, in relation to ways in which power and knowledge suffuse gender there are a multitude of ways in which decisions are enforced in line with a male-female gender binary. For example the clothing one wears, going to the ‘right’ toilet, as well as the purchasing of a wide variety of consumer products aimed at either men or women, or girls and boys. As such, people are not entirely free to exercise their gender, instead there is a frequent and pervasive policing of gender norms in society through a variety of institutions and social means. Therefore Butler argues “when we speak about… my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.” (Butler, 2004b, p.19). Within this quote Butler is arguing that one “must” speak about gender because of its foundational nature to being recognised as a valid subject. Speaking however is not limited to verbal communications, but instead must be thought about in the broader sense of its meaning; for example, one’s clothes ‘speak’ about one’s gender. Speaking may even be extended to one’s body and how that speaks to gender as Butler argues that genitalia and physical characteristics rather than being natural are instead inscribed by society to be read as being symbolic of male or female identity (Butler, 1990). As such recognition as a valid subject is rooted (at least in part) to performing a gender that is recognisable by others as valid, and as Butler goes onto develop in her work recognition is not merely limited to discourses on gender but to a whole range of contemporary values (all of which are suffused with power and knowledge) that are key to identities in contemporary Western modernity. Therefore, to be recognised by others as a subject requires subjection to power and knowledge which is not initially internal to the self; i.e. no baby is born with a sense of their gender and one cannot speak of ‘my’ gender as the gendering of oneself is inherently reliant on discourses that precede one’s ability to act in a gendered way. However, this interim conclusion should not be understood as saying that power and knowledge determines subjectivity. Instead power and knowledge animate subjects to be able to engage in the social world, a process which Butler refers to as performativity.
Performativity Central to Butler’s work is the concept of performativity which Butler uses to understand the dynamism between discourse, the power and knowledge conveyed therein, and subjectivity. Performativity can broadly be understood as a constant ‘doing’, a constant ‘performance’ of discourses which are also constantly being observed and understood by others in reference to discourses that are suffused with power and knowledge (Butler and Salih, 2004). Again, consideration of gender can be helpful in exploring this concept. Gender as a performative endeavour recognises that there is no gender that individuals naturally possess. Instead, individuals must perform their gender by virtue of extant discourses which as discussed cover a wide range of areas all of which are suffused with power and knowledge. However, gendering is not a simple or one off task, instead Butler argues it must constantly be performed. For example, wearing an evening gown would be a performance which is commonly read by others as being feminine (and most likely femininity of a certain class). Equally one’s body can perform gender with various aspects of physical anatomy being read by others as being masculine or feminine; despite what one’s own reading may be. As such performing is a requirement which relies on the subject to perform and others to read, but as the performance is constant it requires repetition which leaves it open to the potential for re/deforming discourses in new and imaginative ways as well as being open to contradictory performances when competing discourses contradict one another. As a result of this performativity reconceptualises all concepts traditionally thought of as nouns (such as gender, sexuality and race) into verbs.
A performative approach can also be expanded and taken towards other specific social identities such as nurses. For example, nurses clearly declare that ‘patient choice’ is an important part of quality care (Griggs, 2010). However, if a Butlerian analysis is taken towards ‘choice’ it becomes more than passively declared by nurses but instead is a discourse that (in part) produces and forms nurses (the subjects) involved in its performative production (re)forming both subjects and the discourse of choice itself. Nurses, patients and all other subjects involved in healthcare become (in part at least) performatively produced by the discourse of choice. Such an approach has analytical implications for nursing research as the focus of a performative analysis is not the construction of choice and establishing a static notion of what choice is, but instead how a discourse of choice is produced by and forms subjects. One example of such work is Nordgren (2010) who provides a robust critique of the concept of ‘choice’ in healthcare. By using a performative analysis, Nordgren demonstrates how patients performatively enact a discourse of consumerism therefore becoming responsible for the choices that they make in the healthcare arena reducing the concept of patients as subjects who are vulnerable and needing professional care. As such, discourses that do not fit the power and knowledge conveyed by consumerist ideas of what a patient should be become unviable performances. Such an approach to analysis can help re-examine previously taken for granted ideas, concepts, identities and ‘realities’ by assuming that they are not de facto but instead continually produced. What is at stake in Nordgren’s analysis is not only what defines a patient but why patients must identify with certain discourses over others and how this is reinforced by wider forms of power and knowledge. As such, when considering social relations from a performative perspective, all discourses that are produced must have social effects by virtue of needing to be repeatable and understandable by others who can therefore go onto repeat them (Butler, 1997a). For example in nursing even cases of abuse can help produce nursing practice as they set the boundaries of what is and isn’t nursing practice; abuse is not (or should not) be repeatable but what constitutes abuse is not easily predefined and instead is a constantly shifting discursive boundary in reference to the power and knowledge that circulates about nursing. Conversely, if a nurse were to give medications as prescribed to a patient this action is intelligible and is therefore repeatable.
However, just as power and knowledge are not deterministic, nor is Butler’s theory of performativity, there remains potential for a blending and merging of different performances to produce novel ways of being with in society at large. For example, recent qualitative work by Nagington et al (2013) took a performative approach to patients and carers views of palliative and supportive district nursing. Nagington et al trace how in recent history discourses of efficiency have become increasingly pervasive in modern healthcare with nurses frequently being described as ‘busy’ or ‘overworked’ in the media. However, on an institutional level busyness is not what is being aimed for, instead there is a broad aim to operate in an ‘efficient’ manner. This then becomes operationalised through various measures such as readmission rates to hospitals and gross number of patients seen per day which must be constantly maintained and improved. However, the policing of these measures to improve means that to be inefficient may result in one’s contract being revoked; effectively making one an unviable nursing subject. Much of this is tied to the neoliberal marketization of healthcare which requires measurements to be produced and efficiency to be strived for. However, the power and knowledge that forms neoliberal discourses of healthcare which claims to improve quality of care when examined in a performative way can be read as having the unexpected effect of doing the opposite because the discourses of efficiency (re)forms the nurses’ identity by patients reading nurses not as efficient, but instead busy. The patient and carer subjectivity therefore then becomes (re)formed in relation to a busy (not an efficient) district nurse, this in turn results in docile patients and carers who do not explore additional or alternative forms of district nursing because nurses were perceived as busy, yet because boundaries of district nursing care were never tested district nurses were perceived as able to do anything. This ultimately resulted in patients and carers not receiving care for needs that they had and disallowed patients to identify as more than just people with physical needs. A more traditional thematic analysis would have often stopped at the level of district nurses being perceived as ‘doing anything’ and thus offering high quality care. However, a performative analysis of the empirical data allows a linking of the broader social discourses tracing the ways in which it enacts and subjugates through the exercising of power. This example therefore serves to show how performances are open to alternative interpretations by others, and meanings are not fixed but instead rely on a complex and constantly maintained set of discourses that produce meaning through extant power and knowledge.
Limitations of performativity Nelson (1999) argues that Butler does not account how material surroundings such as hospital wards form the subject and that Butler precludes its possibility by focussing on the discursive ways in which power and knowledge animate subjects thereby making material/physical ‘realities’ and/or concepts irrelevant. Instead Nelson argues that materiality has much to offer in explaining the construction of the subject. This is something that has been further explored by Nagington et al (2015) by rejecting the home as ‘natural’ place of care and instead considering how it too is performatively produced. In their empirical work Nagington et al explore how the home is constructed discursively as a viable place for palliative care to occur, and thus can be expanded and contracted in a number of ways, most notably by the use of technologies such as IV therapies. However, they also highlight that it is not so much the boundaries of the home that matter, but the how patients and carers can exercise power over the discursive construction of these boundaries. The empirical evidence suggested that more often than not the home as a viable space for palliative care to occur remained defined and policed by medical discourses. However, the home also provided patients and carers with a way of understanding themselves and what it meant to be a patient living at home with palliative care needs, many cited the home as vital to their identity. The limitation placed on the home by medical discourses went onto (re)form patient and carers subjectivities and how they were able to live their lives in relation to their other identities such as husbands, wives, fathers etc. They conclude that current policy initiatives to increase home care whilst valuable fail to address the ethical issues of how home care is constructed, the lack of power that patients and carers have in constructing the home, and that the home far from being a static entity is inscribed by discourse by healthcare professionals, patients and carers. However, medical discourses shaped the boundaries of the home even when nurses and doctors were not present. Therefore, whilst Nelson is correct about how materiality is side-lined in Butlers work, it is possible to rethink of the material in terms of performativity, how it is inscribed with meaning, and thus how it can be just as formative of subjects.
Performativity - summary Performativity can therefore be most simply understood as positing that subjects are relient on performing pre-existing discourses to enter into relations with other subjects. These performances may include verbal speech, but are also conveyed in the clothes we wear (like nurses uniforms) the spaces we inhabit (such as hospital wards) and even our bodies (such as our genitalia). However, it rejects that there are any de facto and enduring understandings of any or all of these different factors. Instead, performative theory hinges on subjectivity being made possible in relation to existing knowledge which brings the power to legitimate or delegitimate subjects existence as social beings and their ability to act in non-normative ways. As such there is no outside of social relations and one cannot ignore power and knowledge. Therefore, unlike Foucault’s understanding of power and knowledge, Butler’s conception of performativity help us understand how subjects must submit themselves to power and knowledge in order to engage in social relations; not just be shaped by specific social regimes like medicine, prisons etc. Yet this does not mean that social life is determined, as it is the very requirement to perform that opens up the possibility for change through performances being read in alternative ways by others who frame of reference is different to those undertaking the performance; power animates and shapes performance but does not determine it. Crucially as demonstrated various concepts in nursing have the ability to be read differentially depending on who is doing the reading and the broader social contexts that the performances occur in. However, this understanding should not lead readers to think that all actions are morally equivocal, on the contrary there remain certain ways of acting that can be considered more or less ethical. As such, the final major theme of Butler’s work presented here is ethics.
Ethics Key to Butler’s later work is the analysis of what can very broadly be termed ethical relationships and the way in which speech (again understood as more than just verbal) has effects on subject’s lives making them more or less liveable. This is present in Butler’s earliest works, but is made more explicit and less specific to gender as her work progresses. As such Butler has examined ethics from a variety of perspectives, but the clearest examples are those that relate to hate speech and the erasure of identities from public discourse.
Hate speech Butler argues that because the subject is produced in language the subject can also be injured by language: “when we say an insult strikes a blow we imply our bodies are injured by such speech” (Butler, 1997a, p. 159). This is because of an interplay between the physical and the psychic. Clearly a physical body is needed for a physical injury to take place, however, this physical injury must be psychically recognised in order to give it the status of an injury. Butler argues conversely when a psychic injury takes place by means of ‘hate speech’ (such as racism/sexism/homophobia) it is not a purely psychic injury. Because for Butler subjectivity is conveyed through speech (which includes verbal as well as symbolic means), the use of speech to injure has a direct effect on the way the body is subsequently allowed to be, move and feel. One limitation of this theory is the lack of clear empirical examples given by Butler who relies on poetic language to put across her point, “one need only consider the way in which the history of having been called an injurious name is embodied, how words enter the limbs, craft the gesture, bend the spine… configuring and restricting the doxa that counts as reality.” (Butler, 1997a, p. 159). This concept is difficult to dismiss due to its logical construction, yet also quite hard to accept because it goes against the wide-spread medical understanding of what injury is and how injury is constructed. Examples of the bodily effect of speech are somewhat hard to substantiate. However, Butler’s theories may offer an alternative way to conceptualise minority stress which has been highlighted as the negative health effects of being from a non-dominant social minority such as gay men and trans people (Wight et al., 2015, Herman, 2013). The mechanisms for this stress could be explored though Butler’s ideas around the physical and psychic effects of injurious speech and it may be possible to unearth previously silenced discourses on death, illness and injury and challenge previously taken for granted explanations about how death, illness and injury are mediated. Such research would produce at times challenging policy implications, potentially highlighting in very different ways the physical effects that (hate) speech can have on subjects and the subsequent explanations may also be more satisfactory, logical and accessible to the lay public than convoluted biomedical explanations. Additionally, whilst Butler is clear in her view that the subject and the body are mediated through discourses, hate speech need not be negatively deterministic for those who are subjected to it; just as the performative is not deterministic, neither is hate speech. This opens up the possibility for the subjects who are interpolated by hate speech to (re)form and (re)deploy speech in a new way: such as ‘nigger’ used by black communities, and ‘queer’ used by gay communities when addressing each other (Butler, 1997a). This ‘redeployment’ will then make use of such language to form insurrectory speech that forces change “to destroy the territory of it’s operation” (Butler, 1997a, p. 163). Nurses could also be seen to have performatively reproduced discourses such as those on ‘knowledge’ in the healthcare arena by redeploying it to refer to non- medical ‘knowledge’ such as social, psychological and emotional details (Hinshaw, 2000). Whilst this is a valid argument it needs to be recognised that power and knowledge shapes how such performative reclaimations are considered valid and hence creates the conditions for their success or failure. However, despite this Butler (1997a) posits that reclamation and insurrection must push at the edges of accepted social norms, thereby ensuring the subject is not made unviable by being outside viable discourses (and hence rejected) but instead managing to push the boundary from within what constitutes an valid subjectivities.
Healing speech? Interestingly Butler does not consider how language and discourses can heal. To consider this raises many new questions about the effects of speech and also how it is subsequently used by the subjects it interpolates. It seems unlikely that Butler’s theory would be the same for healing speech and that a subject would respond to healing speech by destroying its site of operation by engaging in performative reclaimation and insurrection. Future research using a Butlerian approach could focus on which discourses are used in the patient-nurse relationship, their effects on the patient and carer relationship. However, similar concepts do already exist in nursing literature such as ‘therapeutic chatting’ as described by Griffiths et al (2010). Whilst initially it may appear that this is not overtly a healing speech act if understood in a Butlerian sense by linking speech with physicality it may legitimate nursing actions that go beyond “doing things [physical help] for patients” (Griffiths et al., 2010, p. 6) by giving nurses an alternative discursive framework to explore this type of work.
Ethics of power and performativity As discussed above, power is fundamental to subjectivity arising and continuing. As such a pervasive social force therefore, the ethics of power must be considered. Much of this consideration towards the ethics of power takes place in Butler’s work after the attacks on the World Trade Centre, September 11th 2001. Two books Frames of War (Butler, 2009) and Precarious life (Butler, 2004a) are key to Butler developing her concern with ethics and whilst separate publications by Butler’s own admission are closely linked in their overall aim and hence can be discussed jointly. The central empirical theme in these works is around the way in which warfare is maintained through power mechanisms to mourn certain lives and erase others as recognisable and thus mournable; thus these books and the arguments within them are not always clearly relevant to healthcare and/or nursing. However, Butler approaches her critique of warfare through much more fundamental questions that allow links to be made to nursing work.
For Butler life is not something sovereign to the subject but instead is resolutely social, and resolutely dependent on others to confer it, but also by the nature of performativity to continue it. This Butler argues creates an ethical difficulty and call on all subjects as one’s life is as dependent on processes of social recognition as those lives that one goes onto recognise. Yet in warfare, some lives (such as those labelled terrorists) are given differential statuses, treated differently, and left open to destruction and are not subject to mourning on a national level, and as such were never really classified (discursively) as living in the same way as soldiers or civilians. For Butler this destruction is not primarily military in its means (though of course this is the primary vehicle through which the destruction materially occurs) but instead, the sustainability of destruction comes discursively. As evidence to this there has been a proliferation of language to describe lives of those being killed or inhumanly treated as somehow different: terrorist, enemy combatant, infidel. This creates discourses to read those lives that are being protected through warfare as recognisable as worthy of protection, i.e. the Western citizen, against those who are not recognised as worthy of life, or at least worthy of destruction in the name of preserving life. For Butler therefore, ethics is not a fixed set of rules to follow, instead it is the juncture between being acted upon and acting and whether possibilities are created though this acting that expand discursively what counts as a liveable life, and whilst discussing this in relation to warfare leads one to instantly think of life and death, it is possible to consider such expansions in relation to nursing work and move away from the extremities of existence or non-existence. For example, returning to Nagington et al’s (2013) work on busyness the authors noted that that nurses almost always went to visit patients for physical care reasons such as dressings or injections. When nurses acted busy during these visits it precluded patients from exploring their needs with nurses. However, enacting discourses of friendship (chatting about ones hobbies, discussing family etc) had the opposite effect, and allowed patients to talk about other aspects of themselves and other needs such as psychological support. Thus, when patients and nurses acted in a way that blended with discourses of friendship it became possible for patients to explore discourses that went beyond physical care; or to put it another way more aspects of their lives were lived in relation to their nursing care, nursing became more holistic and ethical. As such Nagington et al develop Butler’s work to argue that ethical relationships (particularly those within healthcare and nursing) can be characterised as ones which engage discourses that produce new possibilities for relating to one another, rather than foreclosing possibilities.
Conclusion As can be seen, Butler’s work is prolific, multi-faceted, and ultimately it is impossible to do full justice to it in a journal article. Key to her work is the blurring of boundaries between subjects, discourse and power and uniting the ways in which these have been conceptualised in psychoanalytical theory and post-structural theory. Her work has helped to foster novel understandings of how broader social structures come to shape but not determine individual lives and actions as well as the way in which the intimate ties we have with one another can be a calling for a more ethical way of relating individuals with one another and society. The implications for healthcare are again varied, but they offer in particular a critical re-examining of the way in discourses are constantly forming and reforming the identities that occur within nursing and healthcare. Butler’s work has facilitated a critical reflection on the identities of ‘patients’, ‘carers’, ‘nurses’ etc and whether they always offer the best possibilities for ethical and caring relationships; finally, and possibly most importantly Butler’s work gives permission for the cracks in these identities to be explored for potential novel and more ethical ways of living both for now and into the future.
Further reading This final part is split up into two sections, firstly a reading list for some of Butler’s key texts and secondly a selection of different authors who have applied and used Butler’s work in different ways and settings, both of which in different ways may offer a way into exploring Butler’s theories.
Butler’s works Butler is a prolific writer, therefore offering a suitable starting point is not easy. Instead, the author recommends that as Butler engages with such a wide range of ideas and philosophers uninitiated readers may wish to choose a text which they will have some affinity with in relation to their area of interest and/or their prior engagement with other philosophers. The reading list is presented with this in mind.
Gender Trouble (Butler, 1990), Bodies that Matter: The discursive limits of sex (Butler, 1993) and Undoing Gender (Butler, 2004b). These texts focus on the discussion and development of philosophy and gender theory with some discussion about sexuality, also. These texts tend to have less empirical discussions about day- to-day events that ground their discussion for the novice reader. Key authors engaged with across these works include Freud, Foucault, Lacan, Kirsteva, de Beauvoir, Irigary, Wittig, and Lévi-Strauss.
Psychic Life of Power (Butler, 1997b). The main thrust of the book is to further a post-structuralist (broadly Foucauldian understanding) of power and knowledge with psychoanalytical theories and as such offers a robust understanding of subject formation and continuation in the social world. This text challenges and combines Butler’s post-structuralist theories around power and knowledge with a variety of other authors such as Freud, Foucault, Hegel, Nietzsche and Althusser. However, it is worth noting that in general this is done on a chapter by chapter basis for each key author that she engages with. Hence, familiarity with all these authors is not necessary to access this text and unlike many of Butler’s other books could be approached through reading the introduction and then the single chapter of interest.
Giving an Account of Oneself (Butler, 2005). This book in combination with Precarious Life and Frames of War (discussed above) is sometimes considered as Butler’s turn to ethics. However, this book is a much more in-depth discussion (with a lot less reference to any empirical examples) of what it means to have to live with and for one another. In the book Butler’s argues that we fundamentally struggle to be able to account for ourselves as in order to gain a sense of self we must submit ourselves to power and knowledge that are always conveyed to us by other subjects. As such, Butler argues that we are intrinsically tied to one another in order to create both ourselves and the social world around us. Whilst this book remains robustly engaged with philosophy, it is one of the most accessible ones in Butler’s cannon. Key authors engaged with are Adorno, Levinas, and Laplanche.
Examined Life, finally, there are also several interesting interviews and lectures with Butler that allow an accessible route into her theories and political views, see for example her discussion with Sunaura Taylor in the series on YouTube (Taylor, 2010) which engages Butler’s work in a critical reflection of ability, disability and public spaces.
Application of Butler’s works For those who wish to examine how Butler’s work has been applied to different academic contexts different collections of texts are recommended.
Zeeman et al (2015) Queering Health: Critical challenges to normative health and healthcare. This seminal book in the field of healthcare introduces the reader to queer theory and then lays out how it can be applied to a diverse range of academic topics from ageing gay male lives, mental health care, and more theoretical discussions on how bodies can be reconceptualised as queerer entities in healthcare. Some prior knowledge of the underpinning assumptions about queer theory may be useful for some chapters, but in general it is an excellent example of how discussions around gender and sexuality are beginning to influence academic research into nursing, health and wellbeing.
Stacey and Bryson (2012) Queering the Temporality of Cancer Survivorship This article explores a specific understanding of queer theory by examining how queerness effects our relationship to temporality and the continued living of one’s life, and how different sexualities challenge the heterosexual norms of how life progresses. In particular this text examines how heteronormativity and queerness come to structure the lived experience(s) of cancer with more oblique references to applications in healthcare. Reference is also made to Bryson’s challenging work on breast cancer and trans-masculinities.
Dean (2009) Unlimited intimacy : reflections on the subculture of barebacking and Dean (2011) Barebacking Time. Dean offers an extensive autoethnography of bareback (condomless sex) in North America in the form of a relatively accessible article (Dean, 2008) and a more in-depth book (Dean, 2009). He argues that HIV can be performatively reinscribed away from pathological discourses towards discourses of new queer forms of kinship. He then furthers this argument in later work by arguing that HIV also facilities novel ways of exploring ones future self (Dean, 2011) again exploring in a similar way to Stacey and Bryson the issues that queer theory raises for temporality. References
Butler, J. (1990) Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity, London, Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex, New York, Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997a) Excitable speech: a politics of the performative, London, Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997b) The psychic life of power: theories in subjection, Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Butler, J. (2004a) Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence, London, Verso.
Butler, J. (2004b) Undoing gender, London, Routledge.
Butler, J. (2005) Giving an account of oneself, New York, Fordham University Press.
Butler, J. (2009) Frames of war: When is life grievable?, London, Verso.
Butler, J. & Salih, S. (2004) The Judith Butler reader, Oxford, Blackwell.
Dean, T. (2008) Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing, Giftgiving. Massachusetts Review, 49, 80-94.
Dean, T. (2009) Unlimited intimacy : reflections on the subculture of barebacking, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Dean, T. (2011) Barebacking Time. In: Queer Times, Queer Becomings. (eds McCallum, E. L. & Tukhanenm, M.). New York, SUNY.
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/knowledge : selected interviews and other writings, 1972- 1977, New York, Pantheon Books. Griffiths, J., Ewing, G. & Rogers, M. (2010) "Moving swiftly on": Psychological support provided by district nurses to patients with palliative care needs. Cancer Nursing, 33, 390-397.
Griggs, C. (2010) Community nurses' perceptions of a good death: a qualitative exploratory study. International Journal of Palliative Nursing, 16, 140-149.
Herman, J. L. (2013) Gendered restrooms and minority stress: The public regulation of gender and its impact on transgender people's lives. Journal of Public Management & Social Policy, 19, 65-80.
Hinshaw, A. S. (2000) Nursing Knowledge for the 21st Century: Opportunities and Challenges. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 32, 117-123.
Nagington, M., Luker, K. & Walshe, C. (2013) ‘Busyness’ and the preclusion of quality palliative district nursing care. Nursing Ethics, 20, 893-903.
Nagington, M., Walshe, C. & Luker, K. (2015) A poststructural rethinking of the ethics of technology is relation to the provision of palliative home care by district nurses. Nursing Philosophy, 17, 59-70.
Nelson, L. (1999) Bodies (and spaces) do matter: The limits of performativity. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 6, 331 - 353.
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