COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF GENDER AND LAW

INTRODUCTION

KATHERINE FRANKE*

Each year Columbia Law School's Center for Gender
Sexuality Law selects a scholar whose work has made an
important impact on the study and practice of gender and/or
sexuality law. For 2010 we selected Judith Butler, the Maxine
Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative
Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. In March of
2010, we held a Symposium recognizing the multiple domains
of theory and activism in which Butler's mark has been
profound, and oft times paradigm shifting.

Columbia Law School has the great fortune of having
developed one of the deepest and most diverse faculties engaged
in the study of the law of gender and sexuality. In turn, this has
drawn a most magnificent body of students to our law school,
many of who were involved in making this Symposium a
success. I want to acknowledge and thank them for their hard
work. Our students, no less than those of us who work in the
academy, are the beneficiaries over and again of the creativity
and sheer courage of Butler's ideas.

The contributors to this Symposium come together to
appreciate a body of work, and to take stock of the influence of
that work on a discipline not typically hospitable to the insights
and critiques of a scholar whose training and intellectual archive
lie beyond the traditional pickets of law. Yet starting with
Gender Trouble, and continuing through the more recent work
on war, humanitarianism and grievable lives, Judith Butler has
distinguished herself as among the most important contemporary
scholars of law. Having pledged no fidelity to any of law's
sacred dominions, Butler's writing has unmasked, disarmed and
disassembled many of the foundational truths of law with tools
more precise and devastating than those that any scholar from
within the legal academy has been able to generate. Yet unlike
the analytic cul-de-sac in which we found ourselves after

* Katherine Franke is a Professor of Law and Director of the Center for

Gender Sexuality Law at Columbia University.

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COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF GENDER AND LAW

reading the legal realists and their progeny, the Critical Legal
Studies scholars, Butler's work does much more than merely
point out law's internal contradictions, essentially political
nature, or ways in which the rule of law, in the end, serves the
powerful and privileged.

Her scholarship offers a new place from which to
undertake legal studies altogether. Once set free from the
antonymous structure of the law of male and female, homo and
hetero, or kinship and politics, we find ourselves in a kind of
trouble, adrift in the domain of contingency and performance
where the idea of a viable life is predicated not on the stable
ground of a shared humanity that must be both recognized and
defended by law, but rather on something far more precarious.
After mourning the loss of immutability, self-sovereignty, and a
liberal account of freedom, we find ourselves absolutely
exhilarated by the new ways we have come to understand the
bodies of law we study. This is not a zone of great comfort for
most lawyers and legal scholars, but the contributions to this
volume provide witness to its importance, and indeed its
necessity.

Who familiar with the work of Judith Butler does not
remember reading Gender Trouble for the first time? It changed
entirely how we took up what it means to have a gender, or
better yet, of how gender had us. The same can be said of
Butler's work on kinship, on ethics, and on the idea of the
human that animates her analysis of the law of war and
humanitarianism. In so many ways, it's hard for me to remember
what and how I thought before I encountered Butler's work.

I want to thank the nine scholars who have contributed to
this Symposium for generously offering diverse reflections on
the corpus of Butler's scholarship, and for modeling for us the
kind of critical intellectual practice and courage that her work
inspires. As we draw Judith Butler closer to the Columbia
community, this Symposium offers an opportunity to reflect on
the contributions of one of the most influential scholars of
gender and sexuality.