Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz: Judith Butler and Film
This research explores the role of film and visual media in the influential philosopher Judith Butler’s writings on gender, identity and political resistance. As Sara Salih notes in her introduction to The Judith Butler Reader, “many critics have acknowledged the impact of Butler’s ideas” across many fields, including feminist theory, race studies, cultural studies, film studies, sociology and political philosophy (13). As such, film studies is populated by works that draw from Butler’s theories, such as “gender performativity”, to analyze the representation of gender and body on screen. However, despite the recurrent appearance of films in Butler’s writings as well as documentaries that featured the philosopher, the impact of film on her work has not received scholarly attention. Situating the role of film within Butler’s writings, this project reveals that film (as a crucial part of media history) served as a methodological tool for Butler to investigate in what ways social norms naturalize specific identity categories and exclude others. Through tracing the role of film and its referential functions in the development of “Butlerian egalitarianism”, this project uncovers how cinematic language has been a formative element in the development of new academic fields that were opened up by Butlerian thought since the late 1980s, such as queer theory and trans* film theory.
At a time when the representational expansion of women and LGBTQIA+ people in media coincides with the rise of global “anti-gender” ideologies, Judith Butler’s writings on gender, precarity, and liveability hold new urgency. Judith Butler and Film is the first book to examine the reciprocal relationship between Butler’s theories and cinema, situating film within the broader context of Butler’s philosophy and its interactions with popular media. Tracing the presence of film in Butler’s work – from Paris Is Burning and Boys Don’t Cry to Divine’s queer terrorism in John Waters’ films, and from Hollywood’s star system to documentaries featuring Butler – Gürbüz reveals cinema as both object and method of inquiry into Butlerian thought. Bringing this dialogue up to the present, the book branches into Butler’s 2024 bestseller Who Is Afraid of Gender? and their recent appearances in popular online media, underscoring the immediacy of Butler’s thought in today’s cultural landscape. Moving beyond established frameworks in film theory while drawing on counter-cinema, trans* cinema discourse, and the psychic life of film, Judith Butler and Film repositions cinema as a potential site of embodied transformation and collective imagination-a medium through which egalitarian futures can be envisioned and felt.
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Dr Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz is a film artist and media scholar, serving as an adjunct lecturer in experimental film and video art at the School of English, Drama & Film at University College Dublin. Judith Butler & Film was produced during their Irish Research Council (now Research Ireland) Postdoctoral Fellowship (2022-2024) and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland’s Agility Award for creative development (2023). This book was part of their larger research into the role of film and visual media in critical theory and globalization studies, and they presented papers on Butlerian philosophy, global politics and the production of anti-LGBTQIA+ discourse in the following conferences since they joined the school: Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference (Boston 2024 – supported by the school’s Seed Funding Scheme), European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (Izmir Economy University 2024), Planetary Screens Conference (Queens University Belfast 2025) and British Association of Film and Television Studies (University of Warwick 2025). Temmuz’s work on feminist film theory, global media, subcultures, and experimental cinema were published in journals such as Jump Cut, Cultural Studies, Punk and Post-Punk Journal and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.