Call for submissions Dossier V. 11 Nº. 2 (2026) Interruption and Dispersion. Uses and Misuses of Judith Butler for Thinking the Category of the Human

Sasha Hilas (Lic. en Filosofía; Doctorando en Filosofía; IDH, CONICET, FFyH, UNC - https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7889-5866)
Carelí Duperut (Prof. Lic. en Filosofía; IFAA, FFYL, UNCUYO - https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6632-4903 )

Justification:
Judith Butler (1956) is a philosopher whose contemporary relevance has been undeniable since her second book, Gender Trouble (1990), which helped propel Gender Studies and Queer Theory. During the 1990’s, they revisited the notion of performativity and made a fundamental contribution to both philosophy and LGBT movements. At the same time, Butler is an intellectual trained in German idealism, phenomenology, poststructuralism, feminism, and hermeneutics, without strictly belonging to any single tradition. From this intersection they have drawn conceptual tools that are visible in their exploration of notions such as the body, temporality, materiality, power, hegemony, and language.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, what some critics have called an "ethical turn” take place, beginning with Precarious Life (2004 [2009a]). Although this characterization is debatable, we maintain that this book marks the emergence of a series of important publications on frames of recognition, the criteria for the attribution of humanity, mourning, and violence, which renewed interest in Butler in this region (Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, among others). We refer in particular to Giving an Account of Oneself (2005 [2009b]), Frames of War (2009 [2010]), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015 [2017a]), Caminhos divergentes (2017b), and The Force of Nonviolence (2020). Taken together, these texts opened a debate around a relational ontology in Butler from which the question is no longer what the human is, but rather who counts as human and what dominant criteria distribute that attribution. It is perhaps in The Force of Nonviolence that Butler most clearly articulates their distance from a certain humanism centered on liberal individualism. Although the reflection on mourning and grievability can be traced in earlier works, it is in Precarious Life that the inquiry into the norms that regulate the human —and, by extension, who will be considered grievable— acquires particular density.
From this perspective, the human always refers to conditions of emergency tied to norms of recognition of the human. Thus, there is no outside the norms nor is nude life in the Agambien sense (2017). On the contrary, there are saturated bodies by the operations of power: subjects are not free from norms by not being recognized by them but bound to them even in their exclusion. Nevertheless, normative subjection does not eliminate agency. Where dominant norms operate, minoritary versions appear, and, in every normative reiteration there it opens the possibility of its failure. So, it’s with the norms that constitute us that we explore what we do with them (Dahbar, Canseco, Song, 2017).
This Dossier calls for papers that, through theoretical and interdisciplinary crossings, use and betray the categories offered by Judith Butler’s work in order to deliberate on the human, but also the temporality, the relational ontology and the norms of recognition, among other topics. We are interested in exploring the power of interruption and dispersion that Butlerian concepts have to sustain the critique to exclusionary logics of certain humanisms and to liberal individualism.