Performative

The term performativity has recently come to be used in a wide range of contexts to refer to what might earlier have been referred to as the performance of the self. In its current uses however the term refers specifically to a gendered, and sometimes a raced, classed or ethnic performance of the self, and it connotes feminist work on the body and embodied subjectivity as well as carrying the implication that such a self is socially constructed and might therefore be constructed differently. As it is currently understood, performativity is derived most directly from the work of feminist scholar Judith Butler, where one of the central concerns was to understand the relationship between speech and act, act and identity, and specifically to understand how the connections between certain acts and certain forms of speech, habitually enacted together, come to constitute a compulsory performance (an embodiment) of heterosexuality. The relationship between performativity and performance, somewhat blurred in the formulations above, is also in need of clarification. Performativity in Butler's work derives from the work of J.L Austin (1976) and is a philosophical/linguistic concept. Performance is primarily a theatrical (Parker/Sedgewick 1995) term but one which has been used and useful in sociology and anthropology to describe the 'performance' of everyday life as well as the enactment of ritual, ceremony and so on (Schechner 1985; Turner 1987). Clarification of the relations between these terms requires some history and some investigation which goes back a long way before Judith Butler's work made the term performativity so popular in cultural studies.

Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis: Histories, Remembering and Futures

Terry Threadgold (Cardiff)

http://www.linguistik-online.com/14_03/threadgold.html