Performativity

A ‘performative’ is a linguistic statement that puts into effect (brings into being) the relation that it names, for example, within a marriage ceremony ‘I pronounce you …’ is a performative statement. Similarly, performativity is a discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names through citation and reiteration of the norms or conventions of the ‘law’. Thus, the discursive production of identities through repetition and recitation of regulated ways of speaking about identity categories (for example, masculinity).

Performativity is not a singular act but rather is always a citation and reiteration of a set of existent norms and conventions. For example, judges in criminal and civil law do not originate the law or its authority but cite the conventions of the law [Page 143]that is consulted and invoked. This is an appeal to an authority that has no origin or universal foundations. Indeed, the very practice of citation produces the authority that is cited and reconstitutes the law. The maintenance of the law is a matter of re-working a set of already operative conventions and involves iterability, repetition and citationality.

Though Austin originated the idea of a performative in 1962, it was Judith Butler who popularized the concept of performativity within cultural studies during the 1990s. In particular, Butler conceives of sex and gender in terms of citational performativity. For Butler, ‘sex’ is produced as a reiteration of hegemonic norms, a performativity that is always derivative. The ‘assumption’ of sex, which is not a singular act or event but an iterable practice, is secured through being repeatedly performed. Thus gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express.

Butler combines this reworking of discourse and speech act theory with psychoanalysis to argue that the ‘assumption’ (taking on) of sex involves identification with the normative phantasm (idealization) of ‘sex’. Sex is a symbolic subject position assumed under threat of punishment (for example, of symbolic castration or abjection). The symbolic is a series of normative injunctions that secure the borders of sex (what shall constitute a sex) through the threat of psychosis and abjection (an exclusion, throwing out or rejection). Butler goes on to argue that drag can destabilize and recast gender norms through a re-signification of the ideals of gender. Through a miming of gender norms, drag can be subversive to the extent that it reflects on the performative character of gender. Drag suggests that all gender is performativity and as such destabilizes the claims of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity as the origin that is imitated. That is, hegemonic heterosexuality is itself an imitative performance which is forced to repeat its own idealizations.