Performativity and Identity
Performativity and identity examine how language and repeated acts produce social realities and identities—how saying and doing can constitute gender, the self, and other categories rather than merely describing them.
Definition
The study of how language and repeated acts constitute social realities and identities, and the relation of performativity to performance.
Scope
This topic traces the concept of performativity from J. L. Austin's speech-act theory, in which certain utterances perform actions, through Judith Butler's influential account of gender as performatively constituted by repeated acts, and into broader performance-studies analyses of how identity, race, and the self are enacted. It distinguishes performativity from theatrical performance while exploring their connections, and considers the political stakes of identity as something done rather than simply possessed.
Core questions
- How can words and acts produce rather than merely describe reality?
- In what sense is identity performatively constituted?
- How does performativity relate to and differ from theatrical performance?
- What are the political implications of seeing identity as enacted?
Key concepts
- performative utterance
- speech act
- performativity
- gender as repeated acts
- identity
- citationality
Key theories
- Performative utterances
- J. L. Austin's distinction between constative statements that describe and performative utterances that do something in being said, such as promising or naming, founding the concept of performativity.
- Gender performativity
- Judith Butler's argument that gender is not an inner essence but is constituted through the stylized repetition of acts, an effect produced by performance rather than its expression.
History
The concept of performativity originated in Austin's mid-century philosophy of language, was reworked by Derrida's emphasis on iterability, and was decisively extended by Judith Butler in 1990 to theorize gender and identity as performatively produced; performance studies then took up performativity as a key term linking language, the body, and social identity.
Debates
- Performativity versus performance
- Scholars debate the relationship between Austinian and Butlerian performativity and theatrical performance, disputing whether the terms name the same phenomenon or must be carefully distinguished.
Key figures
- J. L. Austin
- Judith Butler
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
- Marvin Carlson
Related topics
Seminal works
- austin1962
- butler1990
- carlson2018
Frequently asked questions
- What is a performative utterance?
- It is a statement that performs an action by being spoken—such as 'I promise' or 'I name this ship'—rather than describing a state of affairs, a notion introduced by J. L. Austin.
- What does it mean that gender is performative?
- In Judith Butler's account, gender is not a fixed inner identity but is produced through the repeated performance of culturally prescribed acts, so that the appearance of a stable gendered self is an effect of those repetitions.