Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC032000 Social Science / Gender Studies, PSY016000 Psychology / Human Sexuality
Publisher: New York University Press

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Performativity

Tavia Nyong’o

Performativity is one of the most consequential and contested ideas to emerge from feminist and queer theory. For better or worse, “queer performativity” was one of the signal queer theory catchphrases of the 1990s, and it continues to reverberate today, even as the heavily linguistic theory from which it emerged has given way to a subsequent turn to affect, new materialism, and ecological approaches. But where did performativity come from? In the midcentury language philosophy of J. L. Austin, the performative speech act was a way of noticing that language did things in the world, which is to say, it was a way of noticing that linguistic statements could not be reduced to transparently true or false descriptions of “the real” (as some of Austin’s fellow thinkers held). Austin (1975) originally sought to classify speech acts in terms of whether they were “performative” or “constative”—that is, whether they did things or merely described them. Yet in the end, he concluded that all language contained aspects of performative force in it. This conclusion opened the way for a subsequent philosopher, Jacques Derrida, to give speech act theory a deconstructive emphasis. In order for speech to do something, to act as a force, Derrida argued, it paradoxically must cite some precedent within language that granted that act intelligibility.

Although the performative speech act has been extensively debated within critical theory since its inception, the advent of queer performativity in the 1990s gave the idea a second life. In her well-known book Gender Trouble, feminist philosopher Judith Butler ([1990] 1999) helped inaugurate queer theory in part by drawing from this philosophical tradition to argue that “woman” is a performative speech act rather than a biological essence or even a sociocultural known. Prior to Butler, feminist theory had debated the sex/gender distinction, to be sure, with many coming to understand sex as biological and gender as cultural. But Butler’s emphasis on performativity implied that the sex/gender distinction itself was in need of deconstruction and that “woman” was itself a citation without a stable original. In order to make the speech act “woman” coherent, a set of conventions and expectations must be imposed and enforced. Paradoxically, gender’s status as citation also opens out the potential for the gender nonconforming to disrupt those expectations by refusing to “do” their gender correctly. Most famously, Butler pointed to drag queens as making evident the performativity of gender through satire and theatricality.

In another famous book, Epistemology of the Closet, literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) made parallel deconstructive moves with regard to the modern discourse of sexuality, focusing her attention primarily on how that discourse was powerfully structured by what it could and could not say about male homosexuality. The closet was Sedgwick’s paradigm for describing the context in which certain speech acts became framed within a binarism of the speakable and unspeakable. The closet as a metaphor operates as a source of hidden knowledge that can nonetheless be presumed upon “in a pinch.” Taxonomizing the binarisms she repeatedly

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