Performativity

From Geography

Background

The meaning of the term performativity can be partly derived from the word itself. The verb ‘to perform’ is the base of the word and is an important concept in performativity itself. It implies a form of human agency. It is closely connected to a concept such as speech act and has been used by a number of well known social scientists such as Jacques Derrida, Felman and Butler. The basic concept however has been developed by Austin. Performativity can be placed in the post-structuralist view of looking at knowledge: ‘Poststructuralist knowledge actively shapes reality rather than passively reflecting it’, (Gibson and Graham, 2000, p.101)

Definition

Butler describes performativity as: “…that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.”. In other words: Discourse, the way we think, talk and act at length about a certain theme or subject, is not just representational and descriptive. No, it also repetitively ‘performs’ in a way that creates and shapes human agency and thinking

Judith Butler

Butler is probably the most well known social scientist to have extensively worked with the concept of performativity. She uses the idea in her research about gender. Her highly debated argument is that gender should not be seen as something biologically fixed but moreover as something that is being shaped by our own way of acting. Butler ‘deconstructs’ the binary system of gender (male vs. female) by claiming that gendering is a cultural process. A process in which the actors (we) continually perform an act to establish and live up to the idea of masculinity and/or femininity in our environment.

Sources

Gibson and Graham, 2000, post structural interventions

Authors

Henk-Jan van Maanen & Ingram Smit