Showing papers on "Performativity published in 1994"

Performativity Trouble: Postmodern Feminism and Essential Subjects

Abstract: An important theme within postmodem feminism is that essentialist notions of women and naturalized conceptions of the human subject are unnecessary and troubling ingredients for feminist political theory and practice (Alcoff 1988; Ferguson 1988; Hekman 1990; Mouffe 1992). Perhaps no one has advanced this claim more forcefully than Judith Butler through her use of the idea of performativity. According to Butler, our gender, sex and self are the effects of publicly regulated performances. In contrast, I argue that her notion of performativity is too pure to provide an account of our identities. Moreover, it is not obvious that we would be better off understanding ourselves as the effect of publicly regulated performances. This does not mean that a feminist politics would be better off with essentialism. Rather, I suggest that political practice can probably do without either an essen tialist or performative understanding of the subject.

Fat Art, Thin Art

Abstract: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is best known as a cultural and literary critic, as one of the primary forces behind the development of queer and gay/lesbian studies, and as author of several influential books: Tendencies , Epistemology of the Closet , and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. The publication of Fat Art, Thin Art , Sedgwick’s first volume of poetry, opens up another dimension of her continuing project of crossing and re-crossing the electrified boundaries between theory, lyric, and narrative. Embodying a decades-long adventure, the poems collected here offer the most accessible and definitive formulations to appear anywhere in Sedgwick’s writing on some characteristic subjects and some new ones: passionate attachments within and across genders; queer childhoods of many kinds; the performativity of a long, unconventional marriage; depressiveness, hilarity, and bliss; grave illness; despised and magnetic bodies and bodily parts. In two long fictional poems, a rich narrative momentum engages readers in the mysterious places—including Victorian novels—where characters, sexualities, and fates are unmade and made. Sedgwick’s poetry opens an unfamiliar, intimate, daring space that steadily refigures not only what a critic may be, but what a poem can do.

Body Trouble: Corporeal "Presence" and Performative Identity in Cixous's and Mnouchkine's "L'Indiade ou l'Inde de leurs reves"

Abstract: Performance, performativity--one hears these words a lot today. The first has filled the need for an inclusive term that brings together different types of public, private, artistic, and commercial spectacles under a single rubric as the object of a newly instituted field of study. The second, particularly since the 1990 publication of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,' has been urgently buzzing in the mouths and from the pens of those who would challenge normative assumptions of identity grounded in ontological or purportedly "natural" categories of the subject. Performance artists and proponents of a performative identity often share a common target in these categories, and the overlapping terminology appears to betray deeper affinities. Yet, performativity and performance are not always compatible. Live performance clearly does not imply a subversive performativity; much theatre, mimetic theatre in particular, even that which didactically criticizes accepted notions of identity, often first exacts the spectator's recognition and implicit validation of a character's verisimilitude based on an undisturbed idea of the familiar

Art's Gaming Lost: within the make‐belief of curricular certainty

Abstract: Art in education is failing to fulfill itself as an aesthetic language‐game; instead, it is sublated by the curricular priorities of performativity. Informed by a body‐politic whose edifice transpires cultural totality, the curriculum Is, as Inglis argues, “a map of knowledge”. This map of knowledge substitutes the plurality of language‐games with a partitioning of knowledge. With plurality undermined, the individual is split between a private person with creative and aesthetic ambitions, and a public person who has to put up with the expectations of the market. With art relegated to the private individual, and education submitted to the edifice of competence‐based criteria, art's gaming and its aesthetic forms of understanding are threatened with extinction. This essay shows how this is caused by what Laclau sees as the “erosion and disintegration of such categories as ‘foundation’, ‘new’, ‘identity’, ‘vanguard’, and so on”. It argues for a return to the consideration of these categories in orde...

Women and the Fictive Individual of Liberalism

Abstract: »Difference« feminists criticise liberalism as essentially masculine: its supposedly universal categories, notably that of the individual, can not be extended to encompass women. This paper argues that if we see the individual and women as fictive it is possible to understand how liberalism may be more flexible than these feminists allow. The individual and women are analysed as fictive in two senses: i) the Derridean sense in which being »is« not because it is never fully present to itself: there are no stable, determinate identities. The individual and women are deconstructed in the liberal political philosophy of J. S. Mill, ii) the sense in which fictive identities in the first sense produce »effects of truth«: fiction fictions reality. J. Butler's conception of performativity is compared to Laclau's and Mouffe's theory of hegemony: the latter, it is argued, better describes how new (fictive) identities are established in practice. The example is the feminist extension of individual rights to women in the nineteenth century.

Twins separated at birth? West African vernacular and western avant garde performativity in theory and practice

Abstract: Though often described similarly in terms of their emphasis on dynamism, immediacy, diachronicity, and performativity, African and postmodern avant garde artistic practices are theorized as opposites in terms of their cultural positions and functions: one is considered traditional, the other anti‐traditional. By comparing the ideological status, the social function of the object, and performance‐audience relations in these two different cultural matrices, a vernacular function can be distinguished that emphasizes the social uses to which an object is put over any transcendent or inherent significance the object may be perceived to possess. Though for historic reasons these vernacular dynamics are dominant in West African popular/traditional idioms such as the Togolese concert party, they can be seen to be operative in North American popular/postmodern culture as well.