Showing papers on "Performativity published in 2002"

Managing professional identities : knowledge, performativity and the 'new' professional

Abstract: Part One: The Professional Under Scrutiny Part Two: Performing and Negotiating Professional Identity Part Three: Maps And Knowledges for the 'New' Professional

Performativity and primary teacher relations

Abstract: A performativity discourse currently pervades teachers' work. It is a discourse that relies on teachers and schools instituting self-disciplinary measures to satisfy newly transparent public accountability and it operates alongside a market discourse. The introduction of the performativity discourse has affected teacher relations at three levels of professional work: with students, colleagues and local advisor/inspectors. Ethnographic research with primary teachers — which focused on their experience of Ofsted inspections in six schools over periods of up to four years — is the source of this paper. The paper argues that a humanist discourse prevalent in teacher relations with students, colleagues and advisor/inspectors has been challenged by a performativity discourse that: distances teachers from students and creates a dependency culture in opposition to previous mutual and intimate relations; creates self disciplining teams that marginalize individuality and stratifies collegial relations in opposition...

The Seductions of Resistance: Power, Politics, and a Performative Style of Systems

Abstract: Studies of resistance challenge overly structural conceptions of social systems by emphasizing the various forms of creative practice operating within hegemonic space. Yet, by illustrating the different ways that agents respond to a dominant system, resistance theory inadvertently establishes that system as a preestablished entity. Thus, although resistance theory endeavours to recognize the ongoing deconstructs of systems, it simultaneously reifies the system as primary. In response, I argue that this problem is not indicative of a flaw in resistance theory per se, but rather of a flaw in the conception of systems it operates with. Drawing upon Butler's work on performativity, I develop an alternative theory of systems that accounts for social coherence and stratified relations of power through creative forms of social practice alone. Rather than depending on sociostructural concepts such as ideology, hegemony, and normative space, a performative theory of systems situates creative social practice as the...

Dis/Integrating the Gay/Queer Binary: "Reconstructed Identity Politics" for a Performative Pedagogy.

Abstract: ver ten years have now passed since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble began making trouble with its challenges to the systems of gender and sexuality. The book has been translated into nine languages; anniversary editions have been released, and Butler has revisited and revised its central claims in subsequent articles, interviews, and book-length works. In short, Gender Trouble, and, most particularly, the theory of performativity delineated within this book, has remained on postmodern theory's "center stage" since its 1990 appearance. Butler asserts that the incredible life of this text has far exceeded her original and more modest intentions for it, and she credits the continually "changing context of its reception" for Gender Trouble's endurance ("Preface" vii). While Butler's humility and attribution to audiences here are refreshing, Gender Trouble's central claims did constitute theoretical interventions of the first order, disrupting feminism as many of us knew it, and helping to found queer theory in the process. Subverting common-sense beliefs that gender and sexuality are fundamental truths of the self, Gender Trouble (in what are now statements of their own commonplace familiarity) tells us instead that both are always acts, expressions, behaviors, which, like performative speech acts, bring into existence that which they name, and, through their repetition, come to constitute the identities they are purported to be. In other

The Work of Performativity: Staging Social Justice at the University of Southern California

Abstract: In this paper we offer an alternative reading of the role of performativity and everyday forms of resistance in current geographic literature. We make a case for thinking about performativity as a form of embodied dialectical praxis via a discussion of the ways in which performativity has been recently understood in geography. Turning to the tradition of Marxist revolutionary theater, we argue for the continued importance of thinking about the power of performativity as a socially transformative, imaginative, and collective political engagement that works simultaneously as a space of social critique and as a space for creating social change. We illustrate our point by examining two different performative strategies employed by food service workers at the University of Southern California in their struggle for a fair work contract and justice on the job.

Tricking the Border Guards: Performing Race

Abstract: In this paper I examine aspects of the notion of performativity as related to race I propose that the experience of ‘mixed race’ identity can offer opportunities for the performance of racialized identities Drawing from qualitative interviews, I suggest that some ‘mixed race’ women put into play racialized performances, demonstrating a desire to create new meanings out of imposed hierarchical and dualistic racial orders They effectively take advantage of multiple, dynamic, and ambiguous racialized spaces I begin by critiquing recent examinations of performativity in geography, pointing out that, although they contribute towards a greater understanding of the relationship between gender and performance, processes of racialization in regards to performativity have not yet been fully unravelled Through the stories of some ‘mixed race’ women, I chronicle racialized performances in the social landscape in order to ground the notion of performativity through a racialized lens

Talking gender and sexuality

Abstract: 1. Preface 2. Transcription conventions 3. 1. Introduction: Researching talk, gender and sexuality (by McIlvenny, Paul) 4. 2. Doing feminist conversation analysis (by Kitzinger, Celia) 5. 3. Gender and sexuality in talk-in-interaction: Considering conversation analytic perspectives (by Stokoe, Elizabeth) 6. 4. Critical reflections on performativity and the'un/doing' of gender and sexuality in talk (by McIlvenny, Paul) 7. 5. From performatives to practices: Judith Butler, discursive psychology and the management of heterosexist talk (by Speer, Susan) 8. 6. Negotiating gender identities and sexual agency in elderly couples' talk (by Tainio, Liisa) 9. 7. Framing gender: Incongruous gendered identities in Dar es Salaam adolescents' talk (by D'hondt, Sigurd) 10. 8. The repressed on parole: Gender categorisation, performativity and the unsaid in talkin' dirty jokes (by Fish, Andrew) 11. 9. Figuring gender in teachers' talk about school bullying (by Hepburn, Alexa) 12. 10. "I'm still not sure she's a she": Textual talk and typed bodies in online interaction (by Sunden, Jenny) 13. Biographical details 14. Index

The Politics of Discourse: Performativity meets Theatricality

Abstract: When discourses are in flux (of course from one point of view they always are in flux), in periods of unsettled meanings, political struggles exist at various sites of contestation. This productive dissonance is currently the state of play within discourses of performativity and theatricality. Their relationship to each other, and their meanings and uses within their own terms are equally in question. In this essay, I will argue that volatility within these discourses affords an opportunity for forging a new understanding of both their practices and of the consequences of their usages. Further, the identification of certain of these applications with specific nations or regions, what we might call "local struggles," enables a challenge to the limits of these discourses in light of an increasingly urgent imperative to rethink and resituate performance theory in relation to our contemporary transnational situation.

Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction

Abstract: Taking on the Tradition focuses on how the work of Jacques Derrida has helped us rethink and rework the themes of tradition, legacy, and inheritance in the Western philosophical tradition. It concentrates not only on such themes in the work of Derrida but also on his own gestures with regard to these themes-that is, on the performativity of Derrida's texts. The book thus uses Derrida's understanding of speech act theory to reread his own work. The book consists in a series of close readings of Derrida's texts to demonstrate that the claims he makes in his work cannot be fully understood without considering the way he makes those claims. The book considers Derrida's relation to the Greek philosophical tradition and to his immediate predecessors in the French philosophical tradition, as well as his own legacy within the contemporary scene. Part I examines Derrida's analyses of Plato and Aristotle on the themes of writing and metaphor. Part II looks at themes of donation, inheritance, pedagogy, and influence in relation to Derrida's readings of the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Part III considers the promises and legacies of Derrida's work on autobiography, friendship, and hospitality, themes Derrida has recently taken up in his readings of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, and Emmanuel Levinas. In the Conclusion, the author analyzes what Derrida has recently called a "messianicity without messianism" and shows how Derrida develops two different notions of the future and of legacy: one that always determines a horizon for the donation and reception of any legacy or tradition, and one that leaves open a radically unknown and unknowable future for that legacy and tradition.

Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age

Abstract: Now Boarding: The Starship Gender A Preface What The Cat Dragged In: Gender Studies Today An Elegy and Introduction Liberation When? Vision Just in Time Surviving Representation Matters Material Unsexed: A Zero Concept for Gender Studies All That Is Fleeting Compacts Sunya, Sifr, Zero The Cell of the Third De-Ciphering Vacating the Void Do Clothes Make the Woman? Performing In and Out of Industrial Time Dance and Stance Gender Is as Gender Does? Behind the Scenes with Performativity A Different Kind of Closet Good to Think or Good to Eat? Nothing, Repeat, Nothing The Ghosts of Gender Past: Time Claims, Memory, And Modernity Forgetting: Mommy Nearest Remembering: Darwin's Bodies at the Bar Memory's Crucible, Time's Archer The Global Economy Next Time: When Genders are not Enough A Meditation on Change Making Capitalism Fast Gender in Real Time The Smirk of the Now

Dangerous friends and deadly foes- performances of masculinity in the divided city

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between dominant and subordinate masculinities in inner‐city residential areas of Belfast. It explores these relationships within the arena of the religiously segregated district, before exploring how these categories shift and mutate when transferred outside the local community. It examines how fear of violence among both dominant and subordinate men can be understood as a way of expressing masculinity. Through examining how men engage in spatial negotiations based on an assumption that they could be categorised as possible members of paramilitary organisations, the blurring of divisions between masculinities becomes obvious. Locational change can ensure that internal categories become blurred and indistinct, demonstrating the relational and contingent nature of gender. Drawing upon a literature on gender performativity, the paper argues that the categories of dominant and subordinate are merely ideal gender roles that are enacted daily by individuals constra...

Challenges for higher education transformation in South Africa: Integrating the local and the global

Abstract: Higher education in South Africa is faced with an important challenge, how it will cope with the tension between the universal claims of global science on the one hand, and on the other the equally compelling claims to recover the African past (Scott 1997:18). In this article I explore how this challenge might be taken up, by arguing that Western knowledge systems and Indigenous knowledge systems can work together if the representational aspect of knowledge is de-emphasised and the performative side of knowledge is emphasised. I use Turnbull's (1997) ideas of performativity and spatiality to show how seemingly disparate knowledge traditions might be able to be performed together within local knowledge spaces. I point out that although globalisation has homogenising tendencies it also opens up spaces for new identities and the contestation of established values and norms (Stromquist & Monkman 2000). In a socially distributed knowledge system partnerships between higher education institutions and indigenous peoples might create new knowledge spaces which could have transformative effects for academics and indigenous communities. South African Journal of Higher Education Vol.16(1) 2002: 67-73

Re-sourcing Queer Subjectivities: Sexual Identity and Lesbian/Gay Print Media

Abstract: With most critical discussions of lesbian/gay identities and media focusing on mass-circulation representation, visibility and stereotyping, the lesbian/gay community small press has remained neglected, particularly as it plays a role in the constitution of the performative lesbian/gay subject. This paper brings queer theory and communication theories closer together by focusing on both the reading positions inculcating subjective performativity and the mediation of contemporary discourses of sexuality. By examining the role of the gay press as an affirmative 'first encounter' site with oft-censored discourses of non-heterosexuality, it is concluded that there are issues of responsibility in the discursive foreclosure on sexual alternatives beyond the hetero/homo binary in contemporary media formations.

Gender as Performance: Questioning the 'Butlerification' of Angela Carter's fiction

Abstract: During the 1990s, Judith Butler's theories on the performativity of gender identity grew to dominate criticism of Angela Carter's fiction. Butler's theories have provided critics with a politically enabling reading strategy that deconstructs foundational ideas of gender/sexual identity to a far greater degree than many earlier feminist discourses. While acknowledging the sophistication and pertinence of Butler's theories, this article argues that there are significant differences between Butler's presentation of gender acquisition and that presented in Carter's fiction. Highlighting how dominant theoretical trends can often problematically displace other relevant approaches, this article will suggest that Carter's presentation of gender acquisition is more in accordance with that promoted by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex rather than the currently more fashionable theories of Judith Butler.

Thinking political sociology: beyond the limits of post-Marxism:

Abstract: This article is concerned with post-Marxism and materialism in the work of Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. As ‘post-Marxists’ these writers use ‘material’ in a variety of ways, all of which indicate limits and constraints. The article focuses on one version of ‘materialism’ in this work, a version that is more implied than elaborated, in which ‘material’ is equivalent to institutionalized performativity or sedimented discourse: to ‘objective’ social structures and institutions. Post-Marxists often use ‘the social’ as equivalent to ‘material’ in this sense, to gesture towards the context in which politics succeeds or fails. I argue that the specificities of ‘the social’ cannot be theorized from within the terms of post-Marxism itself and that Butler and Laclau acknowledge this limitation in their most recent work. I therefore conclude that post-Marxism needs a supplement that I call political sociology. This is a dangerous supplement in the Derridean sense: a necessary addition that destabilizes the value post-Marxism gives to the distinction between ‘social’ and ‘political’ in which the latter is the privileged term.

The Gender of Onnagata As the Imitating Imitated: Its Historicity, Performativity, and Involvement in the Circulation of Femininity

Abstract: Beyond the studies of Japanese theater, onnagata, “female impersonators” of the kabuki theater, must be of acute interdisciplinary interest. Onnagata are regarded as having played the role of the “paragons” of womanhood in seventeenththrough nineteenth-century Japan, not only theatrically but also socially.1 For women’s studies, therefore, onnagata can provide an intriguing case study in which their gender amounts to a specific element to help explain femininity. For gender studies, onnagata’s gender dramatically visualizes some aspects of the current theoretical understanding of gender: performativity and contingency.2 Furthermore, the gender of onnagata is beneficial to gender studies because it can problematize some elements of gender that are customarily naturalized and made invisible. Gender is no doubt elusive for us to discuss, partially because the concept of gender has been posited as the pair of masculinity and femininity and as associated with sex in some way. (Although one recognizes gender to be divorced from the

¿Por qué le llaman género cuando quieren decir sexo? : una aproximación a la teoría de la performatividad de Judith Butler

Abstract: This text pretends to be an approach from Social Psychology to Butler's theory on the performativity of gender. In contemporary feminist thinking "sex" is usually associated with "nature", and "gender" with "culture" and social dimensions o sex categories; so sex and gender are presented like opposite concepts. Judith Butler proposes in her writings a deconstruction of this dichotomy: she explains that sex is also a social construction and, in consequence, sex would have been gender all the time. This text also studies possible contributions from the theory on performativity to a theory on the subjectivity in Social Psychology; in this sense it's fundamental her defence of the "paradoxical" possibility of social transformation starting from the social categories that constitute us and, at the same time, subordinate us too.

Performing Marriage with a Difference: Wooing, Wedding, and Bedding in The Taming of the Shrew

Abstract: Even before the recent burgeoning of performance theory, The Taming of the Shrew was of great interest to critics interested in role-playing, identity, and theatricality. And because Kate's "taming" and her performative speech both take place in a play-within-a-play, Taming fostered a critical interest in the intersection between performance and gender long before the phrase "gender trouble" became commonplace. The recent debates about performance, culture, and theater sparked in part by Judith Butler suggest, however, that it is time to revisit our analysis of gender and performance in this play. Although there are a number of readings that have already investigated connections between patriarchy and performance in The Taming of the Shrew, critics can largely be grouped into two opposing camps: revisionist and antirevisionist. (1) First there are those who, reading the play as Kate's taming, see her role as reflective or constructive of early modern patriarchal hierarchies that contend that women must be subject to their husbands. (2) Because such readings argue that Kate's speech implies a straightforward acceptance of submission, they deny the play's ability to foster critiques of wifely subordination. Second, there are those who read Kate's final speech ironically, as an act or game. (3) The emphasis on play in these revisionist readings sometimes results in the near avoidance of the uncomfortable taming aspects of the play: Kate's game frees her from them. While the outcomes of these readings are very different, both seem to pretend that early modern patriarchal ideologies are unified and static: Kate submits or escapes subjection to them. And either way, these arguments implicitly suggest that the marriages performed in The Taming of the Shrew do not question or complicate gender hierarchies; rather, they applaud or escape them. In contrast, I suggest that the wooings, weddings, and banquets performed in The Taming of the Shrew do not merely enact an acceptance or rejection of the subjection of wives to their husbands. Rather, they dramatize a marriage that leaves Kate and Petruchio negotiating not only gender hierarchies but also love, sexuality, and parental demands. The Taming's particular reiteration of marriage enacts a series of negotiations for power, none of which results in a marriage based on simple domination and submission or perfect egalitarianism. By exaggerating husbandly dominance, for example, Petruchio's performance draws our attention not to the power inherent in such dominance but rather to its inefficacy. Thereby a conception of marriage that expects hierarchy and mutuality to coincide effortlessly is questioned. Kate emphasizes the room marriage leaves for maneuverability by enacting one that incorporates her wit and sexuality into her very performances of submission. Thus by thinking of marriage (and the female subjection it requires) as performative, we can read Kate's agency through her reiteration of the role of wife--a reiteration that stresses her reshaping of Petruchio and their marriage. By using performance theory to contend that gendered institutions such as marriage can and do change, I suggest that the very institutions which some critics suggest Kate is forced either to accept or to escape are instead critiqued--and perhaps even shaped--by her. (4) Indeed, one of the reasons that the field of performance studies is so prevalent today and has so much to offer our readings of this play is its contention that performance has the potential to "provide a site for social and cultural resistance and the exploration of alternative possibilities." (5) The notion of performativity recently theorized by Judith Butler proposes a theoretical framework which allows that subjects can work from within the very power structures that bring them into being. For Butler it is the repetition required by all "ritual social dramas" that makes agency and even cultural change possible. …

Is there madness in the method? Representations of research in lifelong learning

Abstract: In the move from viewing research as purely technical, objective, and rational to understanding it as a social practice embedded in particular cultural, political, and historical contexts, we raise the question of how reality is represented in research practices and products Thus, the purpose of this article is to examine the "performativity "of text in constructing and reporting research To do that, this article explores the process of formulating research questions for an empirical study of conceptions of flexibility and lifelong learning in the context of further education in the United Kingdom We examine the implications of an analytical reflexivity for the representation of research projects This analysis of representation is (re)presented in three parallel versions of our research: a algorithmic tale, a tale of improvisations, and a reflexive tale

Picture books as performative texts: Or how to do things with words and pictures

Abstract: See article

After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory

Abstract: Every history of theory is simultaneously a theory of history. Rajan and O'Driscoll's wide-ranging volume tackles the issue of providing an intellectual history of theory, given a considerable continuity between theory and the history of ideas, and also given theory's own questioning of traditional intellectual historical models. The editors address this challenge by providing thirteen essays on a variety of theorists from Derrida to Zizek. Under the paradigms of genealogy, performativity, physiology, and technology, the essayists explore metaphors for connecting the work of theorists from different times, that are drawn from areas other than history, and that can enrich and revise our understanding of the histories of theory. Not only do these essays reflect the impact on writing about theory - and by extension on intellectual history - in areas such as psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, and cultural studies, but they are also an exploration of theme and situation - the writing of intellectual history after the linguistic turn and the poststructuralist critique. Written for the theory specialists, as well as intellectual historians and those in the humanities and social sciences who are concerned with critical theory, the essays represent a re-evaluation of the current state of theory, as addressed by leading scholars in the field.

"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in Leaves of Grass

Abstract: ly agential self, the "you," towards whom his speaker directs his address. Having pluralized the Leaves's address by naming a myriad of reader-subjects, Whitman then subtracts the social, economic, racial, and gendered categories of their identity, and the forms of practical life grounded by those categories: Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you, Your true soul and body appear before me, They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work, farms, clothes the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying. The mockeries are not you, Underneath them and within them I see you lurk, (1:214-15) Here Whitman abstracts his addressees in much the same way he has his speaker, projecting into their locally situated subjectivities a more conscious interior core to which he hopes his poetry can make appeal. The seemingly paradoxical purpose of this abstracting process is to particularize even more radically his readers. Whitman wants his poetry to interpellate actual persons who are both socially concrete and at the same time numerically singular, those unique individuals whose souls and bodies are at that moment engaged in reading his text. Whitman experimented with this technique in his early journalism at a time when he was writing for more narrowly defined readerships on typical political and reformist topics, and before discovering the broadly democratizing effects of abstract address.36 But in Leaves of Grass, this placing of generalized/specific readers serves to coordinate Whitman's historical determinism with his emphasis on what Raymond Williams calls "creative [practise] in the emergent sense," and forms the rhetorical context for the collaborative enterprise of his lyric.37 The dynamics of abstraction and specification in the Leaves's address, which aims to put the speaker's words into contact not with readerships but with an actual, individuated reader, prepares for the second moment of lyric performativity, that which allows the reader to discover pre-existing practical-experiential potential through the prompting of the poet. Whitman draws the outlines of this process through a cluster of interrelated tropes, "hinting," "reminding," and Vincent Bertolini 1059 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.85 on Sat, 28 May 2016 06:47:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms "translating." Hinting in the Whitmanian sense is a way of imagining a kind of agency in communication on the part of the poet that is nonlinear but aims to do more than diffusely rouse readers. When the poet writes, "For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at" (2:369), he reinforces the notion of himself as possessor and purveyor of vitally important messages. Here the poet suggests that he is obliquely trying to convey stable meanings that exist in his mind prior to the rhetorical interchange and that must be disencrypted by the reader. But why would the poet who razzes the reader for feeling "so proud to get at the meaning of poems" pretend here to rhetorical superiority? How can we coordinate the speaker's previous rejection of an epistemology of reading as decoding with the authoritarian sense of hinting as a game of guessing what's in the author's mind? Upon closer consideration we can see the apparently contradictory rhetoric of hinting as a tactical imparting of mixed messages concerning the nature and locus of meaning in Leaves of Grass. The notion of lyric hinting encourages the reader to think of meaning as deep content obscured to one's immediate perception. The speaker's use of the term in effect charges the reader with the task of searching after, guessing at, attempting to "hit" "that which" will be "use[ful]" to know, the learning of which will have some practical utility for her/him. The idea of hinting, that is, engages the reader's interpretive agency, linking it to the poet's communicative efforts, thus setting the reader on the path to understanding his poetry. But Whitman also decouples interpretive agency from any conventional understanding of hinting, deflecting the reader's desire to look for that deep meaning, the message behind the hint, exclusively inside the text. We see this in the way Whitman refunctions the concept of hinting for his own purposes, lexically and logically linking the term to its other definition as a subtantive-a "hint" as a slight indication of the existence or nature of something: There is something that comes to one now and perpetually, It is not what is printed, preach'd, discussed, it eludes discussion and print, It is not to be put in a book, it is not in this book, It is for you whoever you are, it is no farther from you than your hearing and sight are from you, It is hinted by nearest, commonest, readiest, it is ever provoked by them. (1:87) 1060 "Hinting" and "Reminding" This content downloaded from 207.46.13.85 on Sat, 28 May 2016 06:47:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Here the speaker makes a distinction, and an explicit parallel, between reading (and other uses of language) and everyday epistemological activity, our navigating of the comprehensible world. He on the one hand de-emphasizes language as a site of knowledge to be mined, saying that the "something that comes to one" is neither in his nor in any other book. On the other hand, by juxtaposing books and the world, and by putting hearing and sight, the faculties most relevant to this kind of lyric reading (the running of one's eye across the page, the "hearing" of the lyric voice) at the center of epistemological process, he suggests that the meanings of books can be known in the way that the subject knows the world. Furthermore, though hinting is still used as a verb in this passage, it is used in a passive construction, and its subjects are superlative adjectives, "nearest," "commonest," "readiest"; these are both agents of the action "hinting" and modifiers of some unspecified entity. The "something" that the reader (presumably the referent of "one" as well as "you") receives is "for you," exists in some prior internal relation of potential meaningfulness to the subject; its nearness and commonness, the fact that it lies ready to hand, "provoke" the subject to make use of it somehow. It is not hard to see Whitman straining towards a tropology of dialectic in these lines, with epistemological objects and subjects coming to each other, interacting, exchanging places. The world, and analogically the text, give out "hints" of the existence of meanings within them; but it is only when we process those hints through our sensory organs and through what Whitman calls our "souls," that we can then call those things into being-and are ourselves called into being (the "you" and the "for you" not being really separate)-in the fullness of their relations to us.38 It is through the idea of prior internal relations of meaningfulness ("I bring what you much need yet always have" [1:87]), however those meanings might be blocked to the reader's immediate awareness, that we can see Whitmanian hinting as dialectically related not to guessing but to "reminding."39 As the speaker of Leaves of Grass puts it: "I am less the reminder of property or qualities, and more the reminder of life" (1:31, 1855 lines). However we might understand the ambiguous phrase "property or qualities" (I take the class reverberations, in this context, to be intentional), the terms seem to refer to fixed possessions of the mind or identity that the speaker does not aim to reference in the moment of poetic utterance. Rather, by revealing "hints" of pre-existing alternative experience to the reader's notice, the poet wants to become the verbal occasion for the Vincent Bertolini 1061 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.85 on Sat, 28 May 2016 06:47:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms reader to be put in mind of buried experiential potential, in the hopes that lyric reading might then release the quantum of "life" contained in that newly realized knowledge. Here Whitman imagines this process of re-minding as giving the reader the power to act upon a realm of immanent subjective diversity, to cultivate and express a host of nascent pseudosubjects akin to the poet's own proliferating "Me Myselves," a power that Whitman tropes as sexual and insurrectionary: to remind the reader of "life" is to ... make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipt, And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that plot and conspire.

The performing genome: Genetics and the rearticulation of the human

Abstract: This essay argues for the reconception of the human genome as performative inasmuch as the articulation of the genome does not merely describe or represent the body, but actually brings the body into being. Such a reconception suggests that human bodies and, by extension, human subjects are produced in acts of articulation and are therefore open to potential re-articulations, a suggestion with important aesthetic and political implications. After considering the act of cloning itself as a performative act, the argument shifts to a consideration of performance artist Ron Athey's 4 Scenes in a Harsh Life and Peter Greenaway's film The Pillow Book, arguing that the "articulated" subject figured by the clone may give rise to the "re-articulated" subjects figured by Athey and Greenaway. In this view, bodies become contested sites for the variable constitution of subjectivity itself.

Teaching the Teachers

Abstract: SUMMARY This paper presents a conceptual tool designed to help teacher education students think critically about the roots and consequences of personal, parental, community, and institutional resistance to diverse sexual identities and behaviours. To explore the roots of sexualized and gendered prejudice and ground the conceptual tool theoretically, it begins with a careful examination of Judith Butler's work on performativity. The paper then describes and illustrates the conceptual tool. The Continuum of (Subversive) Drag Performance helps stimulate critical thinking about the power implications of people's sexed and gendered performances through its six ranges: Radical, Stealth, Commercial, Passing, Mainstream, and Privileged. Because these ranges are independent of common considerations of "normalcy," they offer teacher education students a relatively unthreatening framework for analyzing conceptions of sexuality and gender that, left unexamined, can contribute to sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia.

The Protoliterary; Steps Toward an Anthropology of Culture

Abstract: This is a broad-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink aesthetic and literary studies in terms of an "anthropology" of symbolic media generally. Central to the author's argument is the proposition that the idea of literature-at least as it has been understood in the West since the eighteenth century-as the paradigm for artistic experience is both limited and limiting. In its place, the author offers a more general theory of aesthetic experience appropriate to a wide range of media (in the term's broadest sense) and geared toward performativity and bodily experience. The author develops the idea of the "protoliterary" as a cultural-aesthetic discourse prior to and external to the "literary" as traditionally conceived in Western aesthetics. Manifestations of the protoliterary tend to occur within forms of multimedia theatricalization in which suggestive images of the body loom large. The appeal of the protoliterary lies in its ability to function on both cognitive and somatic levels, thereby neutralizing such distinctions as self/society and reality/fiction. The author's argument is indebted to John Dewey's belief in a basic human need for aesthetic experience, a need that can be met in a variety of ways, from tattoos and scarification, through sports, parades, and cosmetics, to literature, opera, and film. From this basis the book theorizes a history of the development of separate, hierarchical arts in the West while suggesting that independent histories of single arts and artistic experience are no longer desirable or even possible. Although the genesis of particular forms of media are inextricably linked to specific historical, sociological, and technological conditions, their potential functions and effects are not tied to those conditions, nor should they be.

Power, performativities & place: living outside heterosexuality

Abstract: This thesis explores the concepts of power, performativity and place and how these act to produce non-heterosexual women's everyday lives through practices of 'othering'. The thesis explores three feminist poststructural tenets: that everyday life is saturated in power; that identities and bodies are (re )formed through reiterated performances (performativity); and that place is fluid and (re )produced through performativity and power. These tenets are used to explore 28 non-heterosexual women's accounts of their everyday lives. These accounts were formed using six focus groups, three coupled interviews, 23 individual interviews, 22 diaries and six sets of auto-photography. The thesis contextualises these research methods within discourses of feminist methodologies which understand accounts of research as partial, performative and as formed in spaces of betweeness. The concepts, tenets, methodologies and accounts that make up the thesis are understood as mutually (in)forming and not as discrete entities. The thesis considers participants' experiences of heterosexism and genderism. Particular focus is placed on everyday processes of othering in food consumption spaces; how women live with these processes; women's experiences of being mistaken for men; and the (re )formation of place through fantasies and imaginings. Through these explorations the thesis deconstructs dualisms, dichotomies and binaries, contending that everyday life is fonned across and between these boundaries whilst hegemonic power relations are simultaneously (re)performed to maintain heterosexuality and normative femininities 'in place'. Relations of power and performativities render place (in terms of both sites and processes) fluid, (in)forming non-heterosexual women's bodies, identities and places as 'other' in relation to dominant (heterosexual) codes and norms. Discourses of power do not have to be named in order to be materially experienced and this thesis discusses the everyday use of the term 'it' in lieu of words, such as heterosexism and genderism. Moreover, hegemonic heterosexual and gendered codes and norms are diversely (re )made through relations of power and performativities. The thesis concludes by contending that whilst power relations can be theorised as fluid over time, everyday life is often lived as though power is a fixed structure.