Showing papers on "Performativity published in 2012"

Brand, Citationality, Performativity

Abstract: This article provides a semiotic account of the performativity of the brand. It argues that the brand's performativity is a function of its citationality: the ways in which (fractions of) brands are reanimated, or cited, while being reflexively marked as reanimations or citations. First the article argues that the intelligibility and coherence of brands turns on the calibration of a number of gaps in the brand's form: between brand tokens, brand types, and a brand ontology. Such calibration is achieved through moments of citing brand type and brand ontology. The article then discusses three forms of brand citationality that exceed the brand by situating themselves in, and exploiting, these gaps: brand counterfeits, “remixes,” and simulations. The article concludes by discussing the relation between citationality and performativity, arguing that the performativity of brand turns on the (meta-)semiotics of citationality and the excesses it continually generates.

On the performative power of financial models

Abstract: Financial models vary according to their ability to shape markets. This ability depends on the way models are used in institutional settings. In contrast to the prevalent view that involvement in organizational practices almost automatically makes models performative, this paper argues that institutional design might obstruct potential model performativity. This crucial issue determines whether models are strongly or only ‘generically’ or ‘effectively’ performative. The empirical study of the usage of the discounted cash flow (DCF) model presented in this paper offers an example of an application practice that significantly limits the model's performative power.

New Lives of Teachers

Abstract: Depending upon our own ontological and epistemological positioning we may believe that it is: (i) the meganarratives or grand stories (Cohen & Garet, 1975) of broader performativity, results driven, contexts which determine the changes in nature, shape, and direction of the new work and lives of teachers; or (ii) that the accumulation and persistence of what are sometimes called "small stories" (Georgakopolou, 2004) show that these only influence and thus may be mediated by individual and collective agency aided by a strength of vocation, the passion of moral purpose. Some researchers position themselves in a critical sociological perspective, often using Bourdieu (1970) or Foucault (1976) as their theoretical mentors. These researchers tend to write about teachers and schools as victims of policy-driven imperatives as bureaucratic surveillance and new pervasive forms of contractual accountability which (wrongly) assume a direct causal link between good teaching, good learning, and measurable student attainments persist and increase. I see research evidence of this but research evidence, also, of teachers who remain skilful, knowledgeable, committed, and resilient regardless of circumstance I subscribe to what Judyth Sachs identifies as the "activist professional" (Sachs, 2003). By a predisposition to hope, persistence in believing that I can make a difference to the lives of those who I teach, knowledge of a range of research and by conducting research which keeps me close to teachers, for example, through a networked learning community of schools in one city in England, now about to celebrate a decade of teacher inquiry endeavours, I am persuaded that, like me, many teachers, despite some 'bumpy moments,' also maintain their commitment to teach to their best across a career and in changing, sometimes challenging, circumstances. We see this in the in-depth work of Susan Moore Johnson and her colleagues (2004) with new teachers, in Nieto (2003) and Hansen's (2001) writings, in the professional learning communities reported by Ann Lieberman and Bob Bullough's recent writings of happiness, hope, and hopefulness. New Lives, Old Truths The work and lives of teachers have always been subject to external influence as those who are nearing the end of their careers will attest, but it is arguable that what is new over the last two decades is the pace, complexity, and intensity of change as governments have responded to the shrinking world of economic competitiveness and social migration by measuring progress against their position in international league tables. This is in part the reason I have titled this article the 'New Lives of Teachers.' Parallel to these are the growing concerns with the new generation of 'screen culture' children who, suggests one author (Greenfield, 2008), spend more time interacting with technology than with family or at school and whose attention span and sense of empathy are diminishing alongside real and potential conflicts in increasingly heterogeneous societies. As a result, there are regularly repeated claims that teacher educators are failing to prepare their students well enough and so, as in my own country, governments promote apprenticeship models of training (not education) (Donaldson Review, 2011; Hobson et al., 2009; Holmes Report, 1986). 'Teach for America' is one of the models borrowed by my own current government. Schools are encouraged to become 'Teaching Schools' which buy in teacher educators, who themselves are subject to new functionalist performativity demands. In these forms of teacher education students spend most of their time in schools learning the craft of teaching but not necessarily developing their thinking, capacities for reflection, and their emotional understandings; for teaching at its best is an intellectual and emotional endeavour. In the new lives of teachers, schools and classrooms have become, for many, sites of struggle as financial self-reliance and pressure for ideological compliance have emerged as the twin realities. …

Reclaiming authentic selves: Control, resistive humour and identity work in the office

Abstract: This article analyses a study that reveals employees using humour to resist an organization's normative control attempts via a 'workplace justice' program. In an interesting 'doubling', the program used excerpts from the television comedy The Office which were intended to provide clear examples of inappropriate workplace behaviour and foster consensual understanding. However, The Office can be read as a parody of the performativity of management, gender and political correctness, a reading that problematizes the organizational purposes and one exploited by employees to construct alternate interpretations. Analysis focuses on a number of intersecting areas centring on identity work and humour. Firstly, resistance to normative control and its presumed intrusions, with resistance manifest in the form of humour. Related to this are employee perceptions that the organization required the mere performance of 'appropriate behaviour' in conformance with politically correct, managerially fashionable and legalistically expedient expectations. This raises questions about performance, identity and authenticity. Secondly, identity work takes place within power, but operates through a series of plateaux: actions may act resistively in relation to a managerial/hierarchical plateau whilst at the same time acting to reproduce forms of heteronormative masculinity in a different, gender power plateau. Thirdly, the article examines the role of humour in the complexities of identity work and in relation to different frameworks of power. It further theorizes and illustrates the ambiguities of humour and its double-edged capacity to contribute to the maintenance of the status quo and the performance of power as well as its resistive and subversive potential.

Crossing borders: new teachers co-constructing professional identity in performative times

Abstract: This paper draws on a range of theoretical perspectives on the construction of new teachers’ professional identity. It focuses particularly on the impact of the development in many national education systems of a performative culture of the management and regulation of teachers’ work. Whilst the role of interactions with professional colleagues and school managers in the performative school has been extensively researched, less attention has been paid to new teachers’ interactions with students. This paper highlights the need for further research focusing on the process of identity co-construction with students. A key theoretical concept employed is that of liminality, the space within which identities are in transition as teachers adjust to the culture of a new professional workplace, and the nature of the engagement of new teachers, or teachers who change schools, with students. The authors argue that an investigation into the processes of this co-construction of identity offers scope for new insights i...

Vulnerability conditions and risk representations in Latin-America: Framing the territorializing urban risk

Abstract: In risk studies, a large scope of approaches has already been defined, from hazard-centered to socially rooted analysis; being social scientists’ focus on vulnerability more obvious from the late 1960s on. The present epistemological article locates risk causes in society and states that the production of risks is two fold: these are both material and discursive. The conceptual proposal of the article consists of setting an integrative framework that accounts for material aspects of risk as well as for the performative dimensions of its discourses, representations and conceptions. By performativity we mean that discourses and representations do not only reflect what people see or have in mind, but that they also operate the world and make things exist, having concrete consequences in society and its relations with the environment. The proposed framework is called the territorialization-of-risk framework and requires contextualizing and politicizing risk. We state that such framework lays epistemological and methodological groundwork for such a perspective. Territories are viewed as social constructions that are more than bounded pieces of space where an authority takes place. They are spaces where competing social meanings and identification are ascribed, and their making accounts for both material and ideal social drivers that also do intervene in the production of risk. Drawing on different Latin-American cities’ case studies, and mainly on the case of Caracas as former PhD fieldwork, the territorialization-of-risk allows asking critical questions related with power relations, social status, identity and discourses. Actually, risk appears to be the result of a social (both material and ideal) production as it contributes to the shaping of society. It is an outcome and a driver of society at the same time. The territorialization-of-risk framework sheds the light on the importance of non-material aspects in framing risk, as well as on the factual and discursive consequences of its management and policy.

Performance and Performativity: Undoing Fictions of Women Business Owners

Abstract: This article explores the representation of women small business owners in three contemporary novels; Chocolat, The Shipping News and Back When We Were Grownups The primary contribution is to demonstrate how fiction can both challenge and collude in dominant constructions of entrepreneurship, which is more generally gendered as male and masculine Judith Butler's thinking on performativity with regard to gender and sexual desire is applied to women's identities and extended to include their behaviour as entrepreneurs The article demonstrates that these novels both ‘do’ and ‘undo’ gender and business ownership They portray women who are successful in business while displaying culturally accepted norms of femininity but who are set apart from other female characters However, their partial and conflictual identification with norms of gender and entrepreneurship could lead a reader to question those norms and through the undoing of the protagonists, the novels offer alternative performances and performativities of doing gender and of doing business

Framing responsibility: HIV, biomedical prevention, and the performativity of the law.

Abstract: How can we register the participation of a range of elements, extending beyond the human subject, in the production of HIV events? In the context of proposals around biomedical prevention, there is a growing awareness of the need to find ways of responding to complexity, as everywhere new combinations of treatment, behavior, drugs, norms, meanings and devices are coming into encounter with one another, or are set to come into encounter with one another, with a range of unpredictable effects. In this paper I consider the operation of various framing devices that attribute responsibility and causation with regard to HIV events. I propose that we need to sharpen our analytic focus on what these devices do, their performativity-that is, their full range of worldly implications and effects. My primary examples are the criminal law and the randomized control trial. I argue that these institutions operate as framing devices: They attribute responsibility for HIV events and externalize other elements and effects in the process. Drawing on recent work in science and technology studies as well as queer theory, I set out an analytic frame that marks out a new role for HIV social research. Attentiveness to the performative effects of these devices is crucial, I suggest, if we want better to address the global HIV epidemic.

(Im)perfect pictures: snaplogs in performativity research

Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore a visual method, snaplog (snapshots and logbooks) from a performativity theory approach.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses empirical examples from a three‐year qualitative research project where snaplogs are used as an experimental method. The paper presents a reading of performativity theory and discusses the performativity of using visual methods in the research process.Findings – The paper concludes that visual methods have a special ability to activate the field in a way that avoids preconceived ideas, and creates possibilities to observe the researched phenomenon and how it practices, resists and revoices the questions asked by the researchers.Research limitations/implications – The paper explores and discusses the authors’ experiences and reflections on the positioning and scope of using snaplogs as a visual method. It does not report a systematic evaluation of its implications.Practical implications – Snaplogs offer the researcher the poss...

Gendering Terror: DISCOURSES OF TERRORISM AND WRITING WOMAN-AS-AGENT

Abstract: This article problematizes the deployment of the concept of agency in contemporary international relations scholarship. It examines the problems of relying on a foundationalist conception of agency as a tool to achieve meaningful political action by exploring the case of scholarship on the topic of women and terrorism. I argue that scholars on the topic of women and terrorism inscribe agency into women's subjectivities, that is, they place agency as the goal of feminist political action. By tracing the way that scholars write agency into women's subjectivities through an examination of the literature on the topic, I am able to demonstrate how reliance on agency as a foundational concept hinders the goals of feminists.

Declining Performativity: Butler, Whitehead and Ecologies of Concern

Abstract: This article explores what might happen to the concept of performativity within arguments that are understood as ‘topological’. It argues that we might ‘decline’ performativity, which is to say, elaborate the concerns that are expressed in the concept, but inclining it more boldly towards the com- plexities of a world whose elements are always in process of constitution, of reiterative enfolding. Taking a cue from Isabelle Stengers’ recent work in which she posits the notion of ecologies of practice, on the one hand, and Whitehead’s concept of concern, on the other, the paper argues that emer- gent entities have differential requirements – not least according to the dis- ciplines to which they appeal – and subtend different modes of implied obligation. An adherence to these requirements needs to be accompanied by persuasive presentation that obliges a community to affirm any entity. On many levels of abstraction, ecologies need to show concern for an entity to facilitate its emergence and to sustain its mode of being. In an expanded vision, then, human and non-human entities at all levels enter into multifar- ious relational modes of becoming, but these become of sustained conse- quence only through persuasion of communities, sometimes organized into disciplines. The survival of entities requires forms of differentiation, division and of value. The paper relates these arguments to forms of sociological enquiry that give glimpses of how sociology might respond. It ends with a hesitation around the radical anti-anthropomorphism of the stance developed, and argues that this does not entirely eclipse the importance of political hope.

Performing the Sub‐Prime Crisis: Trauma and the Financial Event

Abstract: The article provides a critical analysis of the performative effects of invocations of trauma and traumatic imagery during the sub-prime crisis. We develop a pragmatic approach to performativity that foregrounds the ambiguity between the importance of performative utterances, on the one hand, and overlapping performativities that produce subjects capable of ‘‘hearing’’ such utterances, on the other. We argue that a performative effect of the traumatic narrative of the sub-prime crisis was to constitute it as ‘‘an event’’ with traumatic characteristics. Financial subjects came to anticipate the object of financial salvation through intervention to save the banks; and such a view worked to curtail the range of political possibilities that were thinkable. Lines of pragmatic resistance are suggested, which turn the logic of trauma toward broadly progressive ends. In this way, the political dimension of performativity is brought forward: if finance is performative, then this only invites the question of how we might perform it differently.

The making of a neoliberal academic

Abstract: Drawing on his earlier work on performativity, Ball in this article critically reflects on what it means today to be an academic in higher education.

How to become an iconic social thinker: The intellectual pursuits of Malinowski and Foucault

Abstract: The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure is to investigate the conditions under which social thinkers assume the iconic...

Law's performativities: Shaping the emergence of regenerative medicine through European Union legislation

Abstract: The paper undertakes a textual and documentary analysis of the Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products Regulation, which was passed into law in the European Union (EU) in 2007. This law is significant for the development of regenerative medicine in the EU and globally. Regulatory texts such as this one provide significant material for addressing key concerns in recent theorising about innovative technologies in socio-legal studies, innovation studies, and science and technology studies. These concerns include expectations about future technologies and economic sectorbuilding. By revisiting philosopher J.L. Austin’s well-known work on How to Do Things with Words, this paper deploys his concepts of performative utterances to inform its analysis. Pursuing Austin’s and later commentators’ analysis of performatives in language use, and drawing on Lindsay Prior’s application of actor-network theory to documents, the analysis shows two different types of performativity at work in and through the document. These are termed ‘generative’ and ‘enactive’ performativity. The ‘enactive’ type includes ‘legislative’ and ‘social’ forms. In addition, a more conventional content analysis reveals a range of actions, both legislative and discursive, in the regulatory document. The analysis shows a tension between standardisation and imprecision in the conceptual detailing of the document. Legislative texts produced through established politicolegal conventions are a special class of document that should be accorded a more prominent place in understanding the role of political governance processes in shaping emergent technoscientific fields and sectors.

Gendered Performance Performing Gender in the DIY Punk and Hardcore Music Scene

Abstract: This article considers the relevance of geographical theories about gender roles and how gender is performed, to the situated context of a local DIY ('Do It Yourself) punk scene. It draws on an auto-ethnographic study carried out by the author between September 2008 and May 2009, which explored the themes of the body, gendered performativity and gendered spatialities. The study was based on the author's observations, reflections and conversations with other participants at live music events ('shows') in a particular region of the UK, but also revealed how DIY punk offers an example of an imagined community, crossing temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries with a sense of belonging and collective identity expressed by participants. The study illustrates the complexity of the relationship between punk ideologies and practices and the ways that spaces can simultaneously offer contradictory and negotiable opportunities for empowerment and resistance, acceptance and exclusion. Keywords: Gender, Space, Performativity, Resistance, Auto-ethnography, Punk Introduction '... even a subculture deliberately carved out to oppose mainstream norms and values ends up reinforcing masculinist ideals and male-defined gender expectations' (Mullaney, 2007, p.387) This article considers the relevance of theories about gender roles and how gender is performed to the situated context of a local DIY ('Do It Yourself') punk scene. I reference literature on subcultures and gender and relate it to reflections from my auto-ethnographic research within the local scene studied. The thread running throughout this discussion is the tension between the nebulous political underpinnings of DIY punk, as a sub-culture, and my experiences of DIY punk and hardcore in a particular localised context (I will use 'DIY punk' to include hardcore in discussing my particular case study). Using the themes of the body, gendered performativity and gendered spatialities, this article explores this tension, as well as the often disconnected relationship between espousing progressive ideas (such as anti-racism and anti-homophobia) and acceptance of, or at times support for, reactionary values (particularly sexism). The demographic composition of the scene I was involved in was mainly white, heterosexual, male participants and men held dominant roles as live music event organisers and musicians (the live music events will hereon be referred to as 'shows'). I therefore focus on relationships between the roles played out by men and women, particularly on expressions of masculinity. I begin by introducing the setting for the study followed by an explanation of the methods used in the research. I then explore the potential for DIY punk to be seen as an imagined community, acknowledging the fluidity of the temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries around punk, yet recognising the very real sense of belonging and collective identity expressed by many of the people I talked to. I use examples from my research to illustrate the complexity of the relationship between punk ideologies and practices, relating these examples to theories of gender and space. Finally, I provide examples from the literature of reclamation of punk spaces by women and feminist politics, as well as the potential for punk spaces to be read as queer spaces. This discussion draws from research that took place in a specific geographic and social location and so will not necessarily reflect experiences in all DIY punk spaces or scenes. Still, I hope that the examples provided will illustrate the complexity of the DIY punk music scene, particularly in relation to gender, and how the punk scene offers an opportunity to study the performance of resistance and gender. Consideration of the spatiality of punk shows illustrates the ways in which spaces can simultaneously offer contradictory and negotiable opportunities for empowerment and resistance, acceptance and exclusion. …

Gender Mainstreaming and Employment in the European Union: A Review and Analysis of Theoretical and Policy Literatures*

Abstract: Gender mainstreaming was introduced within the European Union (EU) in the 1990s as a means of addressing the unequal treatment of employed women. Yet its impact on organizational practices in Europe has been limited. This review synthesizes and analyses theoretical and policy literatures on gender mainstreaming within the EU between 1998 and 2011. It highlights ambiguities within gender mainstreaming literatures regarding whether gender mainstreaming is, first and foremost, a policy or a strategy. It further identifies ambiguities regarding how inequality should be articulated: in terms of the sameness or difference between women's and men's concerns, and in the context of whether gender mainstreaming research should be defined as focusing primarily on ‘women’ or on ‘gender’. The paper suggests that such ambiguity of definition within gender mainstreaming literatures compromises the implementation of gender mainstreaming within organizational practices. It further observes the need, within some gender mainstreaming theoretical and policy literatures, to move away from stable definitions of ‘male’ and ‘female’ (which identify women's and men's concerns as often in contrast) towards a more situated approach. The paper contributes to future gender mainstreaming research by proposing a more fluid, post-structural and sociocultural interpretation of ‘gender’. Drawing upon Judith Butler's research, it argues for the reconceptualizing of gender mainstreaming through a ‘Gender as performativity’ framework, in which gender is characterized as situational and performed in line with organizational expectations about women's and men's social roles

Running from our shadows: the performative impact of policy diagnoses in Dutch debates on immigrant integration

Abstract: This article examines the performative politics of claiming policy failure in the integration of immigrants in the Netherlands, often articulated as the failure of ‘the multiculturalist model’. Four consecutive ‘post-’discourses are distinguished, in which we see the construction of increasingly explicit notions of Dutchness. This idea of the Dutch is as much about the style in which it is articulated as it is about the symbolic resources through which Dutchness is imagined. Examining the national imagination in policy diagnoses helps us to understand why immigrant integration has been so consistently presented as a failure of multiculturalism.

Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective

Abstract: Introduction: Permission to Re-Narrate 1. En-Gendering Palestine: Narratives of Desire and Dis-Orientation 2. Women Writing Resistance: Between Nationalism and Feminism 3. Masculinity in Crisis: From Patriarchy to (Post)Colonial Performativity 4. Bodies Beyond Boundaries? Transitional Spaces and Liminal Selves 5. Imagining the Transnational Feminist Community Conclusion: Postcolonial Feminist Futures

Epistemic and performative quests for authentic management in India

Abstract: The project of identifying voices from the South, and transforming the discipline of organization studies through such engagement, raises important questions of how to assess and categorize disciplinary knowledge adequately for such a purpose. This article discusses two quests for authenticity in the context of Indian management studies, based in claims of epistemic relevance and performative efficacy. In both instances there appears a conscious effort to hear voices of the south. But is it sufficient to adequately re-order management knowledge to the demands of a locale, to make it more authentic?

Problematising the role of the white researcher in social justice research

Abstract: This paper contributes to the debate on decolonizing methodologies in qualitative research by considering how a white researcher can try and destabilise white supremacy when explicitly conducting research with social justice aims. It draws on data from a recent ethnographic study of minority ethnic pupils’ experiences in secondary schools in England, and interrogates the tensions between the research aim to challenge racial stereotyping in education, and issues of race and power emerging from the research process. The paper investigates specifically the ways in which interaction is shaped by – frequently hidden, particularly to those privileged by them - structures of white supremacy. Developing an innovative analytical framework which draws on insights from both Critical Race Theory and the work of Judith Butler, the researcher problematises issues of voice and representation in conducting social justice research. It is argued that an approach which engages with elements of both structural and poststructural theory allows a more critical exploration of white supremacy through an understanding of the performativity of race. The author works towards a possible research methodology which not only takes into account, but also tries to destabilise processes of white supremacy in research by both recognising participants’ efforts to do this, and trying to make researchers better able to take responsibility for their own complicity in perpetuating unequal racial structures. It is argued that such a recognition by white researchers will necessarily be an uncomfortable process.

Reforma educacional como barbárie social: economismo e o fim da autenticidade.

Abstract: This paper develops previous work on the role of performativity in changing professional practice and practitioner subjectivities in education. It is argued that the technologies of comparison, measurement and accountability, that are currently proliferating in education systems around the world, are not simply new ways of monitoring outcomes but are actively changing what they purport to describe. They change the meaning of teaching and what it means to teach. These technologies of reform are changing the ways that teachers think about what they do, relate to colleagues and to their students. Sociability and collectivity are being destroyed and are being replaced by suspicion, competition, guilt and envy, a new highly charged repertoire of emotions and deformed social relations. Keywords: Performance. Subjectivity. Professionalism.

Perform or else: the performative enhancement of teacher professionalism

Abstract: The Singapore Ministry of Education's Enhanced Performance Management System (EPMS) was instituted in 2005 as a system of professional accountability to enhance the standards and stakes of teacher professionalism in schools. This essay explores how the EPMS, with its underlying paradigm of performance management, functions as a “technology of discipline” within the political economy of teacher professionalization in Singapore. The analysis centres on the discursive mechanisms of a standardized appraisal instrument known as the Work Review Form. Applying speech act theory via the insights of J.L. Austin and J. Butler, I argue that teachers' professional qualities are not only described and prescribed but also produced by the appraisal protocols of the EPMS – a process contingent on the discursive performativity of the Work Review Form. Implicated in this notion of performativity are the rhetorical manoeuvres by which teachers perform “on paper” under the pressure to perform. Such performance pressures poin...

The Sword, the Sponge, and the Paradox of Performativity Some Observations on Fate, Luck, Financial Chicanery, and the Limits of Human Knowledge

Abstract: Terms such as 'fate' and 'luck' are ways of talking about the ambiguities and antinomies of temporal existence that all humans, even social theorists, have to confront in one form or another. Concepts that include mana, śakti, baraka, and orenda might best be considered as grappling with the exact same paradoxes. Nor should we assume that social scientific approaches are necessarily more sophisticated. Current discourse on 'performativity', for instance, seems in certain ways rather crude when compared to the Malagasy concept of hasina (usually translated as 'sacred power'), which takes on the same dilemma—what I call the 'paradox of performativity'—in a far more nuanced way.

Employability, managerialism, and performativity in higher education: a relational perspective

Abstract: This article combines Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and cultural capital with Lyotard’s account of performativity to construct a three-tiered framework in order to explore how managerialism has affected the academic habitus. Specifically, this article examines the adoption of group assignments as a means of developing teamwork skills in one Australian case study organisation. On a macrolevel, by viewing the employability imperative as one manifestation of managerialism in the higher education field, we argue that managerialism has created a performative culture in the case study organisation evidenced by an increasing emphasis on performance indicators. On a mesolevel, by examining how academics use group assessments to respond to demands made by governments and employers for ‘employable graduates’, we highlight the continuity of academic habitus. Finally, on a microlevel by drawing on alumni reflections regarding their experiences of group assessments at university, we are able to shed some light on their evaluation of this pedagogical tool.

The Performative Fixing and Unfixing of Subjectivities.

Abstract: Looking at two sets of conversations, among Greek adolescents, and between Japanese and Australian workers, this article shows how a poststructuralist understanding of the ways in which participants use and mix elements of their language repertoires implies a view of language as performative. Although the poststructuralist element of our approach on the one hand foregrounds a questioning of stable categories of language, identity, and assumed modes of mixing, our development of an understanding of performativity allows us to consider seriously the processes by which language and identity are constantly being remade. For the participants themselves, this is not simply a question of fluid language practices, but rather the interplay of fixed and unfixed language elements, cultural identifications, and social relationships. Reinvigorating Butler’s account of performativity, our analysis and comparison of these two sets of data shows how a poststructuralist consideration of performativity sheds light on the relationship between the ongoing production of subjectivity and the deployment of fixed, stable, or stereotypical categories of identity.

Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection

Abstract: Nadine Ehlers examines the constructions of blackness and whiteness cultivated in the U.S. imaginary and asks, how do individuals become racial subjects? She analyzes anti-miscegenation law, statutory definitions of race, and the rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon of racial passing to provide critical accounts of racial categorization and norms, the policing of racial behavior, and the regulation of racial bodies as they are underpinned by demarcations of sexuality, gender, and class. Ehlers places the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler's account of performativity, and theories of race into conversation to show how race is a form of discipline, that race is performative, and that all racial identity can be seen as performative racial passing. She tests these claims through an excavation of the 1925 "racial fraud" case of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and concludes by considering the possibilities for racial agency, extending Foucault's later work on ethics and "technologies of the self" to explore the potential for racial transformation.Author: Ehlers, Nadine Publisher: Indiana University Press Illustration: N Language: ENG Title: Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection Pages: 00200 (Encrypted EPUB) / 00200 (Encrypted PDF) On Sale: 2012-05-18 SKU-13/ISBN: 9780253356567 Lib Category: Race Philosophy Lib Category: United States Race relations Category: Social Science : Ethnic Studies African American Studies Category: Social Science : Discrimination & Racism Category: History : Social History