Doing Things with Performativity

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Originally a contribution to mid-20th century debates in the philosophy of language, the concept of the performative has since been taken up across a wide range of disciplines to theorize everything from gender identity to hate speech, economics to textual interpretation. As an antiessentialist approach to identity construction, performativity marks a shift away from the truth value of language to its social or enactive force. In contemporary political discourses, though, “performative” has frequently come to designate something artificial or strategic, as in charges of performative allyship. In this latter sense, the performative is linked closely to performance, and it is understood in terms of theatricality and an acting agent.

Notwithstanding the wide range of uses to which it has been deployed, this panel returns to J. L. Austin’s performative utterance to examine its political possibilities and limits. It asks: In what ways is the performative a resource for parsing political problems and struggles – and for re-imagining different futures? The panel considers this question by turning to the democratic potentials and re-visions of Austin's performative, including the ways that it has been taken up, extended, challenged, and refashioned by thinkers including Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Jose Esteban Muñoz, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. From gender performativity to racial performativity, Cavell’s passionate utterance to Sedgwick’s periperformative and deformative, the papers in this panel offer a range of approaches to doing things with performativity. What are the world-making and re-making possibilities of performative utterances? In what ways can speech acts move beyond convention to inaugurate new political possibilities? What kinds of performative possibilities do “failed” speech acts hold, and for whom? How do audience responses and/or refusals circumscribe the social force of such utterances? How might theories of performativity be extended at the collective register, moving performative utterances away from a sovereign “I” and toward a (more or less) democratic “we”? Papers by junior and senior scholars consider these questions from across time periods, geographical regions, and methodological approaches. In bringing together these different engagements, the panel explores the ways “performativity” contributes to contemporary theoretical understandings of democratic practice, constraint, and struggle.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Claims-Making as World-Unmaking in Euripides' "Hecuba" - Ani Chen, Cornell University

• Performativity, with Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Hortense Spillers - Bonnie Honig, Brown University

• Passionate Utterances and the LA Riots / Uprising - Stacey Liou, University of Florida

• Postcolonial Performativities - Kevin Olson, University of California, Irvine

Chair

• Elisabeth Robin Anker George Washington University

Discussant

• Cristina Beltran New York University