Judith Butler - Performativity

Performativity is an interdisciplinary term often used to name the capacity of speech and language in particular, as well as other non-verbal forms of expressive action, to perform a type of being. It is a forum, a performative act, a ritual, a social action that is omnipresent and without restriction; it extends socially, beyond constraints of system or structure. It is the construction of identity or position through active expression. The term derives from the work in speech act theory originated by the analytic philosopher J. L. Austin, who did not use the word "performativity," but did give the name performative utterances to situations where saying something was doing something, rather than simply reporting on or describing reality. A "performative utterance," Austin argued in How to Do Things With Words, cannot be said to be either true or false, as a constative utterance might be. It can only be judged either "happy" or "infelicitous" depending upon whether the conditions required for it to succeed have been met. In this sense performativity can be said to investigate the pragmatics of language. Judith Butler, as mentioned above, has done much research and writing on performance theory, and has focused much of this work on gender performativity. Butler sees gender as an act that has been rehearsed, much like a script, and we, as the actors make this script a reality over and over again by performing these actions. “For Butler, the distinction between the personal and the political or between private and public is itself a fiction designed to support an oppressive status quo: our most personal acts are, in fact, continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies.”