Transgender studies is inextricably invested in the question of intentionality: is the subject of gender in charge or not? For some, to answer in the negative runs the risk of also negating the “experience of gender identity's profound ontological claim … about the realness and inalienability of that identity” ( Stryker and Whittle 2006: 183). Discourse, language itself, first en-genders the subject as an effect of language's positing power. The subject does not wield the discursive power of the performative. Moreover, this weakened rhetoric of performativity allocates the positing power of the performative (whether speech act or gendering practice) back to an impenetrable, invulnerable, and independent subject that Butler went to psychoanalytic theory and deconstruction precisely to expose - as already pierced, already vulnerable, and already conditioned by a linguistic and therefore rhetorical relation. In a sense, it reduces performativity to performance: that is, it focuses on a single instance of a gendered practice and so forgets the historical chain of repetitions that makes each instance possible. To paraphrase the argument: “Because I choose my gendered practices, I subvert their harmful functions.” 1 This rhetoric of performativity is a much-weakened strain of the one articulated in Gender Trouble and across Butler's subsequent work.
#Judith butler gender performative free#
Yet a rhetoric of performativity has developed that strips it of this theoretical heritage and turns it into a tool for defending the power of the subject, through the conscious presence of agential intention, to intervene in the discourse of gender and so to free that discourse of its injurious potential. Gender Trouble braids speech act theory's insight into the scandalous power of language to posit what it describes together with strands of Lacanian psychoanalysis and poststructuralism that show that this positing power belongs to language, to “discourse” in a Foucauldian register, and precisely not to the authority of the intending subject employing language that Austin started with.
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In a collection of lectures first published in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words, the terms of Austin's classifying system proliferate and repeatedly break down in a demonstration of how even descriptive language's performativity - what it does - calls into question its referentiality - what it seems to point to in the world ( Austin 1975). Austin, names a type of utterance (such as “I do” or “shame on you”) that, by virtue of a felicitous context and relation to authority, accomplishes the action that it also announces ( Austin 1975 Felman 2003 Sedgwick 1993). A performative, in its early usage by speech act theorist J.
In her 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler connected the conceptual category of performativity to the formation of the gendered subject. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,” revolves around a particular keyword or concept.
This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.
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