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ABSTRACT This article explores the insights and limitations within geography of Judith Butler's concept of 'perfomativity'. As a processual, non-foundational approach to identity, many feminist and post-structuralist geographers have incorporated performatity into their work on the intersections between gender, sexuality, ethnicity, space and place. ret few have explicitly undertaken a close and critical reading of Butler's theory. The author argues that performativity ontologically assumes an abstracted subject (ie. abstracted as a subject position in a given discourse) and thus provides no space for theorizing conscious reflexivity, negotiation or ageng in the doing of identity. Butler posits a subject abstracted from persona4 lived experience as well as fiom its historical and geographical embeddedness. Uncritically transcribing this abstracted subject into geography limits how we can conceptualize the linkages between emerging identities, social change and spatially-embedded, intentional human practice. A more thoughtful and nuanced use of performativity would allow geographers to map how concrete subjects (individual or collective) do identity in relation to various discursive processes (eg. those that constitute race, class, sexuality and gender), to other su@jects, and to layers of institutions and practices.
Introduction
This article explores the insights and limitations within geography of the concept of 'performativity'. As a processual, linguistic-oriented understanding of identity, one which disavows assumptions of foundational, pre-discursive moments and the concomitant notion of an autonomous masterful subject, performativity has influenced scholars in cultural studies, political theory, queer theory and gender studies (Butler & Scott, 1992; Campbell, 1992; Parker & Sedgwick, 1995; Nicholson & Seidman, 1995). Interest in performativity was launched by the path-breaking work of Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. In that work Butler excavates the heterosexist and masculinist assumptions embedded within Enlightenment-based and 'post-structural' psychoanalytic approaches to the self, agency and identity. Her analysis finds common foundational assumptions within these seemingly diametric perspectives. Building on this critique, she elaborates a theory of performativity, one that captures the ways in which gender and sexual identifications are continually remade through repetition, or the compelled performance of dominant discourses.
Feminist and post-structuralist geographers increasingly incorporate performativity into their inquiries concerning the intersections of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, space and place (see Bell et aL, 1994; McDowell & Court, 1994; Kirby, 1996; Gibson-Graham, 1996; Rose,...