Performative language
Kira Hall
Jacob Henry2025, Elsevier International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
This chapter explores the historical concept of performative language and how it has evolved within linguistic anthropological thought up to the modern day. The discussion begins with J. L. Austin's understanding of the performative utterance in the 1960s and traces its conceptual lineage into Judith Butler's understanding of performativity in the 1990s. It then examines how Butler's performativity theory has been taken up by linguistic anthropologists in thinking about performative language, especially scholars of gender, race, and class, largely in conjunction with Silverstein's work on indexicality and indexical performance.
Related papers
Performativity and Language Studies
Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 2004
Drawing analogies with the crisis in understandings of culture that led to the development of cultural studies, I suggest in this article that a similar crisis in the understanding of language may give an important impetus to the development of language studies. Arguing for the need to rethink the notion of language as commonly formulated in linguistics and applied linguistics, I take up the notion of performativity as a way of thinking about language use and identity that avoids foundationalist categories, suggesting that identities are formed in the linguistic performance rather than pregiven. Such a view of language identity also helps us to see how subjectivities are called into being and sedimented over time through regulated language acts. This further provides the ground for considering languages themselves from an antifoundationalist perspective, whereby language use is an act of identity that calls that language into being. And performativity, particularly in its relationship to notions of performance, opens up ways to understand how languages, identities and futures are refashioned.
Non-Western Linguistic Performativity in the Twentieth Century
2017
This text takes a contrastive approach to aspects of linguistic performativity as observed in fieldwork conducted by Michelle Rosaldo and Ruth Finnegan during the twentieth century. This paper was awarded a 1,0 (A+) by the Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften of Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
A performative view of language: Methodological considerations and consequences for the study of culture
Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: …, 2009
Although researchers across the social sciences speak of a linguistic turn, most research exploring culture still assumes a traditional perspective on language, which conceives meaning as representation. Yet, Wittgenstein convincingly criticized the epistemological basis of such a perspective, offering an alternative view on language. The paper begins by explaining the central points of a performative perspective of language: first, words do things; second, the meaning of an utterance is not directly given by the utterance; and third, meaning is in use. The change in perspective has direct consequences for the way we conceptualize and study our research phenomena. The second part of the paper deals with how social phenomena can be re-conceptualized and studied, putting a special emphasis on the phenomenon of culture. Finally, drawing from my own empirical material, the paper describes the consequences for the study culture applying a performative view of language. Methodological considerations of the change in perspective are also discussed.
Expression and the Performative: A Reassessment
Phenomenology as Performative Exercise, 2020
This chapter discusses the relation between performing and expressing. It takes Judith Butler's early critique to philosophies of expression as a point of departure in order to investigate whether (i) every philosophy of expression presupposes a substantial and transparent subject and (ii) expression can or cannot be the source of transformation. A closer discussion of the roots of performative theories in ordinary-language philosophy and in cultural anthropology shows that the inquiry into linguistic and more generally social performatives does not rule out expressiveness. Conversely, a phenomenological discussion of expression, mostly inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, allows us to reject the assumption that expression presupposes a substantial and transparent subject and to shed light on the transformative implications of expression. This comparative investigation is not aimed at neglecting the distinction between performing and expressing, but rather at indicating their complementarity.
Harman, R. & Zhang, X. (2015). Performance, performativity and second language identities: How can we know the actor from the act? Linguistics and Education
Recent arts-based research has explored how instructional use of performance supports participants in embodying and challenging social equity issues. Informed by performativity theories (e.g., Butler, 1999) and a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) perspective on meaning making, this paper investigates how multilingual educators in an arts-based language education course analyzed and negotiated language teacher identities. Specifically, the paper explores if and how a performance process, which included storytelling, performance and discourse analysis, supported the focal participants in developing awareness of interaction as discursive negotiation of institutional, cultural and agentive factors. Two implications for language education and research are discussed: the potential of performance as an instructional resource to support critical discourse awareness among language educators, and the potential of SFL as a resource to research arts-based processes in multicultural education contexts.
The Performative Fixing and Unfixing of Subjectivities
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.
Horanyi, Rita. "Performance and performativity." The Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory. Ed. Anthony Elliott. London: Routledge, 2014.
Performance and performativity have emerged as key concepts in social and cultural theory. The recent rise of the interdisciplinary field of performance studies has shifted our understanding of performance as mere entertainment to performance as ‘a way of creation and being’ (Madison and Hamera 2006: xii, original emphasis). As a result, the concept has expanded to encompass everyday action and interaction, as well as ritual and cultural events beyond the stage, influencing a wide range of academic fields. At the intersection of cultural studies, theatre studies, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, gender studies and psychology, studies of performance and performativity clearly grapple with questions about the complex interrelation between the individual, culture and society.
A “Performative-I” Copresence: Embodying the Ethnographic Turn in Performance and the Performative Turn in Ethnography
Text and Performance Quarterly, 2006
Performativity Identified
Qualitative Inquiry, 2004
Poststructural feminist notions of subjectivity point to a notion of the "self" that is fluid, contradictory, and produced in relationships with others and everyday practices. These social structures and processes that shape subjectivity are situated within discursive fields where language, power relations, and discourses exist, intersect, and construct competing ways of giving meaning to and constructing subjectivity. This article explicates Judith Butler's theory of performativity, an analysis of gender (re)signification that provides a rich engagement with the complex relations that enable the construction of subjectivity. Using data from her own life, the author illuminates how Butler's theory can be used to analyze the ways in which subjectivity is negotiated in social relationships and daily practices. The author concludes that Butler's theory of performativity offers a hopeful theory of subjectivity that provides space for individual agency and collective difference.
Related papers
"It's a Girl!" Bringing Performativity Back to Linguistics
In Anna Livia and Kira Hall (eds.), Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, 1997
Performative Linguistics. Speaking and Translating as Doing Things with Words
Journal of Pragmatics, 2006
Speech Act Theory and the Performative Turn in Cultural Sociology
My talk is structured as follows: After placing the speech act theory and the performative turn in a broader theoretical context, I will systematize different aspects of performativity in Austin’s speech act theory. The influential concept of the performative act has to be introduced and distinguished from the performance of speech acts in general. Further, I will distinguish two types of performative acts, the first type has to be conform to a certain set of constitutive rules, whereas the other type requires an authentic performance. From a sociological perspective I will also question the necessity of Searle’s concept of intentionality and will also argue in favor of the ambiguity and observer-dependence of social meaning. After that I will sketch some dramatological approaches to performance and discuss concepts like role, script and cultural background. In the end I will return to Searle’s concept of the background and its relation to the concept of culture and performance in cultural sociology. A few example will show that the combination of performance and the background may be able to explain interesting cases of institutional and cultural change.
A Performative-Performance Analytical Approach
Qualitative Inquiry, 2013
Judith Butler’s theory of performativity provides gender theorists with a rich theoretical language for thinking about gender. Despite this, Butlerian theory is difficult to apply, as Butler does not provide guidance on actual analysis of language use in context. In order to address this limitation, we suggest carefully supplementing performativity with the notion of performance in a manner that allows for the inclusion of relational specificities and the mechanisms through which gender, and gender trouble, occur. To do this, we turn to current developments within discursive psychology and narrative theory. We extend the narrative-discursive method proposed by Taylor and colleagues, infusing it with Butlerian theory in order to fashion a dual analytical lens, which we call the performativity-performance approach. We provide a brief example of how the proposed analytical process may be implemented.
Performance and Performativity in Social Research: On Jeffrey Alexander and Judith Butler
Rhetorical man is an actor; his reality public, dramatic. His sense of identity, his self, depends on the reassurance of daily histrionic reenactment. He is thus centered in time and concrete local event. The lowest common denominator of his life is a social situation. [...] He assumes a natural agility in changing orientations. He hits the streets already street--wise. (Lanham 1976: 2) The importance of the concepts of "performativity" and "performance" inheres in their ability to proffer new and constructive visions of social order, conduct and relations. In this essay, I wish to critically interrogate how the figure and metaphor of the "performative", which originated from within the humanities (in disciplines as diverse as Drama and Theatre Studies, Dance, Music, and Art), has been increasingly taken up in the social sciences, especially as a conceptual and/or organizational frame through which social phenomena and human experiences are understood and described. While the performativity of social life has, in recent years, been given due attention by a plethora of scholars, 1 I hope to focus on how two contemporary social theorists in particular --Judith Butler and Jeffrey Alexander -- have presented different (but also, in some instances, overlapping) frameworks for bridging the performance--sociality divide, foregrounding very specific congruences between performativity, on the one hand, and context, communication, and social interaction, on the other. First and foremost (dedicating most of my essay to this enterprise), I will examine how performance, in Butler's and Alexander's work, is presented as a useful metaphorical construct in the service of understanding human sociality and 1 1 Prominent scholars who have dealt with the relation between "performance" and sociality include (but are not limited to) Victor Turner (performance, ritual, and social conflict), Erving Goffman (performative dimensions of self-presentation and identity management), Richard Schechner (artistic performance as extended to other domains, e.g. politics, cultural ceremonies)
Language as a Performative Speech
Language is a performative speech act that naturally takes place in the forms of life. Language teaching in India is mostly centered on language forms (learning the structural understanding of language). Against the backdrop, this paper addresses the core issues of language teaching which have definite reflection on the material development as well as the transaction methodology so as to achieve the desired outcome. Researchers in ELT in other Asian countries have realized the importance of performance based language teaching. It is also observed in the present study that belief system (core and peripheral) shapes the communicative action in a social setting.
Performative speech acts, ethnography and fiction
Journal of Pragmatics, 2007
Zora Neale Hurston was the most prominent woman in the Harlem Renaissance. “As an ethnographer and writer, she … is now considered one of the defining authors of the African American literary tradition” (Robinson, 2005:272). Following the suggestion of Hill (1996) and of Plant (1995), this essay links Hurston's ethnography and fiction with a discussion of performative speech acts. In particular, Hurston's work is linked to a conventionalist/intentionalist debate about how illocutionary speech acts should be interpreted.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.