Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:13:45.350Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Limits of Performativity: A Critique of Hegemony in Gender Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Dennis Schep
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Recently, Judith Butler refused to accept an award for civil courage at the Berlin Christopher Street Day, because she felt the event had become too commercial, and the event's organization had failed to distance itself from certain discriminatory statements. This, as well as many of her works, suggests that more than any other contemporary feminist author, Butler is aware of the risk of implication in exclusionary politics; a risk she might therefore successfully avoid. However, in this essay I argue that to the extent her theory of performativity has become a hegemonic framework within the field of gender studies, it leads to the foreclosure of certain possible gendered identities. Using Nancy's notion of finite thinking, I argue that a different approach to universality may lead to a less exclusionary way of conceptualizing gender.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , Fall 2012 , pp. 864 - 880
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Butler, Judith. 1990/2007. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith, and Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri. 2007. Who sings the nation‐state?: Language, politics, belonging. London: Seagull Books.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith, Laclau, Ernesto, and Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. Contingency, hegemony, universality: Contemporary dialogues on the left. New York: Verso Books.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986/1988. Foucault. Trans. Hand, Seán. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1966/2001. The order of things: Archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1997/2003. “Society must be defended.” Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. New York: Picador.Google Scholar
Nancy, Jean‐Luc. 1990/2003. A finite thinking. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Nancy, Jean‐Luc. 1993/1997. The sense of the world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Nancy, Jean‐Luc. 1996/2000. Being singular plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Ronell, Avital. 2007. The Überreader: Selected works of Avital Ronell. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, N.C., London: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar