Performativity free essay sample

In this paper everyday performativity will be used in differentiating it from mere performance and establish what role it play in interpellating us as raced, gendered, classed, ethicized and national subjects. To understand Performativity, there is a need to distinguish it with performance which is the term it is mostly confused with because of the thin line difference they have and the repetitive attribute they share in common. On one hand, performances mark identity, bend and remake time and provide people with behavior that is twice-behaved, not for the first time, rehearsed, cooked and prepared (Schechner 1985:564). On the other hand performativity being a term first used by a philosopher named J. L. Austin in 1955 was meant to describe using words to actually accomplish actions. Today a wide range of actions, behaviors and events are thought of as performative. These range from performative writing to various kinds of role playing in everyday to personal identity itself, especially gendered identity (Schechner 1985:565). We will write a custom essay sample on Performativity or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page To simplify performance and performmativity differences is to explain them by example. For example, football is a performance and no one can confuse it with tennis because the characteristics of each performance genre are conventional and have different rules they follow. On the other hand the terms that deal with the performative performance in everyday life and identity constructions are as rule bound as sports, but often less consciously so like gender of an individual which changes from time to time. With Performative terms like gender, race, ethinicity, class and national subject, it used to be that a person is who she is assigned a role y birth, tradition, education or training but for quite some time and especially in so called postmodern societies, people have been able to shift roles both in the long term by means of sexual orientation choices, various kinds of surgery, cosmetic and more and in the short-term by means of dress, makeup, jewelry; selection of friends, social miliens (Schechner 1985:567) and in this case we can say that the growing acceptance of the performative as a category of theory as well as a fact of behavior has made it more and more difficult, and inadvisable to assign truth to the realm of life and worse to the realm of theatre. Firstly in exploring on the role everyday performativity play in interpellating us as raced, it must be noted that race has its sub activities or set of behaviors that follows it for one to be of a particular race. Race is understood to be beyond the visual and into the performative. Race refers to ones genetic make-up and somatic properties. According to Gates, it is important to remember that race is only a sociopolitical category nothing more (1992:37-38). In addition to that to talk in terms of racializing norms is indeed to suggest that race, like gender, sex and sexuality is constructed rather than natural, assumed in response to the interpellative call of discourse and the law (Butler 1999:164). It must also be noted that racial common sense informs an epistemology of race that associates certain racial categories with certain stereo typical qualities and creates a regime of truth that informs social interaction (Hanchard 1999:164). What becomes evident is that race is devoid of ontological security and is instead performatively constituted: race (the designation and enunciation of racial status as black or white) operates as a performative speech act in order to produce that which it names (Butler 1993:23). Looking at Malawian situation in terms of race, it can be noted that people assign a black race to a white person when he or she have some attribute they considered to be played by a black person. For instance, when a white person is poor people refer to that person as black as them because they attribute richness to white people. Another example is that when a black person is eating well, has worth and speaks good English, people consider that person to be white (ndiazungutu amene aja) and with that it clearly show that race is performative and no one is born white or black but like the speech act, the society voice assigns blackness or whiteness to individual basing on the role an individual subject plays. On the issue of gender, everyday performativity has played some roles in interpellating us as gender. There has been a great deal of research over the last few decades on how transgender and other-gendered individuals trouble or problematize the normative culture of gender. Those researchers and others have documented the dominant cultural ideology of gender as a binary, in which there is always one or two choices in terms of an individual’s gender-choice comprises of feminine and masculine, woman or man, or some other similar binary combination that denotes an expected action, display, or performance associated with a biologically sexed body (Goffman 1977:281). This culture of gender in which gendered bodies exist as a binary is also often linked with heterosexuality as being the dominant driving ideology and strategy for the continuation of gender norms (Butler 1993:283). In addition language, as a tool of dominant culture, medical rhetoric, and the biological sciences, is also cited as perpetuating the binary ideal of gender (Bloch Lemish 2005:154). Because these binary choices in gender are explicitly tied to the sex of an individual, those individual expressions or performances of gender that are non-normative or deviant from cultural gender expectations for a particular sex can be particularly problematizing for the dominant culture of gender. When an individual’s performance of gender is incongruent with cultural expectations considering their sexed body, there is a direct challenge to gender norms through their performance. Gender norms, how we communicate our gender identity, and how we communicate from a situated moment of gender identification touch upon issues of agency, representation, epistemology, power and performance (Butler, 1990:74). Butler suggests that gender identity is necessarily prior to any other identity and that persons only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility (1990:22). She suggests that identity is a social phenomenon in which gender plays a primary shaping role as a dictate of cultural understanding of a person as such. To be understood as a person means that there is a social recognition of gendered person and that the gender must also be socially recognizable. However, Butler’s argument is not that we are non-persons prior to gender identity but that a discourse about identity or about a person cannot occur prior to or separate from a gendered identity. At the same time, Ehrensaft has shown that from birth to infancy, and up until at least their first year, a person does not have the capacity to either understand gender or to even begin to have a gender identity. Yet, infants are intelligible and are gendered. The agency of the newborn and the infant is with the parents or caretakers who, after the assignment of sex (however arbitrarily a sex is or can be assigned), can choose to begin to attribute gender. Gender is often assigned as a correlate to an infant’s assigned sex, with all males assigned as boys and all females assigned as girls. As an infant beginning a gendered existence in a culture, the power and agency to begin the gendering process is with another. We do not begin our lives as gendered beings with any agency or power-only with (an arguably questionable) biology (2009:14). For example it is when children are growing when they are taught to live there sex, girls are taught how to seat like a girl with legs closed and boys are encourage to be strong and advised that men do not cry and this is not signed at birth. On the issue of class, everyday performativity has also a role to play. It must be noted that even ordinary people doing ordinary things wear uniforms/ costumes, behave according to strict rules appropriate to their life roles as teachers, nurse, police, waiter, judge, student, parent, lover and so on. Naturally during a single day, a person may perform many different life roles, each following a careful scenario, each making performative demands. For instance, when a person is classed it means he follow the combination of rule that he/she has accumulated through his life time. A person is not born classed but the society and the environment in which he/she has been accustomed shape a particular individual. Starting from the house he/she were raised people accumulating many ideas on how they should live there class. For example depending on different levels of classes, other people mostly men like of my kind we were raised with the mentality that washing dishes, cooking and looking after the kinds is assigned to girls. With that mentality in mind and with other ideas we learn at school, we become to be given a specific class than others. This is to say that, the different environments that men are brought up in determine their class in the society. As on the role everyday performativity play in interpellating ethnicized, it must be put in mind that race and ethnicity are different. Ethnicity refers more to one’s behavior in relation to a larger group of which the individual claims to belong. According to Martin and Nakayama, ethnic identity pertains to the feelings one has about belonging to a particular group. Ethnicity typically includes several dimensions: self-identification, knowledge about the ethnic culture (traditions, customs, values, and behaviors), and feelings about belonging to a particular ethnic group (2000:122). Jandt also emphasizes that ethnicity, in addition to one’s perceived identification with a group, is dependent upon one’s acceptance into a group as well (2001:44). What must be noted is that ethnicity is something that you must learn and be accepted into. Thus, and individual may be racially be white, but his or her ethnicity being Ngoni, or a black person but his/ her ethnicity may be a Jewish or Latina. This is to say that ethnicity is performative since everyday activities are what constitute an identity of an individual and not something an individual subject is born with. Lastly on the role everyday performativity play in interpellating us as national subjects is that, as citizen, we are obliged to follow the roles of the state. This identity of being a national subject is assigned mostly at birth where in most of the countries people are considered to be citizens because they were born in that particular country, but this national subject can change with time in that one can become a citizen of another country because he has stayed in that other country for a long time. This is to say that national subject is not static, but rather prone to change as a performative attribute. As a national subject an individual is given and identity by the flag of the country, the national anthem and by belonging to a particular geographical location or within a map. This issue of maps in other circumstances becomes problematic because one can move into another country without becoming a citizen of that country. On the same note, sometimes it is difficult to know the citizens of some people particularly those who live in the boundaries of countries. For example people who stay in the boundaries of Malawi and Mozambique at Ntcheu can give an individual no clue on whether they are national subjects of Malawi or Mozambique, but the society is what mostly determines the national subject of an individual. On the overall note, it must be noted that the roles assigned to us by the society can be subverted. Taking an example of Malawi, in the past most women were not allowed to go to school but now women are going to school and nowadays the number of women going to college has increased. In the past women were not allowed to do technical works, but now in university women are now enrolled to do such kind of education and work. The other example is that in the past nursing was for women but now men are doing it too. Those examples show that what the society assigned can be subverted. In conclusion, performativity had a large role in interpellating us as raced, gendered, ethicized and as national subjects because of its nature of being less bound by rules that makes it more difficult to identify individual subjects at birth. This is the case since in the post modern societies people are able to shift roles both in the long term by means of sexual orientation choices, various kinds of surgery, cosmetics and more and in the short-term by means of dress, makeup, jewelry, selection of friends, social miliens and many more and at the end makes performance difference from performativity in everyday life. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bloch, Linda- Renee and Lemish Dafna. I know I’m a Freierit, but†¦:How a Key Cultural Frame (en) Gender a Discoourse of Inequality. Journal of communication, 2005. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge Classics,1990. Print Butler, Judith. On Speeech, Race and Melancholia: An Interview with Judith Butler. 1999. Print. Ehrensaft, Diane. One Pill Makes you Boy, One Pill Makes you Girl. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 2009. Print Felman, Shoshana. The Scandal of the Speaking Body. Stanford: Stanford University Press,1980. Print. Gates, Henry. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. print. Goffman, Erving. The arrangement Between the Sexes. Theory and Society. Retrieved from http://www. jstor. org. rwlib. neiu. edu:7 January,2013 9:34 AM. Hanchard, Michael. Black Cinderella? Race and the Public Sphere in Brazil: In Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Print. Jandt, Felix. Intercultural Communication: An Introduction (Third ed. ). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc, 2001. Martin, Judith and Nakayama, Thomas. Intercultural Communication in Contexts. Toronto: Mayfield Publishing Company, 2004. Print. Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania press, 1985. Print.