Agonistic performativity, the exercise of freedom and the politics of gender

null, Fiona Jenkins (Australian National University)

Judith Butler’s claim that ‘gender is performative’ is generally simplified into the assertion that gender is ‘a doing not a being’, together with the implication that once gender is understood as merely instituted ‘through a stylized repetition of acts’, the task becomes to undo or subvert it.

This paper attempts a new approach, by reading the assertion of the performativity of gender in terms of an agonistic contest among the politically consequential and competing ways in which the performative itself might be interpreted. Throughout Butler’s work, though more explicitly in recent writings, gender performativity signals the political potential of ‘a provisional and plural coexistence’; but it opens that space ‘between us’ only by actively contesting another mode of enactment of performativity, one that involves the re-tethering of performative powers to the agential figure of a sovereign subject.

Here I consider, first, how shifting focus toward this contest over the mapping of social and political power reframes Butler’s claims regarding the performativity of gender, and second, how competing versions or enactments of performativity are at stake in some fraught aspects of gender politics today.