Lise Nelson Bodies and Spaces Do Matter The Limits of Performativity

Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp.
331–353, 1999
Bodies (and Spaces) do Matter: the limits of performativity
LISE NELSON, D epartment of Geography, U niversity of W ashington, U SA
ABSTRACT This article explores the insights and limitations within geography of Judith Butler’s
Downloaded by [Universidad Nacional Colombia] at 10:07 17 March 2012
concept of ‘performativity’. As a processual, non-foundational approach to identity, many feminist and

post-structuralist geographers have incorporated performativity into their work on the intersections between
gender, sexuality, ethnicity, space and place. Yet few have explicitly undertaken a close and critical reading
of Butler’s theory. The author argues that performativity ontologically assumes an abstracted subject (i.e.
abstracted as a subject position in a given discou rse) and thus provides no space for theorizing consciou s
re exivity, negotiation or agency in the doing of identity. Butler posits a subject abstracted from person al,
lived experience as well as from its historical and geographical embeddedness. U ncritically transcribing
this abstracted subject into geography limits how we can conceptualize the linkages between emerging
identities, social change and spatially-embedded, intention al 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 (e.g. those that constitu te race, class,
sexuality and gender), to other subjects, 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 concom itant
notion of an autonomous masterful subject, performativity has in uenced 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
nds 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 identi cations 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, 1997). I will argue, however, that most geographers have read and deployed
performativity uncritically, in ways that both foreclose an interrogation of its more
Correspondence: Lise Nelson, Department of Geography, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA; e-mail
k lise@u.washington.edu l .
ISSN 0966-369X Print; 1360-0524 Online/99/040331-23 Ó 1999 Taylor & Francis Ltd 331
332 L. Nelson
problematic aspects and constrain their own analyses. In other words, many geographers
enthusiastically use the language of performativity without regard to its limitations.
Moreover, by not reading performativity critically, they inject an undertheorized and
often problematic notion of agency into their work. As I will elaborate later, performa-
tivity ontologically assumes an abstracted subject (i.e. abstracted as a subject position in a
given discourse) and thus provides no space for conscious re exivity, negotiation or
agency in the doing of identity. This point is crucial for geographers because spatially
embedded, intentional human practice often lies at the center of our inquiries into
identity and space [1].
In light of the recent turn towards notions of performativity in geography, my purpose
in this article is threefold. First, I will explore Butler’s theorization of performativity,
particularly as it relates to questions of subjectivity, agency and social change. I argue
that while Butler’s approach to identity provides critical insights into how discourses
function to constitute ‘the subject’, she deconstructs agency without presenting a
constructive alternative to humanist versions of this concept. Her focused drive to
annihilate the Enlightenment’s masterful, autonomous subject overrides any commitment
to retheorizing subjectivity and agency in post-Enlightenment, post-structural terms.
Paradoxically, this omission allows the masterful subject to haunt her work, an issue that
I will elaborate in subsequent sections. Brie y, in accepting Enlightenment perspectives
as the only way to think about the notion of ‘agency’, Butler problematically jettisons
agency altogether. This causes performativity to remain narrowly focused on sub-
jecti cation , a privileging of the moment (even if it is repeated over and over) in which
discourse encloses or subjugates a person’s identity. In reducing complicated negotiations
of identity by concrete subjects to a frozen moment of subjugation by discourse, Butler
posits, in the words of Paul Smith (1988), an abstracted subject—one abstracted from
personal, lived history as well as from its historical and geographical embeddedness.
Without critical reworking, Butler’s notion of performativity actually undermines at-
tempts to imagine a historically and geographically concrete subject that is constituted by
dominant discourses, but is potentially able to re ect upon and actively negotiate,
appropriate or resist them.
Second, in light of this critical reading, I examine how performativity has been
deployed within geography, particularly within key articles by David Bell et al. (1994), a
response to that article by Lisa Walker (1995), and within a piece by Linda McDowell
& Gill Court (1994). Although the two articles ‘All hyped up …’ (Bell et al., 1994) and
‘Performing work …’ (McDowell & Court, 1994) speak to very different subdisciplines,
each uses Butler as their central theoretical approach, making them ideal for tracing the
logic of performativity. While they embrace the more insightful dimensions of Butler’s
work, these geographers overlook the problematic aspects of her theory. Their relatively
uncritical use of performativity limits their ability to connect discursive change with
thinking/speaking subjects located in time and space, a connection they themselves
propose as central to their analyses.
Third, I will conclude by exploring how we might begin to concep tualize a situated
subject, one constituted by discursive processes yet not reducible to them. I will draw in
particular on the work of Paul Smith (1988), who seeks to discern ‘the subject’ within
literary theory and cultural studies. Smith’s work provides a springboard from which to
think about critically translating textual theories such as performativity into geography.
Key to this translation is recognizing that inquiry locatin g (and located in ) space–time ows
demands a substantially different ontology of the subject than the abstracted one assumed
in textual approaches. I suggest a way to theorize a concrete, situated subject by
Performativity in Geography 333
examining recent efforts by some feminist geographers to think through eldwork theory
and practice (see a special issue of Professional Geographer, 1994). Their nuanced approach
to subjectivity and eldwork demonstrates that in order to adequately analyze social
processes located in time and space—e.g. how a researcher goes about doing interviews,
observing, and analyzing given particular assumptions about the nature of knowledge
and subjectivity—it is essential to theorize a speaking, potentially re exive subject. Such
a subject is discursively constituted but capable of negotiating discursive contradictions
over life course, a personal history itself embedded in particular historical and geograph-
ical processes, including inter-subjective interactions. Without such an understanding of
subjectivity, we cannot comprehend either our own position as knowledge producers or
the nature of spatial–temporal change.
Geographers who draw upon performativity in their writings could contribute more
effectively to debates about space and processes of identi cation if they engaged closely
and critically with the intricacies of Butler’s theoretical work on performativity. Such a
strategy is not only relevant to those, such as Bell et al. (1994) and McDowell & Court
(1994), who place it at the center of their work, but to a larger number of geographers
who frequently and casually draw upon the language of performativity to describe the
ways in which hegemonic discourses inscribe gendered, sexualized and nationalist
identities (see Gibson-Graham, 1996; Kirby, 1996; Sharp, 1996; Rose, 1997). My
critique of Butler aims to generate critical re ection among those geographers who draw
on the vocabulary of performativity without addressing its theoretical baggage, particu-
larly in regard to assumptions in Butler’s work concerning subjectivity, agency and
change. I hope to open up a discussion of how to think about identity as an iterative,
non-foundational process in relation to intentional human practice, concepts central to
much of geographic inquiry.
Before turning to the three main points of this article outlined above, the following
section will brie y situate geographers’ use of performativity within broader epistemolog-
ical and theoretical debates within the discipline—debates in which ‘the subject’ has been
of central concern.
T he C ontested Status of ‘the Subject’ w ithin G eography

Perspectives on ‘the subject’ and its relation to spatial–temporal processes have been at
the heart of contentious theoretical debates in geography for the past three decades, if
not longer. Contests over ‘the subject’ embedded within geographical analysis relate
directly to crucial ontological, epistemological and methodological differences between
particular schools of thought within the discipline. For example, the nature of ‘the
subject’ lay at the heart of growing interest in humanist perspectives among anglophone
geographers in the 1970s. These geographers reacted against the mechanistic and
positivist approaches of spatial science and quantitative geography, and sought to value
essential human subjectivity and experience (see Tuan, 1977; Ley & Samuels, 1978).
Humanists also launched an important critique against structural Marxists, who view
human subjects as loci within relations of production, a conceptualization that seems to
deny anything but a teleological agency. But, by the mid-1980s humanists themselves
had come under scrutiny by geographers engaged with structuration theory, post-
structural perspectives and feminist approaches, theorists who argued that humanism
relied on a transparent, masterful (autonomous) and implicitly masculine subject (Rose,
1993; Gregory, 1994).
334 L. Nelson
Structuration theory, particularly as elaborated by sociologist Anthony Giddens (1976,

1979), in uenced geographers interested in theorizing the relationship between knowl-
edgeable human agents and social structures (Gregory, 1981; Thrift, 1983). Structuration
theorists rejected the autonomous subject of humanism, but similarly critiqued structural-
ist (particularly Marxist) perspectives that failed to recognize that social structures are
both medium and outcome of social practices by knowledgeable agents. Structuration
theory in geography sought to examine concrete interactions in time and space,
particularly the spatially constituted institutions and practices that mediate the relation-
ship between determining structures and individual agency (Gregory & Urry, 1985). As
pointed out by Richard Peet (1998), Giddens’s work on structuration ‘involves a
speci cally re exive form of human knowledgeability, “re exivity” being understood not
merely as “self-consciousness” but as the mental monitoring of the ow of social life’ (p.
154). Thus, ‘the subject’ within structuration theory represented a negotiation between
the hopelessly determined subject of structural Marxism and the volunteerism of
humanist perspectives.
Despite structuration theory’s advances toward thinking about a socially-constituted
yet knowledgeable subject, post-structural and feminist theorists over time questioned the
degree to which structuration assumed the same view of knowledge and ‘the subject’ as
structuralist perspectives. As noted by Derek Gregory (1994), for Anthony Giddens class
remained the central analytical category, and thus most structurationists theorized
subjective identity as stemming primarily from relations of production. Feminist sociolo-
gist Ann Game (1991) pointed out that structuration held on to notions of rational action
(and thus a uni ed, transparent subject) as well as the scienti c, detached observer
searching for a whole, systematic truth. Feminist geographers similarly criticized structu-
ration’s implicitly disembodied, unsituated masculine subject as well as its masculinized,
detached form of theorizing (Rose, 1993, p. 29). In short, authors drawing on structura-
tion often adopted the same assumptions concerning knowledge, truth and the nature of
‘the subject’ as the structuralist perspectives they sought to critique.
The critique of structuration by feminist geographers in particular re ected shifts
within feminist theory more broadly in the late 1980s–1990s, shifts that while focused on
epistemology and the politics of knowledge production, spoke directly to questions of
subjectivity and identity. I think it is helpful to brie y situate these discussions in
geography within broader feminist theoretical debates. In short, feminists began not only
to look outward with a critique of masculinist epistemologies, such as those at the heart
of structuration theory, but they also turned inward, questioning ‘the subject’ constructed
within feminist theory.
Two related intellectual debates provided the impetus for critical re ection on ‘the
subject’ of feminist thinking. First, women of color and Third World women feminists
critiqued ‘the subject’ implicit within most feminist thought at the time, a subject that
normalized the experience of white, middle-class, rst world women (hooks, 1984; Trinh,
1989). This critique stimulated greater interest in the multiplicity of oppression and
fractured the notion of ‘woman’ and her experience(s). Second, a growing interest in
post-structural psychoanalytical perspectives (e.g. those of Lacan and Derrida), as well as
Foucault’s notion of power/discourse, also profoundly affected feminist theory [2].
Feminists appreciated post-structural attempts to deploy an anti-essentialist world-view,
reject totalizing ‘grand’ theory, and embrace multiplicity, difference and the ‘decentered’
subject (Sarup, 1988). Furthermore, feminists within and outside of geography drew on
the linguistic turn dominant within post-structural thought, one which emphasized how
language constitutes social reality. For post-structural feminists, subjectivity and identity
are largely understood as produced through discursive, power-laden processes (de

Lauretis, 1986; Nicholson, 1989).
As part of this epistemological shift within feminist theory, many geographers ques-
tioned a feminist tradition within the discipline based on simply bringing women into
(usually Marxist) geographical analysis. This ‘add woman and stir’ approach to geo-
graphic theory and methodology neglected the status of knowledge as well as the
problematic construction of a uni ed ‘woman’ subject. Moreover, assuming an essential
identity of ‘woman’ precluded understanding how various oppressions, such as ethnicity
and sexuality, intersect with gender and space. Over time, this re exive critique spawned
a variety of empirical and theoretical approaches within feminist geography, which
despite their diversity, commonly invoke epistemological and ontological critiques of
masculinist knowledge production and engage questions of discourse, multiplicity and
identity (Christopherson, 1989; McDowell, 1992; Rose, 1993; Massey, 1994; Duncan,
1996).
In light of traditions in geography that highlight meaning and identity, it is unsurpris-
ing that many geographers have found performativity enabling, particularly as a
linguistic and psychoanalytic based theory of subject formation. In a Gender, Place and
Culture article David Bell, Jon Binnie, Julia Cream & Gill Valentine (1994), for example,
argue that theorizing sexuality and gender as performative can transform static, pre-dis-
cursive notions of space and place. By drawing on Butler’s theory of performativity, they
enhanced the theoretical scope of queer theory in geography and contributed new
understandings of sexuality, place, space and identity. While their article sparked a
heated debate among geographers and non-geographers concerning their interpretation
of Butler as well as drag itself [3], their exploration of performativity and space raised
important questions for future inquiry within the discipline. In subsequent sections I will
explore their article in depth as an example of how performativity has been translated
into geography.
Performativity as an organizing theoretical construct has also been taken up within the
econom ic geography sub eld. With their article ‘Performing work: bodily representations
in merchant banks’, Linda McDowell & Gill Court (1994) examine the performance of
gendered identities within the nance industry, arguing that the gures of the ‘prince’
and the ‘princess’, as gendered bodily performances, became scripted in the shift towards
a globalized nance industry. McDowell & Court raised new awareness within the
sub eld, one that frequently and unproblematically deploys the categories found within
liberal econom ic analysis—most importantly the singular, interest-bearing subject coded
white and male. As I will argue later, their article highlights how subjectivity and identity
fundamentally affect the nature and outcome of econom ic change, in this instance
industrial restructuring.
Finally, Butler’s notion of performativity strongly in uenced the geographers who
contributed to Nancy Duncan’s collection, BodySpace (1996), an important anthology of
contemporary feminist thinking in geography. Duncan introduces the volume by dis-
cussing feminist perspectives on epistemology, particularly approaches to ‘the subject’
and object of feminist research. She draws explicitly on Butler as she frames the
contributions to the volume: ‘the authors of the essays in this book show in various ways
how such performances and contests around power relations take place in lived space’
(1996, p. 5). Unsurprisingly, various contributors to BodySpace routinely invoke the
language of performativity. Kathleen Kirby (1996), for example, examines the subject
and spatial politics embedded in Cartesian maps, asking ‘what kind of space, what kind
of subject, does mapping (per)form?’ (p. 46). Joanne Sharp (1996) argues that the
336 L. Nelson
intertwining of gender and nationhood can be viewed as a repeated performance of

norms that take on a ‘natural’ presence (p. 98). Despite the frequent recourse to Butler’s
work and the language of performativity, none of the contributors to BodySpace under-
takes a critical look at it. Such a critique, however, is essential to Duncan’s original
proposal to explore how performances take place in lived spaces and to distinguish
between identity as performance or contestation.
In sum, Judith Butler’s elaboration of performativity contributes to theorizing pro-
cesses of subjecti cation—that is, the processes by which subjects are compelled through
structures of meaning to participate in reproducing dominant discourses of identity (e.g.
gender and sexuality)—across a range of geographic sub elds. Yet as I will elaborate in
the following section, her preoccupation with this moment of subjecti cation, in which
a concrete subject is ‘subjugated’ by discourse—and her determination to deconstruct the
notion of a uni ed, autonomous subject—causes her to foreclose theorizing the interre-
lated issues of social change, resistance and the historical/geographical embeddedness of
identity performance. Butler sets up a dichotom y between the subject as node in the
discursive matrix (an uncomplicated product of hegemonic discourses) against a notion
of subjectivity as transparent and whole (outside of discursive processes). Thus any notion
of agency or intentionality within human subjects draws immediate suspicion.
Geographers who draw on the language of performativity often do not explicitly
address this dichotom y—the opposition Butler sets up between a pre-discursively consti-
tuted, autonomous subject and an unthinking/abstracted subject that necessarily repeats
dominant discourses. In doing so, geographers narrow their capacity to examine
resistance/negotiation and change within particular historical and geographical situa-
tions. Moreover, intentionally or unintentionally transcribing this dichotom y into geo-
graphic theory can also have a disturbing effect on academic politics. In the nal section
of the article I will touch on how assuming a binary opposition between the autonomous
subject and the subject as abstracted performer of dominant discourse has contributed to
a policing of ‘the subject’ within feminist geography. Brie y, those attempting to think
through a situated but knowing/speaking subject (see Nast, 1994; Staeheli & Lawson,
1994) are often roundly criticized for ‘falling into the liberal humanist trap’ (see Rose,
1997). Why are notions of intentionality/re exivity/purposeful action immediately sus-
pect and otherized as capitulating to the transparent, masterful subject? In my view this
type of politics stems from an unproblematized adoption of the abstracted subject
common to post-structural textual and linguistic theories such as performativity, which
con ate human beings with subject positions available within particular discourse(s).
P erform ativity : rethinking identity and ‘the politica l’

In Gender Trouble (1990) Judith Butler dramatically retheorizes identity as well as the limits
and potentials of the political [4]. Butler deconstructs ‘the subject’ through powerful
critiques of the heteronormativity of psychoanalytical theories, including those of Freud
and Lacan, as well as feminist perspectives that essentialize ‘woman’ and perpetuate a
gender/sex dichotom y. Her analysis broadens our understanding of the political by
opening up naturalized assumptions about gender and sexuality to interrogation and
(political) contestation. Moreover, this deconstruction, which I will elaborate later, forms
the basis for her argument against notions of a pre-discursive moment, or the idea of a
self ‘outside’ of power/discourse matrices. While such a critique is most easily leveled
against Enlightenment thought (e.g. liberal feminist thought), and its assumptions of an
autonomous, masterful subject, Butler brilliantly reveals the masculinist and heterosexist
assumptions (pre-discursive foundations) within popular post-structural psychoanalytic
perspectives. In excavating these naturalized assumptions, she opens them up to
contestation, and thus broadens the realm of the political.
Butler (1990) draws upon Foucauldian understandings of how juridical forms of power
produce the subjects that they subsequently come to represent, in a manner that disavows
their productive role. Analyses that take these juridical foundations as given, such as the
matrix of heterosexual desire, naturalize these exclusions and render them outside the
realm of the political and into the realm of the ‘natural’ and pre-discursive (p. 2). Thus,
feminists who claim an essential female identity, and use this to promote a single feminist
political agenda that speaks for all women, reinscribe exclusionary dichotom ies. Invoking
a universal female identity reinstates binary understandings of gender as well as
heterosexuality because ‘woman’ does not exist outside of masculinist discourses, which
always construct ‘woman’ as a homogeneous other category [5]. She calls for a feminist
politics focusing on representational and epistemological issues. In her own words, Butler
(1990) encourages ‘a new sort of feminist politics … to contest the very rei cation of
gender and identity, ones that will take the variable construction of identity as both a
methodological and normative prerequisite, if not a political goal’ (p. 5). Thus, for Butler,
genealogy—the critical examination and disruption of the capillaries of knowledge/
power production—must be foregrounded within feminist scholarship and politics.
Along similar lines, Butler questions feminist approaches that distinguish between sex
and gender (between material/biological bodies and gender ideologies), because they fail
to recognize how a binary male/female of sexed bodies is produced through discourses of
gender. To imply that sex (biological male/female) lies ‘outside’ of gendered discourses
once again inscribes as ‘natural’ a gendered, heterosexualized duality, one theorized as
part of a pre-discursive moment. Instead, Butler advocates theorizing gender and
sexuality (any ‘identity’) as performative, which she de nes in her later work, Bodies that
M atter (1993), as ‘a speci c modality of power as discourse’ (p. 187). In other words, the
concept of performativity recognizes that ‘the subject’ is constitu ted through matrices of
power/discourse, matrices that are continually reproduced through processes of re-
signi cation, or repetition of hegemonic gendered (racialized, sexualized) discourses.
Understanding what this means may become clearer as I trace Butler’s critique of
postmodern psychoanalytic theory. At this point it is important to highlight that Butler
profoundly challenges traditional notions of human identity, moving away from treating
identity as a natural attribute to recognizing that there is no foundational moment in the
doing of identity. Subjects continually perform identities that are prescribed by hege-
monic discourses.
Butler also insightfully critiques heterosexist assumptions embedded within psychoana-
lytic theory. In Gender Trouble she shows that despite their rejection of the Enlightenment’s
masterful humanist subject, Freud and Lacan presume heterosexuality as a pre-discursive
norm. In reference to Freud’s theorization of the Oedipal complex, she writes, ‘to what
extent do we read the desire for the father as evidence of a feminine disposition only
because we begin, despite the postulation of primary bisexuality, with a heterosexual
matrix for desire?’ (1990, p. 60). Thus, Freud’s position that the female infant desires the
father stems from a presumption about sexuality, namely that heterosexual desire is the
norm. This assumption naturalizes heterosexuality within Freud’s psychoanalytic theory,
obscuring it from critical analysis and contestation. Butler also questions Lacan’s
designation that, ‘as observation shows’, female homosexuality results from a disap-
pointed heterosexuality. To arrive at such a conclusion, Lacan must presuppose a
338 L. Nelson
masculine and heterosexual ‘norm’: ‘lesbian sexuality [must] be a refusal of sexuality per
se only because sexuality is presumed to be heterosexual’ (p. 49). In this way, Butler
excavates implicit discursive/political assumptions embedded within sites designated
pre -discursive, or ‘natural’, by these respective theorists.
By developing a genealogy of foundational premises within feminist and psychoana-
lytic theory, Butler opens up the realm of the political. She demonstrates how naturaliz-
ing, essentializing discourses, whether feminist, humanist or ‘post-structural’
psychoanalytic, themselves create political exclusions and unexamined pre-discursive
moments. In particular, Butler elucidates how these implicit assumptions function to
provide ‘natural’ foundational legitimacy to theoretical claims, and thus she opens them
up to theoretical and political questioning. As a result, Butler’s work has become central
for many theorists who seek to develop an anti-essentialist, non-foundational and
processual approach to questions of identity and subjectivity.

Building on her critique of feminist identity politics and post-structural psychoanalytic
perspectives, Butler develops a theory of performative identity. What is the ontology of
‘the subject’ embedded within performativity? Following Foucault’s notion of juridical
systems of power, Butler treats subjects as effects of discourse/power matrices. Subjects are
‘the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse’, or, ‘a consequence of certain rule-gov-
erned discourses’ that manifest through a ‘compulsion to repeat’ or resignify dominant
discourses (1990, p. 145). In order to avoid an explicit move towards structural
determinism (implied by treating subjects as unidirectional effects of rule-governed
discourses), she adamantly claims that to recast the subject in this way does not imply
that subjects are determined by discourse. She writes, ‘the subject is not determined by the
rules through which it is generated because signi cation is not a founding act, but rather a
regulated process of repetition .’ (p. 145, emphasis in original). Thus, Butler attempts to avoid
determinism, or ‘the subject’ as unidirectional, unmitigated effect of dominant discourses,
by casting her theory as non-foundational. She implies that by rejecting foundational acts
within theories of identi cation she necessarily exiles determinism from her theory.
However, what is a ‘regulated process of repetition’? What is the difference between
repetition as foundational versus conceptualizing it as ‘non-foundational’ yet ‘regulated’?
These conceptual nuances form the basis for Butler’s contention that her approach is not
deterministic or structuralist. Thus, it is crucial to examine how ‘regulated repetition’
works in her theoretical and empirical discussions. To explore this issue, I examine not
only her de nition of ‘regulated repetition’, that is, how she views the process through
which ‘the subject’ performs dominant discourses, but also her conceptualization of the
moment in which dominant discourses are displaced . How are dominant discourses
subverted within this process of repetition? In simpler language, how does change
happen?
As Butler explains it, the process of doing gender (or sexuality) involves repetition
(resigni cation through performance) that is regulated by dominant discourses. The site
for social and political change within the performance of identity lies in the displacement
of dominant discourses, a ‘slippage’ within the process of repetition (1990, p. 30). How
does Butler specify displacement and slippage? Within Gender Trouble , the displacement of
dominant discourses remains accidental and unintentional. For example, she writes, ‘the
disruptions of this coherence through the inadvertent reemergence of the repressed reveal
… that “identity” is constructed’ (1990, p. 28, emphasis added). For Butler, change (the
disruption of coherent dominant discourses) stems from a spontaneous emergence of that
which is repressed by dominant discourses (e.g. multiplicity, sexuality that cannot be
de ned bimodally, etc.). In another passage she writes that ‘discourses present themselves
in the plural, coexisting within temporal frames, and instituting unpredictable and inadvertent
convergences from which speci c modalities of discursive possibilities are engendered’
(1990, p. 145, emphasis added). Apart from asking how discourses act to ‘present
themselves’ or ‘institute’, clearly this passage argues that new discursive possibilities stem
from chance convergences that operate if not completely outside the ‘subject’, then at
least autonomously from it.
Subversive, counter-hegemonic resigni cation occurs through slippages in the process
of repetition, slippages which, according to her discussion in Gender Trouble , cannot be
conscious or intentional. She emphasizes this point as she derides other approaches that
vest the subject with agency, ‘usually gured as the capacity for re exive mediation, that
remains intact regardless of its cultural embeddedness’ (1990, p. 143). Although it
remains unclear to which writers she is referring, it seems that for Butler any assertion
of intentionality within the doing of identity necessarily assumes a masterful humanist

subject, one that lies ‘outside’ power/discourse matrices.
Butler further elaborates her theory of performativity within her later book, Bodies that
M atter (1993). In that work she speci es performativity through an analysis of the lm
Paris is Burning, and this allows me to interrogate more closely how she conceptualizes
regulated repetition and displacement. Speci cally, I examine the implications of perfor-
mativity within the context of a particular analysis, in contrast to her theoretically
focused work in Gender Trouble .
In Bodies that Matter, Butler undertakes a reading of drag balls in New York City and
asserts that the balls illustrate the nature of performativity—the repetition and ultimately
the displacement of dominant discourses of gender and sexuality. The lm Paris is Burning
documents drag contests, in which contestants win by most closely mimicking ‘realness’
in dress and attitude (according to categories such as the rich straight man or the butch
femme). According to Butler (1993), the ball ‘involves the phantasmatic attempt to
approximate realness, but it also exposes the norms that regulate realness as themselves
phantasmatically instituted and sustained’ (p. 130). In other words, watching a gay man
mimicking a butch lesbian, or a straight wealthy woman from New Jersey, is disruptive
of dominant sex/class/gender identities because the performer’s supposedly ‘natural’
identity does not match the signs produced within the performance. By disrupting the
assumed correspondence between a ‘real’ interior and its surface markers (clothes, walk,
hair, etc.), drag balls make explicit the way in which all gender and sexual identi cations
are ritually performed in daily life.
By interrogating implicit norms within enunciations of ‘identity’ and recognizing it as
a process of identi cation, something that is done over and over instead of something that
is an inherent characteristic, performativity opens up new terrains of analysis. While this
contribution should not be overlooked , the assumptions regarding subjectivity and
agency within Butler’s theory of performativity prove to be quite problematic. As Butler
theorizes it, performativity forecloses inquiry into why and how particular identities
emerge, their effects in time and space, and the role of subjects in accommodating or
resisting dominant, xed subject positions. Could the individuals performing within drag
balls in Paris is Burning be treated as speaking, knowing subjects within Butler’s theory of
performativity? Would their perspectives and responses be crucial to understanding
how, when, and why dominant discourses of sexuality are displaced? How did
they interpret ‘realness’ in the contest and in relation to their sense of self? Did it
change over time? While those questions lie outside the parameters of her analysis, these
are the kinds of questions often asked by geographers. Yet, as I will elaborate later,
uncritically using Butler’s theory in fact forecloses inquiry into the conscious subversion
340 L. Nelson
or appropriation of dominant discourses as well as into the geographical embeddedness

of identity performances.
Interestingly, within Bodies that M atter (1993), Butler herself runs up against the limits
of her own theory. In tracing how she struggles to overcom e the contradictions and
shortcomings of performativity, I hope to demonstrate that while Butler effectively
debunks the notion of xed identity, and autonomous agency, she cannot seem to escape
the specter of critical consciousness within subjects. In Bodies that Matter, published 3 years
after Gender T rouble , Butler at certain moments infuses her discussion with a notion of
critical consciousness. For example, at the end of chapter 3, ‘Phantasmatic identi cation
and the assumption of sex’, she recognizes the need to wield subordinated identity within
contemporary homophobic and racist hegemonies, while maintaining ‘critical re ection
[of constituitive exclusions] … in order not to replicate at the level of identity politics the
very exclusionary moves that initiated the turn to speci c identities in the rst place’
(1993, p. 118). Her recourse to forms of ‘critical re ection’ sharply contrasts with an
earlier emphasis on unintentional, accidental displacement within the resigni cation
process as the locus of change. Several times Butler implicitly inserts intentionality into
her discussion. For example, she ends her conclusion of the book, ‘For one is, as it were,
in power even as one opposes it, formed by it as one reworks it , and it is this simultaneity
that is at once the condition of our partiality … and also the condition of action itself
(1993, p. 241, emphasis added). Who is this ‘one’ who ‘reworks’? Asking this question,
which she implicitly poses in her conclusion, cannot be explored within the parameters
of ‘performativity’ as she theorizes it.
These intimations of consciou s agency and subjectivity within Bodies that Matter contrast
sharply with her explicit theorizations of ‘the subject’, or lack thereof, within Gender
T rouble . Does Butler need to be haunted by this apparent inconsistency? I think not, if we
fundamentally change our conceptions of agency. What haunts Butler is not that she
implicitly begins to theorize a form of conscious agency/subjectivity within Bodies that
M atter, but that she fails to reconcile this within her explicit theorizations of ‘regulated
repetition’ and ‘slippage’ as the moments of counterhegemonic articulation. Her theory
of performativity treats any enunciation of identity as necessarily xed, and any notion of
agency as necessarily one that implies an autonomous, masterful subject. In other words,
she runs into a bind because she only conceives of conscious agency as stemming from
an autonom ous (pre-discursive) subject. Having effectively debunked that notion, she makes
no place for conscious agency. In this way, paradoxically, the autonomous, masterful
subject continues to haunt her work: she accepts the idea that agency is autonomous and
pre-discursive.
In the same way that, for Butler, agency necessarily implies a singular, autonomous
subject, her discussion of identity adopts the very assumption she seeks to critique. In
Bodies that M atter, she contends that the destabilization of pre-discursive identity categories
(e.g. ‘woman’) stems from their very failure to ‘secure the borders of materiality’ or to be
‘exhaustive’ (1993, pp. 187–188). Butler is pointing out how identity politics (not her own
theories) assume xity and exhaustiveness. Nevertheless, when she irrevocably links all
invocations of ‘woman’ with notions of a singular, whole subject, of identity as an
exhaustive category, she implicitly capitulates to assumptions about subjectivity found
within identity politics. Thus, although her critique explicitly rejects the notion of identity
as exhaustive, she implicitly adopts ‘exhaustiveness’ of identity as her own premise.
It is crucial for feminist theorists to one, free theories of subjectivity from an appeal,
explicit or implicit, towards a singular, xed identity (e.g. a singular ‘woman’) and two,
liberate agency from the liberal notion of ‘free will’. Butler attempts to theorize such a
move, but does not quite succeed. I argue that if we retheorize identity and subjectivity
in ways that treat them as not xed and exhaustive, but changing and contested over
time and space, we could still conceive of a conscious, thinking subject without
necessarily invoking the autonomous subject. Such a position would not discount Butler’s
well-argued point that the formation of identity and subjectivity inherently creates
exclusionary moves. In fact, such an explicit reworking of identity would be consistent
with Butler’s statement quoted earlier, which calls for critical re ection of the exclusion-
ary moves within identity politics. Nor would such a retheorization of identity contradict
Butler’s notion that ‘Where there is an “I” who utters or speaks and thereby produces
an effect in discourse, there is rst a discourse which precedes and enables that “I” and
forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will’ (1993, p. 225). Subjects can be
constituted through hegemonic discourses of gender, race, and sexuality while remaining
re exive of, and (potentially) intervene in, that process.

While such a detailed examination of Butler’s conceptualization of ‘the subject’ might
seem tedious, it is within these intricacies and contradictions of her work that we can
more usefully resignify performativity within geographic analysis and feminist praxis. The
limits of performativity emerge most starkly when exploring identity performance within
particular geographical and historical contexts, as I will explore in the following sections.
As a textually-based theory, ‘performativity’ must be carefully translated into geographical
inquiry. As Paul Smith (1988) comments:
there is a distinction to be made between the subject-position prescribed by a

text and the actual human agent who engages with that text and thus with the
subject-position it offers. Clearly, any given text is not empowered to force the
reader to adhere to the discursive positions it offers—the text is not, in
Althusser’s terms, a repressive state apparatus. (p. 34)
Geographers are in a good position to theorize identity formation as an iterative process,

but one produced through a recursive relationship between power/discourse and critically
re exive, geographically embedded subjects. It is in conceptualizing the movement
between the two that an iterative conception of identity becomes useful. Unfortunately,
most geographers to date have limited their ability to make such a contribution by
overlooking, or even misreading, the implications of ‘performativity’ in their theorizing
of subjectivity, identity and space.
C onceptualizing B odies in Particular Spaces: the lim its of perform ativity

As geographers show increasing interest in the connections between identity, space and
place, Butler’s notion of performativity has worked its way into the vocabulary and
theoretical concepts of post-structuralists in the discipline. In some cases geographers are
using performativity to frame their work (Bell et al., 1994; McDowell and Court, 1994;
Gibson-Graham, 1996), while others draw on the language of performativity to talk
about identity (see Sharp, 1996; Kirby, 1996). Several of these theorists explicitly frame
their work as contributing to a needed spatializing of performativity, including attention
to context, change and resistance. This is an important move, but one that requires a
critique and explicit reworking of performativity. Instead of critically evaluating perfor-
mativity, many geographers deploy it unproblematically, creating unacknowledged
tensions within their work and foreclosing important dimensions of the issues that they
examine. Most importantly, despite expressing an intent to contextualize performativity,
342 L. Nelson
many geographers do not develop the theoretical tools with which to interrogate the
time/space location and effect(s) of identity ‘performances’, or the role of concrete
subjects in that process.
This section will explore how some geographers deploy performativity within their
theoretical and analytical inquiries. In particular, I examine ‘All hyped up and no place
to go’ by David Bell, Jon Binnie, Julia Cream & Gill Valentine (1994), as well as
‘Performing work: bodily representations in merchant banks’ by Linda McDowell & Gill
Court (1994). Both articles misread Butler’s theory of performativity, glossing over its
major shortcom ings that otherwise would be glaring within geographically grounded
work. In short, I argue that basing their analyses on performativity (1) makes their efforts
to conn ect the subversion of dominant discourses with critically re exive subjects tenuous
and unclear; and (2) leads to a static description of identities without inquiry into
contextual causes and effects of various performances.
All Hyped U p and N o Place to Go
Jointly authored by David Bell, Jon Binnie, Julia Cream & Gill Valentine (1994), ‘All
hyped up and no place to go’ examines the construction of sexualized spaces by
exploring the gures of the hypermasculine gay skinhead and the hyperfeminine ‘lipstick’
lesbian. The authors draw on Judith Butler’s deconstruction of the sex/gender di-
chotomy, particularly her argument that discourses produce the ‘biological’ division
between ‘male’ and ‘female’, to interrogate the ‘presumed authentic heterosexual nature of
everyday spaces’ (1994, p. 32). Moreover, they attempt to contribute to a performative
understanding of identity by asserting that the meanings and effects of identity perform-
ance are contingent on time and space—an issue Butler does not address in her own
work.
Despite their promising beginning, however, Bell et al. (1994) ultimately do not
adequately theorize or contextualize the performances of sexualized spaces. Because they
do not explicitly address the abstracted subject within performativity, the authors lack the
theoretical handles with which to engage (1) the concrete subjects that perform the
hypermasculine gay skinhead and the ‘lipstick’ lesbian, and (2) the social-historical
embeddedness of these performances. Interestingly, Bell and his co-authors sense the gap
in performativity when they misread Butler and impute a notion of choice into the
performance of identity (see the discussion that follows). That misinterpretation, however,
only serves to exacerbate the inconsistencies that emerge throughout their discussion. In
short, they have dif culty connecting the performances of the hypermasculine gay
skinhead and the ‘lipstick’ lesbian with speaking subjects who actively subvert heterosex-
ualized spaces. Moreover, they overlook the time/space implications of emerging
counterhegemonic identities.
First, I will address their misreading of Butler’s performativity. As pointed out in a
commentary by Lisa Walker (1995), Bell et al. (1994) insert intentionality into their
reading of Butler’s theory of performativity: ‘according to Butler, the answer is in the
authors’ intentions’ (p. 33). However, ‘intention’ is not within the vocabulary of
performativity. The authors build on this crucial misunderstanding of Butler by viewing
her use of the term ‘construction’ to indicate choice, to indicate that there is a
‘constructor’ behind the construction (a doer behind the deed). Butler (1990), however,
goes to great lengths to banish that notion because juridical forms of power produce the
subjects that they subsequently come to represent, in a manner that disavows their
productive role (p. 25). Consequently, the heart of Butler’s deconstruction of the
gender/sex dichotom y hinges not only on recognizing that sexed bodies do not exist
outside of gendered discourses, but that the notion of a sexed body acting ‘to construct’
gender ideology is merely such a juridical ction. As I argued in the previous section, for
Butler, to posit a subject that is aware or critical of dominant discourse (one that she
assumes is then ‘outside’ of it) capitulates to the autonomous masterful subject of liberal
thought. Instead, the contingency of construction for Butler stems from unintentional
slippages that occur through repetitive, compelled performances of hegemonic identities
[6].
Second, despite their attempts to insert agency into performativity, Bell et al. (1994)
limit their analysis by not explicitly critiquing the abstracted subject in Butler’s work. It is
not hard to understand why the authors of ‘All hyped up’ might end up smuggling in
some notion of agency into their reading of Butler, and into their own analysis. Without
some notion of self-re exivity and intentionality, the authors would have dif culty using
performativity to analyze the production and contestation of heterosexualized spaces within
particular spatial/temporal contexts. Conscious subjectivity comes into play, for example,
when discussing the hypermasculine gay skinhead, a style that developed in a ‘reaction
against the clone look’, in the ‘minds’ of young men who associated the clone look with
AIDS (1994, p. 35). Bell and his co-authors clearly treat gay skinheads in their analysis
as proactively reshaping dominant narratives and styles of sexuality. In appropriating a
look associated with homophobic fascism, Bell et al. read the gay skinhead as making
visible the constructedness of heterosexualized space.
Nevertheless, by not explicitly critiquing Butler, or retheorizing agency and subjectivity
in relation to a performative, processual understanding of identity, Bell et al. do not
consistently esh out how agency and intentionality shape the origins or effects of the
performances they analyze. The commentary by Lisa Walker (1995) on ‘All hyped up’
highlights some of the more glaring repercussions of their oversight. She points out that
the article minimizes how a gay skinhead might be misread within the gay community,
‘speci cally by black gay men who perceive skinheads to be “wearing the uniform of the
oppressor” ’. The ip side of this omission, as Walker notes, is that Bell et al. seemingly
deny the possibility that gay skinheads might also be fascists (1994, pp. 72–73).
Thus, although the authors of ‘All hyped up’ seek to read intentionality into the theory
of performativity, they miss crucial spatial and historical origins and implications of these
intentions [7]. Walker (1995) traces these problems to a failure of ‘theorizing how gender
difference changes the way the two gures [gay skinhead and lipstick lesbian] reoccupy
“straight” gender/sexual styles’ (p. 73). While I agree with Walker’s point, I think it is
more than a simple oversight of how gender affects (the reading of) these performances.
Instead, I trace the shortcom ings of their analysis to core assumptions within Butler’s
theory of performativity, which provide no handles for thinking about the spatial/
temporal location (e.g. within fascist politics) or the effects of particular performances
(e.g. the potential perpetuation of racist oppression) of particular performances. Bell et al.
super cially read intentionality into performativity, but this does not compensate for the
theoretical chasm within Butler’s work. Rather, as a repetition with a difference, it
exposes a certain lack at the origin [8].
I also look to assumptions embedded within an uncritical use of performativity to
explain a second problem noted by Lisa Walker (1995). She is very critical of the article’s
double standard in regard to the gay skinhead and the lipstick lesbian. She notes that
whereas for the gay skinhead intention is key, allowing Bell et al. to sidestep questions of
racism within that particular performance, for the lipstick lesbian the (white) heterosexual
gaze is paramount to their analysis (1995, p. 73). By assuming a straight male gaze, the
344 L. Nelson
‘performance’ of the lipstick lesbian is deemed by Bell et al. to be complicit with

stereotypes of the feminine, and thus not a radical, disruptive performance. I argue,
however, that the issues raised by Walker’s brilliant critique of ‘All hyped up’ are
connected directly to the uncritical use of performativity, and the undertheorization of
agency, change and resistance.
In their reading of the lipstick lesbian, Bell et al. slip even more clearly into the notion
of compelled, unre exive repetition as elaborated by Butler in Gender T rouble . As Walker
points out, because there is no obvious subversion of heterosexist stereotypes, for Bell
and his co-authors the lipstick lesbian (who projects a hyperfeminine imagery) remains
an uncritical performer of dominant discourse. They write (1994):
Even if hyperfemininity can be turned from a lesbian style to a conscious
political strategy aimed at destabilising heterosexual spaces, it is doubtful how
successful it can be because, whilst it may make heterosexual women uneasy

about feminine identities and spaces, it does nothing to undermine patriarchy.
(p. 43)
Because they fail to contextualize why and how lipstick lesbians choose to create a
particular image, its effects over time and space and through complex inter-subjective
dynamics, their reading ends up (as Walker points out) implicitly adopting an abstracted
heterosexual male gaze. In other words, their interpretation is static, without concern to
multiply-positioned concrete subjects located in time and space. A more complex
analysis of concrete subjects would have disrupted any tendency to adopt a male
heterosexual gaze and historicized how sexualized spaces are performed and contested
in relation to daily human practice.
Performing W ork
The pitfalls of performativity for geographical analysis are also apparent within Linda
McDowell & Gill Court’s piece, ‘Performing work: bodily representations in merchant
banks’ (1994). The intensive research conducted by McDowell & Court explores
nuanced gendered performances within the nance industry during the last decade, a
decade characterized by globalizing markets and growing speculation. They emphasize
that linking meaning to everyday practice helps trace the micro-links between gender
identity and econom ic process. In doing so, they contribute to a dialog between critical
social theory and work within econom ic geography. While McDowell & Court provide
a needed push to the theoretical parameters of econom ic geography, they do not use
the opportunity to critically read Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. The under-
theorization of subjectivity, agency and space within Butler’s work is overlooked by
the authors, with direct consequences for the analytical scope and depth of their
project.
Speci cally, like Bell et al. (1994), McDowell & Court read intentionality/conscious
action into Butler’s work on ‘the subject’ and identity. This allows them to remain
largely uncritical of performativity, which at a theoretical level frames their investiga-
tion. For example, McDowell & Court see Butler’s notion of ‘the regulatory ction of
heterosexual coherence’ (Butler, 1990, cited in McDowell & Court, 1994) as meaning
that ‘through acts, gestures, and clothes, we construct or fabricate an identity that is
manufactured’ (1994, pp. 732, emphasis added). By implying an active subject that
‘constructs’ and ‘fabricates’, McDowell & Court smuggle into the notion of performativ-
ity a doer behind the deed. Their unintentional misreading of Butler (the insertion of a
knowing subject) permits them to approach the question of how workers in the nance
industry remake gendered identities through daily practice. Nevertheless, by not ex-
plicitly tackling ontological assumptions within Butler’s theory of ‘the subject’ they miss
an opportunity to rework performativity into geography. Furthermore, like Bell et al.,
they have dif culty connecting discursive change with workers who assimilate, accommo-
date, or resist dominant narratives.
In ‘Performing work’ McDowell & Court examine the shift from the gure of the
patriarch of dynasty banking (older white male) to the more fragmented identities of
young and hip ‘princes’ and ‘princesses’ (still white) characteristic of today’s expanded
and fast-paced merchant banking industry. They introduce their discussion of the
modern nance industry by stating that:
This emphasis on [new] ctional representations [the prince and princess] is
paralleled by shifts in the nature of ‘econom ic reality’ as the commodities dealt

with in the new nancial world themselves are increasingly ctional entities:
futures trading and junk bonds. (1994, p. 733)
This statement implies some sort of connection between the rise of ctional trading
entities and the emergence of new ctional representations of workers, but that particu-
lar, key relationship receives scant explanatory analysis in the article.
McDowell & Court (1994) make a vague connection between the economic shifts and
the new gendered performances within the industry when they trace the emergence of
the new identities to ‘the class basis of the City … the rapid recruitment in the 1980s
[which] resulted in a wider class composition and a more open way of doing business …
a process that undermined the old white males club characteristic of “dynasty” merchant
banking’ (1994, p. 736). Clearly, econom ic, industrial shifts impacted recruitment
strategies, bringing in a new set of actors that affected the old white male establishment.
But the nature of that shift, the linkages between econom ic changes and the discursive
guring of gendered workers (the prince and the princess) in the industry remains
unspeci ed. The reader is left wondering if there is a functional relationship between the
econom ic shifts within the industry and the emergence of the gures of the ‘prince’ and
the ‘princess’. As I will explain further, McDowell & Court have dif culty making these
connections explicit because performativity lacks the theoretical tools with which to
analyze historically and geographically embedded change (the shift from the patriarch to
the prince and princess within England’s merchant banking industry), nor the active role
of workers in that process.
‘Performing work’ is devoted primarily to reading (1) how the media deploys the
gures of the patriarch, the prince and the princess, and (2) how workers perform
dominant identities through daily practice. A reading of images and performances,
however, is not the same as tracing the contested emergence of these identities through
time and space in relation to thinking subjects, who sometimes appropriate dominant
identities and who sometimes contest or change them. The ‘performance’ of the prince
and princess identities is vaguely located in changing capitalist relations within the
nance industry. Why were young men and women recruited into the industry? What
discourses gave meaning to changing recruitment strategies and how did they articulate
with the dominant discourses of gender prevalent in the ‘dynasty’ banking industry at the
time? How did the women and men recruited into the industry respond to and reshape
‘dominant’ constructions of their identities as (gendered) workers? What is the history of
the prince and princess as discursive gures? McDowell & Court do not explore the
origins and effects of these identities over time and space.
346 L. Nelson
By undertheorizing the shift from the patriarch to the prince/princess, that change
remains an assumed, unproblematized backdrop to their interviews with nance industry
employees, as well as to their analysis of the dominant media representations of the
industry. From the interview evidence presented in the article, McDowell & Court do not
turn their analytical eye to that hegemonic shift in relation to their inform ants’ voices.
For example, interviews with male workers related how their success in the industry
depended on a bodily performance tied to the image of the trim, t, clean, young male.
Female workers, in contrast, contended with developing their image as ‘one of the boys’
or deploying a highly feminine identity to recruit and maintain clients. The voices of
workers in the industry are objects in a description of the ‘prince’ and the ‘princess’, with
little sense of how workers interpreted/responded to dominant discourses or how these
interpretations in turn reshaped the nature of those narratives.
At the end of their article, McDowell & Court begin to talk about how men and women
in the industry reacted to the gures of the prince and princess. In the section ‘Uneasy
seduction’, they discuss the sense of alienation many of their women respondents
experienced in relation to the ‘compelled’ performance of a sexualized feminine ident-
ity—compelled in the sense that their success in the industry was structured around
adopting such a performance (1994, p. 746). Yet the authors choose to leave this set of
responses unexamined beyond stating that unease existed. McDowell & Court leave it as
a description of an ‘uneasy seduction’ rather than examining how such responses might
reshape hegemonic identities. They quickly end the article, asserting that the gendered
stereotypes performed within the industry ‘undoubtedly’ contribute to the lack of
representation of women among the upper echelons of the industry (1994, p. 747).
Notably missing is an explanation of the relationship between this lack of representation
and how men and women variously ‘performed’ their workplace identity over time and
space.
McDowell & Court successfully frame their research according to Judith Butler’s
theory of performativity, leaving them with a rather static snapshot of dominant gender
discourses correlated to shifts within the structure of the industry. They conclude by
asserting that in the 1990s, the construction of a distinctive bodily image is central to
selling nancial advice in contrast to the disembodied, rational male gure of the
previous decade (1994, p. 747). They leave unanalyzed the complexities of how and why
these images shifted. While it is true that bodily image is central to selling nancial
advice, they do not comparatively explore how these bodily images (the prince and
princess) developed through time and space in relation to active, interpretative subjects.
Instead, these bodily images seems to be posited as a ‘natural’ outcome of structural
econom ic shifts (e.g. new recruitment strategies) within the industry.
Performativity, as conceptualized by Butler, could not provide the tools necessary to
addressing the questions the authors set out for themselves, namely, how dominant
discourses are remade through daily practice. Moreover, by not interrogating Butler
closely, McDowell & Court missed an opportunity to use their research to re-evaluate the
theory of performativity. A more critical use of Butler might have adopted the insightful
aspects of performativity, while thinking creatively through questions of subjectivity,
agency as well as the historical and geographical embeddedness of discursive changes,
including the emergence of new gendered identities in the nance industry. Such a
critique would have provided the theoretical handle for connecting the voices and
perspectives of the workers interviewed to a critical analysis of the gendered guring of
workers in the rapidly changing nance industry.
In sum, the already abstracted subject embedded within performativity forecloses
inquiry into agency, change and the spatiality of identity formation. While geographers
are in a good position to intervene in this debate, much of the published work in
geography, as exempli ed by ‘All hyped up’ and ‘Performing work’, does not attempt to
address these shortcomings. In ‘All hyped up’ an uncritical use of performativity plays
into their abstracted reading of the lipstick lesbian as an uncritical and non-subversive
performance. Moreover, they avoid the more negative/exclusionary aspects of the gay
skinhead performance by neglecting to locate gay skinheads as subjects in relation not
only to dominant discourses of sexuality, but in relation to other subjects as well as
historical-geographic processes (e.g. racism and fascism). For McDowell & Court the
unproblematized use of Butler’s work permits them only to allude to how discourses are
changed and subverted within the nance industry, as well as to the effects of these
performances. They note that women are feeling alienated from their sexualized
feminine work personae, but they do not relate that alienation to their readings of the
nature and consequences of gendered performances in the industry.
For Bell et al. and McDowell & Court, their uncritical adoption of performativity
reduces the explanatory power of the research that each article sets out to do: both
explicitly seek to contextualize performances, tie them to time, space and human
subjects. But in order to do that it is important to explicitly reformulate Butler’s ontology
of the subject, which forecloses questions of agency and spatial–temporal change, without
rejecting her more insightful understandings of identity as non-fou ndational and proces-
sual.
A ccepting P artia lity and ‘Inbetweenness’: thinking through situated agency

Butler’s work sets up a dichotomy between the masterful humanist subject and the
subject as a node in the power discourse matrix, a site of unconsciou s compelled
repetition of hegemonic identities. She rejects the former to embrace the latter. But how
different is Butler’s subject from a structural Marxist subject? The former is a product
of collisions between discursive processes of which ‘it’ is utterly unaware, while the latter
subject is unwittingly determined by the ‘needs’ of the relations of production. Both
perspectives imply a structuralism that can leave us paralyzed when confronted with
research projects in which a theory of a speaking, acting subject is required. Within the
language of performativity, anything smacking of intentionality becomes a discursive ‘god
trick’ and must be banished.
So how might we productively reconceptualize ‘agency’ without either obliterating the
subject by de ning change as random discursive slippage, or reifying subjectivity as
autonomous and somehow ‘outside’ of discourse? Paul Smith’s D iscernin g the Subject (1998)
helps point us to a way out of the dichotom y. In his assessment of psychoanalytic, literary
and cultural theory, Smith argues that most post-structural thought has produced a
cerned, abstracted subject, one that cannot explain how human subject/individuals
negotiate multiple discourses at any concrete moment in relation to their sedimented life
history. His notion of a cerned subject draws on the English roots ‘to cern’ and ‘to cerne’
(meaning ‘to accept a patrimony’ and ‘to encircle and enclose’) and points to how many
textual theories assume a subject entirely subjugated/enclosed by a given discursive
subject position (1988, p. xxx). Smith questions the notion that subject positions offered
by any given text automatically and/or unproblematically lodge themselves within
human agents who engage that text.
Such a critique applies equally well to performativity, particularly to the functionalistic
notion of ‘compelled repetition’ of hegemonic discourses. Human subjects, located in
348 L. Nelson
time and space, do identities in much more complex ways than performativity allows.
Smith (1988) insightfully responds to positions, similar to Butler’s, that reduce this process
to repetition:
Here the encounter between spectator and text becomes monumentalized as
more or less a repetition. In this maneuver the category of the ‘subject’ is given
over entirely to the psychological accoun t of the original entry into the symbolic . That
account becomes, with all its genetic force, the privileged one to which all
instances of subjectivity might be unequivocally referred. (p. 34, emphasis
added)
Positing a frozen moment of interpolation into the symbolic as the central mechanism for
doing identity not only collapses human subjects with subject positions, it elides the past,
the future and space [9]. Moreover, reading identity as performative, focusing on how
dominant discourses are repeated by ‘subjects’, is an ontologically distinct project from

one which questions the spatial–temporal location of and in uences upon identity,
and/or the effects of that ‘performance’. These issues represent central terrains of
geographic inquiry, including the questions posed by Bell et al. (1994) and McDowell &
Court (1994).
I follow Smith (1988) in advocating that we abandon thinking about agency as a
discrete, internalized quality, and instead see it as a disturbance in self-certitude and
epistemological cernment or enclosure (p. 78). Here is it helpful to quote him at length:
What is at stake here is a sense of how and under what conditions subject/
individuals simultaneously exist within and make purposive intervention into
social formations. Such intervention can and does take place, actively or
passively, through single people or collectives, privately or publicly. It can take
the form of a refusal as much as an intervention; it can be in the service of
conservatism as much as of disruption. It may well call upon an experience of
class; but more generally it calls upon the subject/individual’s history: such a
history is not exclusively determined by class or class membership, real,
borrowed, or imagined. Oppositional or conservative activity on the part of
any person is primarily a mark of a certain engagement with meanings as they
exist, circulate, and become xed within the practices of any given social
formation. Those meanings have a history which is, in every case, constitutive
of the histories of subject/individuals. [10] (1988, p. 5)
How individual and collective subjects negotiate multiple and contradictory discourses,
how they do identity, is an inherently unstable and partial process. Moreover, although
this negotiation, acceptance, or struggle may be conscious, it is never transparent because
it is always in ected by the unconsciou s, by repressed desire and difference. Accepting
that ‘conscious action’ is not unmediated, that it is always encumbered with and
in uenced by (conscious or unconsciou s) constitutive discourses, is to truly accept the
partiality of knowledge and to be rid of the autonomous, transparent subject of
Enlightenment thought.
Geographers stand to make important contributions to debates about the situatedness
of the subject and the doing of identity. Smith develops his critique from a position
within literary and cultural studies, arguing that post-structural theory elides the
conscious and unconsciou s sedimented history of individuals, a history that exceeds any
one subject position offered by a discourse or text. Building on that important argument,
geographers can think through how to spatialize and historicize the creation and
recreation of identity. A starting place for a cartography of identity could be to map how
individuals and/or collective subjects do identity in relation to various discursive

processes (e.g. class, race, gender and sexuality), to other subjects, and to layers of
institutions and practices—all located concretely in time and space.
More nuanced approaches to subjectivity and identity, ones that reject the dichotomy
between a hopelessly fragmented subject and the uni ed humanist subject, have already
appeared within an array of geographical work. Here I will focus on a (1994) special issue
of Professional Geographer that brought together several feminist scholars who explore the
relationship between the partiality of knowledge and the theories, methodologies and
politics of eldwork (see, for example, Staeheli & Lawson, 1994; Katz, 1994; England,
1994; Nast, 1994). Through their analyses and theoretical discussions, the contributors
develop a complex, post-structural feminist understanding of subjectivity. At the heart of
their project is the notion of ‘betweenness’, a space that captures the instability, partiality
and situatedness of intersubjective relationships, self-re exivity and knowledge pro-

duction.
These feminist geographers take as their starting point the recognition that both
researchers and the researched are situated in relations of power (Nast, 1994) and that
‘woman’ as a cerned, xed subject is a destructive illusion. The situatedness of subjects
and knowledges refuses any possibility of complete truth, objectivity or self-knowledge,
but at the same time does not prevent self-re exivity and political intervention into the
categories that shape research and women’s oppression. As Staeheli & Lawson note:
This recognition—that we cannot fully understand others’ subjectivities and
speak with authority for them—does not imply relativism and certainly must
not lead us to abandon our research topics. Rather, we should recognize that
the space of betweenness is a site in which we can uncover the experiences and
politics of marginalized groups. (1994, p. 99)
Ultimately, their commitment to an unstable space of betweenness (Katz, 1994) repre-
sents a commitment to a relational and situated ontology of ‘the subject’ and knowledge.
This position allows them to explore the construction of identities in and through space
without recourse to either an autonomous subject or a subject theorized as a node in the
power/discourse matrix—both of which are politically disabling and analytically suspect.
As these geographers recognize, if we reduce concrete subjects to compelled,
unre exive performers of dominant discourse(s) we miss the how and the why of human
subjects doing identity, a process directly tied to their lived personal history, intersubjec-
tive relationships, and their embeddedness in particular historical moments and places
[11]. Nast (1994), Staeheli & Lawson (1994), Katz (1994) and others approach feminist
eldwork in geography through post-structural perspectives on knowledge and ‘the
subject’, drawing in particular on the work of Donna Harraway (1988, 1991) and Sandra
Harding (1991). Their commitment to partiality and situatedness, however, is matched
by their rejection of the political and intellectual paralysis that often comes from
uncritically embracing endlessly fragmented knowledges and subjects.
This rejection stems not only from their location within a feminist political project, but
from the exigencies of eldwork itself, which demand that we theorize concrete subjects
in time and space. Ironically, many of the contributors to the Professional Geographer issue
devoted to feminist eldwork came under scathing critique by Gillian Rose (1997), one
of the few geographers who correctly understands the intricacies of performativity and still
embraces it. Tracing her critique helps draw out the implications of uncritically
translating performativity into geographic inquiry, which in Rose’s case slips into a
troubling policing of ‘the subject’ within feminist and post-structural work.
350 L. Nelson
Rose’s criticism hinges on reading the notion of ‘self-re exivity’ discussed by these
authors as an assertion of transparency, which she contends treats the researcher-self as
a knowable agent (1997, p. 309). Rose makes this argument in spite of the epistemolog-
ical commitment, articulated by all the authors she critiques, to the partiality of
knowledge and their location in elds of power. Because of this commitment, their
assertions concerning self-re exivity, or concerning the politics of knowledge-production,
cannot be construed as appealing to transparency or as constructing an all-knowing
feminist ‘god-trick’—as asserted by Rose (1997, p. 311).
Why does Rose insist on reading transparency into their notion of self-re exivity and
a sense of ‘all-knowing vision’ into their complex discussions of how to negotiate
positionality and power relations in eldwork? It stems in part, I think, from Rose’s
adoption of a Butlerian styled dichotom y between the masterful (transparent) Enlighten-
ment subject and the subject as a site for compelled, unintentional performance of
dominant discourses. Rose (1997) traces her own vision of research as a ‘constitutive
negotiation’ (a process never made completely clear) to Butler’s work on identity and
power, correctly emphasizing that ‘Butler’s arguments are deeply hostile to models of
human subjectivity as conscious agency’ (p. 316). Rose embraces Butler’s genealogy of
the subject, which explains her hostility to any notion smacking of conscious awareness/
action, such as the concept of ‘self-re exivity’ used by the various geographers cited
above.
Like Butler, Rose is haunted by humanist idealizations, arrested by an inability to
conceptualize self-re exivity as anything but transparent. Because Nast (1994), Staeheli &
Lawson (1994), Kobayashi (1994), McDowell (1992) and others assert the possibility of
self-re exivity, as well as the potential for mapping the terrains of power and difference
within eldwork, according to Rose’s formula they must be conceptualizing themselves as
masterful, transparent subjects. Rose is condemned to a cycle of critique without exit, her
‘sense of failure’ (1997, p. 305) without solution, because she cannot conceive of a self,
a subject, that is both constituted by discursive processes and potentially aware of them,
potentially able to actively appropriate, reject or reshape the subject position(s) offered by
dominant discourse(s).
This dichotomous blinder causes her to miss how the work of the feminist geographers
she critiques is embedded within a more thoughtful understanding of subjectivity, agency
and knowledge/power, and thus is messy and complex. Their negotiation of the tensions
between a complex epistemology and research practice intervenes in the debate about
the nature of the subject and power/discourse within post-structuralist theory. Nuanced
conceptualizations of ‘self-re exivity’, positionality and power in the eld opens up
discussions of how to navigate between the constitutive power of discourse and the
historical and geographical embeddedness of thinking subjects. It is within these openings
that the best contributions of geographers to feminist politics, research practice, and
epistemology have been made in the last decade—and, I would argue, will con tinue to be
made.
Finally, Nast, Staeheli & Lawson, Kobayashi and McDowell conceptualize the
researcher as capable of self-re exivity and a producer of situated knowledge. In doing
so, they also theorize their informants as subjects capable of agency, albeit ones just as
entangled in power/discourse relations as the researchers themselves. Rose’s insistence
on treating this as a failure is an extremely unproductive move. To view ‘the subject’ as
incapable of re exive thought, whether in regard to the subjectivity of the researcher or
the researched, capitulates to an Enlightenment notion of subjectivity, agency and
change (e.g. self-re exivity 5 transparent, unencumbered knowledge) [12]. Rose implic-
itly cannot let go of the humanist subject, which is why she is left rather paralyzed by
a stylized ‘sense of failure’.
As Rose’s critique demonstrates, an uncritical adoption of textual approaches such as
performativity not only narrows the scope of geographic inquiry into identities and space,
but it can generate disturbing academic politics. The kinds of questions many geogra-
phers ask cannot be adequately addressed by a strictly performative understanding of
identity, an approach that assumes an already abstracted, time and placeless subject.
Uncritically and loosely drawing on the language of performativity—or deploying it
merely as an academic bon mot —limits our ability to explore the complex dynamics
between identity, space and change. Nevertheless, as exempli ed by the feminist
approaches to eldwork cited earlier, geographers are in a position to theorize the
historical and geographical embeddedness of human subjects who ‘perform’ a wide
variety of identities in relation to various spaces over their life course. Locating these
performances in time and space, as well as theorizing how situated, knowing subjects do
identity, deepens our intellectual project and enables a political one as well.
By highlighting the consequences of an undiscriminating translation of performativity
into geography, I hope to contribute to ongoing discussions of how to conceptualize
identity as processual, indeed as ‘performative’, without acceding to a problematic
deconstruction of conscious agency and subjectivity, and without abstracting ‘the subject’
from its constitution in time and space.
A cknow ledgem ent

I would like to thank Vicky Lawson, Matt Sparke, Michael Brown, Robert Self and Kim
Van Eyck for their encouragement and comments, as well as two anonymous reviewers
for their feedback. Any unconvincing interpretations or errors are my own.
NOTES
[1] Throughout this article, I refer to intentional human practice, and a knowing and/or speaking subject. In
all cases, I do not assume transparent intentions or self-re ections. Instead, I argue that while intentions are
in ected by unconscious, repressed desire and/or difference, human subjects are capable of re exivity—a
cobbling together of multifarious and contradictory discourses to form (unstable) intentions and under-
standings of their actions as they do identity.
[2] The impact of these perspectives has been profound, despite powerful critiques of post-structural
psychoanalytic theorists by various feminist thinkers (see Fraser, 1989; Nicholson, 1989).
[3] See the four viewpoint response articles in Gender, Place and Cu lture, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1995: Lisa Walker, ‘M ore
than just skin-deep: fem(me)ininity and the subversion of identity’ (pp. 71–76); Elspeth Probyn, ‘Lesbians
in space: gender, sex and the structure of missing’ (pp. 77–84); Lawrence Knopp, ‘If you’re going to get
all hyped up you’d better go somewhere!’ (pp. 85–88); and Andrew Kirby, ‘Straight talk on the
pomohomo question’ (pp. 89–95).
[4] ‘The political’ as discussed by post-structuralists such as Chantal Mouffe (1995) refers to an abstract
conceptualization of agonistic relations. Thinking about the political, in contrast to substantive attention
to ‘politics,’ allows for analysis across a variety of situations. Michael Brown (1997) demonstrates the
importance of contextualizing ‘the political’ within particular social spaces as well as the need to move
beyond a singular focus on antagonistic political relationships.
[5] As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, feminist theorists and activists essentialize identity for a variety
of reasons, including strategic ones. While I recognize this, Butler does not make such distinctions when
she roundly criticizes all approaches that posit a uni ed, singular woman’s identity.
[6] Bell and his co-authors belatedly allude to these shortcomings within Butler’s work near the end of the
article. They cite Susan Bordo (1992, p. 171), who warns against regarding the ‘body-in-drag’ as an
abstract, unsituated linguistic structure, as pure ‘text’. Nevertheless, they choose not to engage this
352 L. Nelson
problematic within their analyses, which nominally seek to contextualize performativity. Instead, they apply
a textual theoretical approach to actual people and spaces, with troubling effects.
[7] I use the word ‘origins’ not to refer to some pure foundational moment or beginning of intentions/agency.
Instead, I want to imply that agency, intervention by individual or collective subjects, is embedded in
complex time–space processes. To understand where subjectivity and/or agency comes from, the why and
how of identity, this geographical and historical location is crucial.
[8] In other words Bell et al. (1994) insert intentionality and agentic subjectivity into their reading of Butler.
While Walker faults the authors for this, she does not connect this misunderstanding at the level of theory
to the critiques she raises regarding their analysis of the lipstick lesbian and gay skinhead performances.
In contrast, I see Bell et al. ’s misreading as an important but misguided attempt to deal with the tensions
created by translating performativity into grounded geographical analysis. I characterize it as misguided,
rst, because they do not use the opportunity to rework performativity within geography, and second,
because it generates the problematic conclusions raised by Lisa Walker.
[9] Theorizing discursive change as developing through random, unconscious slippages in repetition does little
to alleviate the functionalism of the argument.
[10] Smith’s vocabulary of the ‘subject/individual’ may sound awkward when read outside the context of his
book. His term subject/individual refers to a human entity that is often called a ‘subject’ or an
‘individual’—two quite contradictory labels. He notes that the term individual posits the false impression
that a human being is self-contained, undivided and whole. In contrast, the term ‘subject’ maintains an
etymological sense of ‘something that is sub-jected, thrown beneath; in short the subject is by and large
a passivity’ (1988, p. xxxiii). The dialectical tension between the notion of ‘subject/individual’ can point
towards a more helpful way of conceptualizing the partiality of subjectivity and agency (see his ‘Notes on
terminology’ in Smith, 1988, pp. xxxiii–xxxv).
[11] My reference to particular historical moments and places includes how individual and collective subjects
are located in, and continuously recreating, a constellation of ideologies, material relations, practices and
institutions.
[12] Moreover, negating the researched re exivity and agency reinscribes the academic as the all-powerful,
omniscient observer. What you end up with is a researcher who can ‘see’ the discursive structures of which
the researched are entirely unaware yet compelled to repeat.
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Lise Nelson Bodies and Spaces Do Matter The Limits of Performativity

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Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp.

Bodies (and Spaces) do Matter: the limits of performativity

LISE NELSON, D epartment of Geography, U niversity of W ashington, U SA

concept of ‘performativity’. As a processual, non-foundational approach to identity, many feminist and

T he C ontested Status of ‘the Subject’ w ithin G eography

Structuration theory, particularly as elaborated by sociologist Anthony Giddens (1976,

are largely understood as produced through discursive, power-laden processes (de

intertwining of gender and nationhood can be viewed as a repeated performance of

P erform ativity : rethinking identity and ‘the politica l’

processual approach to questions of identity and subjectivity.

of intentionality within the doing of identity necessarily assumes a masterful humanist

or appropriation of dominant discourses as well as into the geographical embeddedness

re exive of, and (potentially) intervene in, that process.

there is a distinction to be made between the subject-position prescribed by a

Geographers are in a good position to theorize identity formation as an iterative process,

C onceptualizing B odies in Particular Spaces: the lim its of perform ativity

contextual causes and effects of various performances.

All Hyped U p and N o Place to Go

‘performance’ of the lipstick lesbian is deemed by Bell et al. to be complicit with

successful it can be because, whilst it may make heterosexual women uneasy

paralleled by shifts in the nature of ‘econom ic reality’ as the commodities dealt

A ccepting P artia lity and ‘Inbetweenness’: thinking through situated agency

dominant discourses are repeated by ‘subjects’, is an ontologically distinct project from

individuals and/or collective subjects do identity in relation to various discursive

and situatedness of intersubjective relationships, self-re exivity and knowledge pro-

A cknow ledgem ent

Potrebbero piacerti anche

re exive of, and (potentially) intervene in, that process.

and situatedness of intersubjective relationships, self-re exivity and knowledge pro-