ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on the author's earlier critique by considering the evolution of Butlers approach to subjectivity, agency, and ethics in her more recent work, and by exploring how geographers have engaged with Butlers approach to performativity as a means to talk about identity and subjectivity. Butler's analysis broadens author's understanding of the political by opening up naturalized assumptions about gender and sexuality to interrogation and contestation. Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter represent key texts articulating Butlers notion of performativity, and over the last two decades geographers deploying the language of performativity and performance overwhelmingly cite these two monographs in their work. The author concludes by suggesting that people look to late Butler for correctives on how to theorize identity in ways that provide the ontological space for analyzing not only how these re-enactments reproduce existing power relations but for considering how they may in some instances be actively reconfiguring and resisting those relations.
