ABSTRACT
A term hard to pin down Performativity is everywhere – in daily behavior, in the professions, on the internet and media, in the arts, and in language. It and its sister term, “performative,” are very difficult to pin down.These words have acquired a wide range of meanings. Sometimes they are used precisely, but often they are used loosely to indicate something that is “like a performance” without actually being a performance in the orthodox or formal sense. “Performative” is both a noun and an adjective.The noun indicates a word or sentence that does something (I will explain this shortly).The adjective inflects what it modifies with performance-like qualities, such as “performative writing” (see Phelan box).“Performativity” is an even broader term, covering a whole panoply of possibilities opened up by a world in which differences are collapsing, separating media from live events, originals from digital or biological clones, and performing onstage from performing in ordinary life. Increasingly, social, political, economic, personal, and artistic realities take on the qualities of performance. In this sense, performativity is similar to what I called “as” performance in Chapter 2.
