ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the four organizing features of performative writing to begin the discussion of the ethical issues related to the form such as the labels embodied, evocative, partial and material as defining characteristics. Performative writing, like other modes of qualitative inquiry, makes a bid as an alternative form of scholarly research. Thinking of "performative" as an adjective and a noun implies an emerging set of procedural precedents or stylistic conventions associated with performative writing. Such a bid often works by definitional opposition to positivist, objectivist logics that, as the argument goes, remain trapped in the Cartesian mind or body split. Performative writing's call for embodied speech is a bid to make the body relevant, a recovery gesture designed to intervene in the mind/body split. It asks the body to stand in for a number of perceived absences in traditional research practices.
