ABSTRACT
Performativity—how language and nonverbal communication tacitly or overtly affects social actions—structures all utterances and imaginative literature. Building on J.L. Austin’s speech act theory (Austin 1962), Judith Butler has developed, since the 1990s, a theory of gender performativity (Butler 1997). It has been widely appropriated as a critical tool to understand sexuality and gender variance in the West, although the theory was not specifically created in the context of trans studies. This chapter examines transness through a theory of trans performativity that recalibrates our critical capacity to understand tacit transness. Specifically, this chapter engages what might be called body-swap narratives in a global context that were not labeled as trans, including Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Sally Potter’s film adaptation of it, Makoto Shinkai’s film Your Name, the Wachowski Sisters’ Matrix trilogy, as well as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Trevor Nunn’s and Andy Fickman’s film versions of the comedy. My theory of performativity hinges on the idea that the social practices and interpersonal relationships known as “gender” evolve over time and in different social spaces and that these practices are constituted, and sometimes undermined, by performative speech acts. Performativity destabilizes the idea of singularity and the perceived absolutism of such signifiers as gender. The case studies show further that trans performance can become overt or tacit over time. Actors may use certain stage practices to suppress or index transness in specific contexts. Their speech acts may be recognized or misrecognized by audiences as symbolizing or evading particular themes. In a future point, the actors may no longer desire that same type of legibility.
