Performativity

Performativity is the capacity of speech and communication not simply to communicate but rather to act or consummate an action, or to construct and perform an identity. A common example is the act of saying "I pronounce you man and wife" by a licensed minister before two people who are prepared to wed (or "I do" by one of those people upon being asked whether they take their partner in marriage). An umpire calling a strike, a judge pronouncing a verdict, or a union boss declaring a strike are all examples of performative speech.

Some theorists in philosophy and gender studies, notably Judith Butler, have argued that even commonplace communication and speech acts are performative, in that they serve to define identity. In this way, performativity reverses the idea that an identity is the source of more secondary actions (speech, gestures). Instead, it inquires into the construction of identities as they are caused by performative actions, behaviors, and gestures. This view is influenced by philosophers including Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and John L. Austin.

The term derives from the founding work in speech act theory by ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin, who did not use the word "performativity," but did, beginning in the 1950s, give the name performative utterances to situations where saying something was doing something, rather than simply reporting on or describing reality. The paradigmatic case here is speaking the words "I do." Breaking with analytic philosophy, Austin argued in How to Do Things With Words that a "performative utterance" cannot be said to be either true or false, as a constative utterance might be. It can only be judged either "happy" or "infelicitous," depending upon whether the conditions required for its success have been met. In this sense, performativity is a function of the pragmatics of language. Having shown that all utterances perform actions, even apparently constative ones, Austin famously discarded the distinction between "performative" and "constative" utterances halfway through the lecture series that became the book and replaced it with a three-level framework:

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