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Judith Butler and performativity

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13 Judith Butler and performativity

Kate Kenny

Reference: Kenny, K. (2019) Judith Butler and Performativity. In: Management, Organizations and
Contemporary Social Theory. S. Clegg and M. Pina e Cunha (eds.).

Chapter objectives
This chapter discusses:

How Butler’s early work examining discourses of gender and sexuality gave
rise to her theories of identification and subjection
Butler’s practical relevance as an influential thinker and a social activist
Affective recognition and its location relative to other post-structural and psy-
choanalytic thinking, including that of Foucault and Lacan
An overview of this approach including its relevance for debates about the rela-
tion between self and other, and agency and structure, within organization
studies
The concept of performativity and its implications for studies of networks of
power and discourse
The effects of subjection, including dynamics of exclusion and violence

Examples from organization studies are provided to illustrate each of these

points.

Introduction
Unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political
existence (Judith Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly).

I felt overwhelmed with pride and gratitude that someone with the integrity to be so
out as a lesbian was taking the leadership that the rest of us needed, not just emo-
tionally but practically. It had been a long time since I felt real leadership before me
that I could rely on. I experienced a great feeling of relief to see and hear that other
voice, that other face literally creating a context one day, for me, whereas the day
before there was none (Sarah Schulman [artist-activist and Distinguished Professor of
English at the City University of New York]).

Judith Butler holds the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School
and is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature
and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She is
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Judith Butler & performativity 245

a philosopher and one of the most challenging thinkers of our time. The rich and
nuanced theory of identification and subjection she develops encompasses an under-
standing of the productive, positive side of these processes along with their darker,
more hurtful aspects. At the same time her account emphasizes the inescapable
unpredictability of the ways in which we identify with dominant aspects of our
social world, including our organizations.
This project began in one of her earlier works, Gender Trouble (1990), in
which she examines discourses of gender and sexuality and how these play out
in social life, including how they interact with each other. In theorizing new dir-
ections for understanding identification, her work follows on directly from the
examination of subjection to power that Foucault was pursuing towards the end
of his life – to do with how and why individuals identify with, and contribute to
the maintenance of, dominant discourses (see chapter on Foucault, this volume).
Butler (1990; 1993) takes up the challenges that he left unanswered by combin-
ing ideas from his version of post-structural thought, with insights from her
reading of Hegel, along with gender and psychoanalytic theorists including Iri-
garay, Kristeva, Freud and Lacan. Like Foucault (1991), she is always question-
ing the things we take for granted; her project is a similar exercise in
‘continuous problematization’.
Students interested in questions of how and why networks of power persist, and
how we are each involved in these processes, will therefore be fascinated by her
ideas. A growing number of scholars in the field of business and management stud-
ies have already been inspired (Harding, 2003; 2007; 2013; Fotaki, 2013; Kenny,
2009; 2010; 2018; Roberts, 2005; Riach, Rumens & Tyler, 2014; 2016). As yet
a relatively small area of work on organizational recognition, identity and subject-
ivity (Kenny, Whittle & Willmott, 2011), Butler’s ideas are ideally placed to
answer some of the most pressing issues facing theorists of organization today who
puzzle the ways in which we become invested in and reproduce power (Fotaki,
Metcalfe & Harding, 2014; Kenny & Euchler, 2012; Pullen & Knights, 2007;
Pullen et al., 2016; Hancock & Tyler, 2007; Ford, 2010; Parker, 2001; 2002; Ford
& Harding, 2004; Fotaki, 2014; Hodgson, 2005; Varman & Al-Amoudi, 2016). In
social theory, feminist and cultural studies, beyond business and management, she
has long been celebrated for offering one of the more valuable explorations of this
question (Hall, 2000, p. 28; Lloyd, 2007).
More than many social theorists, Butler puts her ideas into practice. Having
been involved in protest movements since the age of 16, she is a hero among
activists, including feminist, gay, transgender and transsexual communities, and
AIDS activism. This has led to the emergence of a fanzine Judy dedicated to her
and her ideas. More recently she has been hailed as an inspiration by pro-
Palestinian activists for her stance on the academic boycott of Israel – a complex
position given that she is a Jewish anti-Zionist, and an outspoken one. This
activism has not been well received by all parties, as the protests that accompan-
ied her arrival in Frankfurt to collect the 2012 Adorno Prize show. Even so, she
remains undeterred in her commitment not only to her theoretical work but also
to the necessity of living her intellectual thought through practice and activism.
This sets her apart from professorial colleagues at Berkeley, and from other
social theorists included in this book. Butler’s life, as well as her ideas, have
inspired many people and continue to do so.
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246 Kate Kenny

Affective recognition and organization studies
It is helpful to think of her overall approach as a theory of recognition that
describes how we are compelled, affectively and often without our knowledge or
will, into subjection to powerful discourses, which can sometimes be harmful. This
search for recognition as a ‘valid subject’ – or a person who is considered legitimate
in a given social sphere – powerfully influences life in organizations and institu-
tions. While Butler herself does not tend to use the term ‘affective recognition’, it
usefully brings together some key ideas from her 25 years of theoretical develop-
ment around questions of subjectivity and power.
One of the most valuable aspects of this approach is that it emphasizes neither
the micro-level of the subject, nor the macro-level of structure, at the expense of
the other. Instead it offers a way to iterate between these levels, each vital for
understanding the enactment of power. She adds a further layer from her readings
of Freud and especially Lacan: that of the psyche, arguing that power has
a ‘psychic life’ (Butler, 1997b). Others have provided fuller accounts of the nuances
of Butler’s theory, including Sarah Salih’s Judith Butler (2002) as well as Butler’s
own reflections on her work in, for example, her collections of essays: Undoing
Gender and Senses of the Subject, each of which provides fascinating insights into
different facets of her thinking. In this chapter, I present aspects that have proved
particularly influential for scholars of organization, with relevant examples given.
Affective recognition is a term that brings together insights from theories of
gender, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis to explore how, as subjects, we are
formed by and formative of power. To start, it is helpful to recap Foucault’s ideas
on how power operates through discursive networks that have no centre, or ‘locus’
(Foucault, 1990), but rather are upheld through the day-to-day practice of many
people, in many places. Power persists because lots of people support the discursive
networks of which it consists. This occurs both through the operation of power/
knowledge, a term referring to the ways in which power imbues what is taken for
granted to be acceptable ‘knowledge’ in a given social setting, and through the
social practices that emerge as a result (Foucault, 1990, pp. 94–95). The overall
idea is that power ‘works’ through networks of discourse, with discourse referring
to: ‘ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of
subjectivity and power relations that support these’ (Weedon, 1997, p 105).
Butler’s early work focuses on the ways in which gender and sexuality are consti-
tuted by such networks. She specifically examines the ‘forms of subjectivity’ that
emerge, and the matrix of power relations that support this. We all contribute to
the maintenance of gender as a primary, important category in society, she notes.
For example, we tend to ask, first, whether a newborn baby is a boy or a girl,
before asking anything else about them. Why would this be our first question, she
wonders? What forms of power are in place upholding this binary distinction
between male and female, granting it such importance? Butler looks to wider
power relations, including those relating to the economic well-being of a state
dependent on increasing its population of citizens. She examines norms of patri-
archy and the ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ that effectively upholds this. She con-
cludes that it is the repeated acts of subjection of people everywhere, to these
discourses of gender and sexuality, which end up reinforcing the status quo. For
Brewis, Hampton & Linstead (1997), in one of the earliest examples of Butler’s
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Judith Butler & performativity 247

thought making its way into management and organization studies, it is powerful
discourses around binary ideas of gender that constitute subjects in today’s work-
places as gendered. They instill the impression of a stark difference between male
and female subjects. It is not that these differences reflect innate features of people
who have particular biological traits; rather the male–female distinction is falsely
entrenched and amplified through the emphasis on differences that contemporary
workplaces tend to uphold (see also Fotaki & Harding, 2013; 2018). Taking these
ideas into the sphere of management, Harding studies norms around what it is to
be an acceptable ‘manager’ and describes the compulsion experienced by profes-
sionals to subject themselves to particular ideals that are themselves upheld by
a discursive network influenced by law, rationality and modernity (Harding, 2003,
p. 7). These become manifest in the subject themselves – the manager – as they
struggle to see themselves, and have others see them, as professional managers.

Processes of subjection and the self-other divide

For Butler, the real question is why and how these subject positions are adopted;
what is the drive underlying this compulsion? What is the force that operates
‘upon’ or ‘within’, for example, Harding’s manager? What is it that keeps people
subjected to forms of power? While Foucault became increasingly interested in sub-
jects and subject positions towards the end of his life (1990), he tended to avoid
this particular issue, but Butler declared in Gender Trouble that she was going to
address it directly through an analysis of post-structural thought via psychoanalysis
and gender theory (1997b, p. 18). Subjection, she argues, must be ‘traced in the
turns of psychic life’ (1997b, p. 18). The subject emerges through the positions
offered to it in language; one cannot exist outside of these and therefore outside
the categories of identity that offer us a valid and recognizable position in the
world. We are constituted by these very norms with which we identify because we
are compelled to seek recognition from them. In order to be considered, and to
consider oneself, a valid subject, one must be legitimized by the normative identities
on offer. Power relations and their manifestations as normative categories therefore
dictate the very ‘terms through which subjects are recognized’ (Butler, 2009, p. 3).
Our compulsion to be recognized can be productive in many cases and, for
example, leads to the formation of solidarity groups. Butler (1993) describes the
‘names project’ emerging in the context of AIDS activism; here a community was
formed around a sense of collective pain. Also in her book Bodies that Matter
(1993), she describes how the film Paris is Burning evokes forms of alternative kin-
ship that can emerge when bodies are bound together in a shared acknowledgement
of the subjectivity of the other
But identification can also cause hurt – sometimes we desire norms that ultim-
ately are painful (think of a person subscribing to a particular set of gender norms
around being ‘female’, for example, in order to be recognized as a ‘proper woman’,
and then experiencing these norms as both restrictive and discriminatory) – there is
a darker side to subjection. We cannot opt out unfortunately because ‘… our lives,
our very persistence, depend upon such norms, or, at least, on the possibility that
we will be able to negotiate within them’ (Butler, 2004, p. 32). ‘Called by an injuri-
ous name, I come into social being … I am led to embrace the terms that injure me
because they constitute me socially’ (Butler, 1997b, p. 104), a situation that leads
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248 Kate Kenny

Harding, for example, to describe subjectivity as an ongoing ‘tug of war’ of desires
for subjection and the acknowledged pain it can bring. In many cases, because we
cannot do otherwise, it is better to ‘exist in subordination’ than not to exist at all
(Butler, 1997b, p. 7). Affective forces bind the subject to discourse (Braunmühl,
2012; Stavrakakis, 2008).

Butler’s ek-static self

These ideas on identification and subjection do not suggest the presence of an
‘inner self’ in Butler’s account, as this is anathema to post-structural thinking.
Rather, her psyche is a Lacanian one, structured by the social – the symbolic order,
or the world of language. On this view, the idea of an ‘inner’ psyche is problem-
atized as an illusion informed by a wider social and political context that empha-
sizes and valorizes the individual (Butler, 1997b, p. 19). Reading Foucault’s ideas
on discursive power via Lacan, Butler is inspired by the latter’s refusal of the per-
sistent ‘ontological dualism’ whereby the ‘inner’ psyche and ‘outer’ world are seen
as separate. The subject is constituted through language – through discourse – and
thus the psyche and the political are mutually constitutive (see, for example, Lacan,
2006). This implies an ‘ek-static’ view on what the ‘self’ is – it is radically outside;
‘the terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, outside oneself,
beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author’ (Butler, 2004, p. 1). This
turns our commonly accepted view of what it is to be a self, to have an inner life
that is somehow our own, on its head. We are radically external, always other to
ourselves (Butler, 2004, p. 148; 1997b). This perspective goes beyond other theor-
ies of the mutual recognition of self and other,1 even those proposing that these
entities are necessarily mutually constitutive.2 Butler’s approach moves us towards
a more radically ‘external’ concept of the subject, which is different because it
eschews the idea of false harmony between the self and the other upon which it
depends for existence, instead seeing the condition of ‘being in relation’ as imbued
with tension, ‘struggle around abjection and continual iteration’ (2004, p. 19;
Kenny & Fotaki, 2015). The radically external self-other is at once complex,
ambiguous and in a relation that is always in danger of rupturing, for reasons
described further on. Moreover, in contrast to other theories of recognition, Butler
places power at centre stage.3 Even though we are constituted as subjects through
the presence of wider contextual forces, this does not mean that we as subjects, or
the norms to which we find ourselves subjectified, are static or determined, and
Butler’s concept of performativity illuminates this.

Agency, structure, performativity

In Gender Trouble, performativity is developed to problematize the idea that the
norms influencing categories of identity to which people find themselves subscrib-
ing, even unwillingly, are somehow determined. Performativity shows us that
norms are not static but contingent. In search of a valued sense of stability, whole-
ness and ‘coherence’ that is always eluding us, we look to powerful norms and dis-
courses in social life, seeking recognition from these. This is not straightforward,
however. While many critiques of post-structural thought point out that it offers
little room for what they call ‘agency’, Butler is at pains to show that the
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Judith Butler & performativity 249

reproduction of discourse, by the actions of the subject, is by no means determined.
Neither does this imply that the subject is somehow agentic and able to choose her
attachments at will. Again, Butler invokes the psyche to complexify this traditional
debate around the agency-structure dualism, problematizing both sides as she does
so. For her the psyche develops through years of layered identifications and losses,
desires that have been variably met or denied, and this unique ‘congealment’ of
attachments affords an unknowingness to any process of subjection (Butler, 1997b,
p. 169). In addition, the subject is never self-identical at two consecutive moments
in time, but rather exists in an ongoing condition of transformation (Butler, 2004);
Derrida’s concept of différance is drawn upon to describe the subtle time lag
between one iteration of a given signifier and the next (Butler, 1990, p. 179). The
self that is constituted through signification is thus always ‘at a temporal remove
from its former appearance’ (Butler, 2004, p. 148). These insights represent vital
contributions to an organizational scholarship that can become mired in ‘either–or’
debates around agency and structure that, at best, sees them as mutually constitu-
tive, but even so struggles to theorize the nature of this constitution and what it
means both for subjects and relations of power (Kenny, 2012).
Performativity begins with the idea that there is no ‘fixed’ essence to any phe-
nomena within the social – there is always, as Lacan notes, a lack at the heart of
any signification. The ideal subject that is invoked by a particular set of discourses
therefore does not exist, but rather is upheld by fantasy. For example, the ideal of
‘woman’ implied by discourses around gender is an illusion. Instead, each time the
label is ‘taken up’ or appropriated by a subject, it shifts and alters slightly because
of accompanying intersections with various other norms around, for example, race
and class, but also because of the different psychic landscapes of those involved in
the enactment of subject positions, and the temporal subversion inherent to these
(Butler, 1990). The impact of this idea has been profound for scholars and people
outside of universities alike, because it defuses the power of normative ideals (Bor-
gerson, 2005). It says to people who feel trapped into toxic attachments with
labels, just so that they can retain a sense of validity as humans, that these are not
determined, and nor does the ideal evoked by the discourse even exist. Attempts to
identify with such an ideal are therefore futile. The process of subjection, of
‘becoming’ a subject in the terms offered by a particular norm, is ‘uneasy’, unpre-
dictable and overdetermined (Butler, 1997b, p. 30).
Importantly this means that norms can be subverted because of their very unpre-
dictability – and identities can be taken in radical new directions. In a well-known
example, Butler uses a drag queen to show how such performances symbolize the
‘troubling’ of gender. A drag show is a setting that amplifies the realization, on the
part of the observer, that there is clearly no substance to the idea of an ‘ideal
woman’ because of the various ways in which this ideal is performed and per-
ceived. This has been one of the more popular of Butler’s ideas for organization
scholars to date, with the performativity of gender informing studies of how TV
comedy shows can disrupt and parody idealized gender positions in the workplace
(Tyler & Cohen, 2008), or relations of power and domination in transnational
trade organizations under contemporary capitalism (Kenny, 2009). Within organ-
ization studies these ideas have been used to show how employees negotiate organ-
izational norms, finding ways of ‘doing’ new subject positions even as they are
injured or ‘undone’ by expectations of how they should be and act (Thanem &
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250 Kate Kenny

Wallenberg, 2014; Linstead & Pullen, 2006). Tyler’s (2012) account of ‘dirty
work’ in sex shops is an exemplar of these dynamics at play in the context of an
organization; she describes how workers absorb the experience of stigma and
devalued status because the industry is seen as morally tainted. At the same time
they find ways to survive this subjective positioning as ‘sex shop workers’, includ-
ing through subverting accepted norms around what this kind of work might look
like. Others have described these dynamics in the context of older workers (Riach,
Rumens & Tyler, 2014), employees (Harding, 2007), managers (Harding, 2003;
Roberts, 2005) and workers in non-profit organizations (Kenny, 2010).

Subjection and exclusion

Subjection causes hurt when we create boundaries around categories of identifica-
tion – dictating who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ of what is considered to be normal.
This can cause pain to those left outside. Examples from Butler’s work include
people who do not subscribe to either side of a gender binary but experience them-
selves as occupying a more complex, fluid gender position. Such individuals can
find themselves excluded and punished in certain social settings and also betrayed
by an unwilled and yet felt desire to be seen as a normal, ‘valid’ subject. This can
be catastrophic, with people cast as ‘impossible beings’, outside of the norm and
therefore unrecognizable (Butler, 1990; 2004, p. 31). Such exclusions can then be
turned in upon the self, in a painful form of self-beratement. Butler valuably works
with ideas from Mary Douglas (see also chapter on Douglas in this volume) and
Julia Kristeva to develop her account of this darker side to the psychic life of
power (1990, p. 168), drawing on the Freudian notion of melancholia to illustrate
how this exclusion operates (1997b, p. 139). The point is that these processes of
abjection are part of how a sense of subjectivity is constructed: boundaries rely
upon that which is outside them in order to come into being and to persist. Repudi-
ated, excluded others are therefore the condition of possibility for the subject her-
self to exist; they ‘form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject’
(Butler, 1993, p. 3). She describes how:

If construction produces the ‘domain of intelligible bodies’, must it not also

produce as well a domain of unthinkable, abject, unliveable bodies? This latter
domain is not the opposite of the former, for oppositions are, after all, part of
intelligibility; the latter is the excluded and illegible domain that haunts the
former domain as the spectre of its own impossibility, the very limit to intelligi-
bility, its constitutive outside.
(1993, p. ix)

Again, the idea of the autonomy and sovereignty of the ‘self’ is problematized –
it is constituted through and emerges because of such exclusion. The other that has
become abject is therefore part of the self (1997a, p. 50); this can yield a strange
preoccupation or fascination with the excluded other who must paradoxically be
kept close. For Butler, however, this ambivalence that surrounds the ways in which
selves are constructed means that we must acknowledge and temper the harm that
our own self-constructions might do to others, as she elaborates in Giving an
Account of Oneself.
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Judith Butler & performativity 251

On a practical level, this framing is useful for the analysis of contemporary
racism and exclusions of vulnerable groups in her recent work. It has also informed
her thinking on public acts of speaking; for example, in Excitable Speech, these
ideas are extended to why some kinds of speech are acceptable and others not. For
her the perceived legitimacy of a statement is tied up in the subject position of the
person doing the uttering. Certain kinds of speech fall within acceptable norms,
with those issuing them considered viable subjects. Others speak outside of what is
seen as normal and they can be excluded (Butler, 1997a, p. 133). Her work is
aimed at problematizing understandings of hate speech, querying the ways in which
gay and lesbian soldiers in the US army were censored in how and when they
might articulate their sexuality: speech was regulated through regulating the subject
positions held by the speakers. How speech is received depends on how the speaker
is framed. In organization studies, scholars have drawn on these ideas to under-
stand legitimate leadership rhetoric (Harding et al., 2011), and illegitimate state-
ments by whistleblowers (Kenny, 2018). In an explication of how this plays out in
the context of organization theory and scholarship, Fotaki and Harding (2018)
engage with Butler alongside other gender theorists to explain how women occupy
a place of exclusion, being subordinated and considered inferior as a result; their
analysis also offers suggestions for how this might be overturned.

Organization, violence and precarity

Constructing these kinds of boundaries can be a precursor to violence, as Butler
discusses in the compelling account of the US ‘war on terror’, and the ways in
which certain subjects are represented in the media, in Frames of War (2010). Her
ideas shed light on how the dynamics of recognition within a certain society, in this
case the United States, mean that in order for this polity to define itself (as Western,
enlightened, civilized and under threat), it must reject and expel a repugnant other
(as Middle-Eastern, Muslim, backward, aggressive). Certain discursive ‘frames’ cir-
culate in which these notions are reinforced, through photographs, stories and even
the construction of space, including Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. These
frames appeal to people on an affective level, inciting fear in some, a sense of
national pride in others, and ultimately drawing on a felt, emotive force on the
part of the person experiencing them. This affective force effectively ensures the
construction and continued maintenance of the frame.

Butler’s point here is that normative violence – the construction of certain per-
sons as ‘abject’, other and therefore deserving of exclusion – can be a precursor
to actual physical, structural and institutional violence. Framing can rob certain
kinds of human of any subjectivity at all, which is a different condition to
oppression. As she explains elsewhere: ‘to be oppressed means that you already
exist as a subject of some kind … but to be unreal is something else again. To
be oppressed you must first become intelligible’ (2004, p. 30). It is easy to exert
and to defend acts of violence against a population of ‘unreal’ people – who
have never been subjects – because this does not evoke the kind of empathy or
rage that violence against sympathetic groups of people would bring. Ultimately
‘there have been no lives, and no losses’, where violence of this nature takes
place, because, from the perspective of the viewer, there is ‘no common physical
condition, no vulnerability that serves as the basis for an apprehension of our
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252 Kate Kenny

commonality’ (Butler, 2004, p. 25). Framing can militate against the formation
of any empathetic fellow feeling, or impulse to protect the other against the vul-
nerability that is the common condition of humanity. It is, she argues in Precar-
ious Life, this shared vulnerability that might provide the basis for a sense of
solidarity between states and societies that are ostensibly very different, albeit
that opportunities to foster this seem to be lessening.
In organization theory, there is a growing albeit very limited scholarship on the
role played by organizations in the enactment of violence, and Butler’s work on
normative violence stands to make a valued contribution to this essential project
(Kenny, 2018; Varman & Al-Amoudi, 2016). Indeed, while it has not been
a primary focus of her work, organization has increasingly featured in her later
writings in which she reflects upon the precarity of working life under contempor-
ary conditions of capitalism, and its subtle structural violences. In conversation
with Athena Athanasiou (2013, p. 148), she describes the ‘violent rhythms of being
instrumentalised as disposable labor’ as new forms of work bring new forms of vul-
nerability and suffering: ‘Never knowing the future, being subjected to arbitrary
hirings and firings, having one’s labor intensively utilized and exploited’ all lead to
a condition of ‘radical helplessness’ for many in work today. In addition to this
focus on precarious labour, she is also interested in how social movement organiza-
tions emerge and are sustained, and specifically how bodies – physical and material
presences that can effect change by simply ‘showing up’ – continue to represent
essential sites of protest but also solidarity, even in a world where communication
and social commentary increasingly move into the virtual.

Conclusion
Overall, affective recognition offers a rich and evocative theory for scholars wishing
to explore processes of identification and subjection, including those relating to
organizations. It encompasses the pleasure and warmth of identification and
belonging – essential aspects of being human – but also the potential for pain and
indeed violence both to ourselves and to others around us, that are inherent to
these dynamics. Affective recognition is, like life itself, ultimately ambivalent; the
norms that hold such power over our lives are neither determined nor monolithic
but always open to being subverted. The ‘game’ goes on.

End-of-chapter exercises
1. Butler is widely recognized for putting theory into practice. Think about the
social theories that most appeal to you, including those learned in this book.
How might you practise these in everyday life?
2. Think about one of the ‘identity categories’ that you occupy. Is it, as Butler
suggests, performative in how it operates?
3. Are the social norms that inform this category changing, and if so, how?
4. What kinds of attachments do you experience in relation to this category: are they
affective and if so, do you experience this as positive, negative or otherwise?
5. For Butler and other gender theorists, the body is central to effective organizing,
including organizing of social protest. Can you think of ways in which bodies
are important to other kinds of organizing we encounter in everyday life?
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Judith Butler & performativity 253

Glossary
Affective recognition In search of a valued sense of stability, wholeness and ‘coher-
ence’ that is always eluding us, we look to powerful norms and discourses in
social life, seeking recognition from the subject positions on offer from these,
albeit often unconsciously. We thus subject ourselves to such norms. This recog-
nition is experienced affectively, through psychic attachments to the process.
Exclusions Exclusion can emerge when, in the process of subject construction, bound-
aries are created around categories of subject, determining who is included and who
is left out. This can cause hurt and pain to those outside the limits of what is seen to
be a normal, ‘valid’ subject, an experience in which violence directed at the self by
others can turn inward. Exclusions are part of the way in which a sense of subjectiv-
ity is constructed: boundaries rely upon that which is outside them in order for cat-
egories of subject to come into being and to persist. Repudiated, excluded others are
therefore the condition of possibility for the subject herself to exist.
Performativity Performativity explains how there is no ‘fixed’ essence to any category
of identity. The norms that influence these categories are not static but contingent,
and open to change. These norms are performed over time and therefore are always
being produced, and altered, by those who adopt them. Norms of gender, for
example, while having significant influence over us, are not determined.

Notes
1 See critiques of Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth’s work, for example in McQueen
(2015); McNay (2008).
2 See, for example, Levinas (1969); Merleau-Ponty (2002)
3 In addition to Foucault and Butler described here, see also Haraway (1991); Lloyd
(2005); McNay (2008) on this point.

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