Performativity, precarity, and Sexual Policies

Abstract

Gender performativity is one of the core concepts in Judith Butler's work.In this paper Butler re-examines this term and completes it with the idea of precarity, by making a reference to those who are exposed to injury, violence and displacement, those who are in risk of not being qualified as a subject of recognition, There are issues that constantly arise in the nationstates, such as claiming a right when there is not a right to claim, or being forced to follow certain norms in order to change these norms.This is particularly relevant in the sexual policies that are shaped within the nation-states. Key wordsPerformativity, precariety, sexual policies, post-structuralism thought that I might take this opportunity to think again about gender performativity and to try to give an account of how I moved from a focus on performativity to a more general concern with precarity.Performativity was, to be sure, an account of agency, and precarity seems to focus on conditions that threaten life in ways that appear to be outside of one's control.Are these two concepts as different as they might at first appear?To conduct this comparison, or to describe this passage, let me briefly review what is meant by gender performativity and also what is meant be precarity, and then let me explain what has prompted me to change my focus, to some degree, but also to point out what has not changed.To say that gender is performative is to say that it is a certain kind of enactment; the "appearance" of gender is often mistaken as a sign of its internal or inherent truth; gender is prompted by obligatory norms to be one gender or the other (usually within a strictly binary frame), and the reproduction of gender is thus always a negotiation with power; and finally, there is no gender without this reproduction of norms that risks undoing or redoing the norm in unexpected ways, thus opening up the possibility of a remaking of gendered reality along new lines.

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