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This paper proposes to critically review Judith Butler's conceptualization of performativity from 1990-2015. In these years Butler proposes to extend the scope of J. L Austin’s concept towards gender theory, replacing Austin's speech act analytic with a post-structural analytic of power. Butler critically uses the reference to poststructuralism and French feminism to reinterpret the Aristotelian conception of the intelligibility of power as the materialization of a discursive form, subordinating to it the scope of performativity. Noting that this influence is absent in Austin's theoretical and analytical grounding of the concept, we will finally contrast the scope and limitations of Butler facing Austin.

In 1723, the first volumes of the seven-part book series, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-1737), were published in Amsterdam by the exiled Huguenot Jean Frederic Bernard. Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 engravings by the famous exiled Parisian engraver Bernard Picart, the Cérémonies provided a revolutionary insight into all the world’s religions by comparing ceremonies, customs, and rituals on an equal footing. Earlier research has already shown that Picart’s body of illustrations must be considered as a « source of, and target for, social agency », to put it in a Gellian way. Accordingly, Picart’s printed illustrations can be considered as tools to elicit emotions and demand the viewer’s active intervention by means of emotionally laden visual strategies. In this article, I intend to deepen our understanding of the way(s) in which Picart’s representations of religious ceremonies from all over the world worked as a profound force for change by looking into the various ways in which Picart tended to achieve his goal. In addition to earlier scholarly work that highlighted Picart’s use of the comparative method (Hunt et al. 2010), the « con‑visualization » of images (Von Wyss-Giacosa 2019), and the « dis‑orientation of the self » (Tarantino 2021), I argue that his artistic strategy is also highly indebted to the use of theatricality as a visual rhetorical and performative device to spread knowledge.

This article presents a discussion about gender based on the notions of performance and performativity, seeking to weave relationships between these terms with art and the educational field. It pursues the idea of a performative feminist pedagogy, performed by the (auto)biographed body, in artistic performances developed by women, involving the issue of gender, more specifically the performances Facial Hair Transplants (1972) and Rape Scene (1973), by the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. Supported by researchers from multiple areas, this study aims to critically contribute to the area of education, redefining educational practice from an aesthetic and gender principle, offering reflections on the production of difference.

Anthropologists and ethnographers who observed the making of string figures in various indigenous societies at the turn of the 20th century often described this practice as highly elaborate. String figure-making as performed in “Eskimo” (Inuit) societies was more particularly analyzed as a prime example of the “magical” or “religious” significance that could be attributed to such a practice in non-western contexts. Building both on the study of classical ethnography relating to different groups of the “Inuit area,” and on fieldwork carried out in Inuit communities of the eastern Canadian Arctic in the 2000s-2010s, this paper examines the forms of the ritual or symbolic efficacy ascribed to string figure-making in pre-Christian Inuit societies. Several modes of action involved in this practice are thus considered here in view of the idea of impacts on the cosmic order or meteorological system, and on the human relationships with game animals and with ancestors. They are further put in perspective with Inuit references to shamanic action.

This article studies identities not as modes of identification but as a relationship with the unknown. To investigate this possibility, two projects are analyzed, distant in time but comparable by the strategies to turn the artistic space into a research medium, Lucubrations about the possible whereabouts of the living book of Xocén (2018-2021), from the cultural platform Ojo Theater, and The Ritual of the Serpent (1923), by the German art historian Aby Warburg, which will be studied from a contextual, situated and relational perspective of the performative, applied to the uses of identity images of native communities.

The evolving research field of social studies of economics (SSE) has shown that economics as a profession has gained influence on public debate and political power in many countries and in different social contexts. The channels of influence for economists are complex and widespread, i.e., there are multiple channels through which economists are able to influence public policy issues. In this article, we provide an in-depth analysis of a sample of the 85 most published authors of trade-related research in top economics journals to characterize the social field of elite economists and show how position in that field correlates with influence and power in and outside academia. More specifically, our data include information on their academic careers, their professional social networks, and their involvement in a variety of possible intermediaries between academic economics and policymaking (e.g., institutions such as think tanks or the media). We apply multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and cluster analysis to show how different configurations of intra-academic capital are associated to policy-relevant extra-academic capital. The overall results of this analysis are threefold. First, the biographical analysis of elite trade economists reveals a remarkable degree of concentration of different forms of capital, which indicates a strong hierarchical order within the elite segment of trade economists. Second, and in line with this, despite the overall unequal distribution of capital within this elite sample, different forms of intra-academic and extra-academic capitals become visible. Third, while the cluster analysis reveals a main “average core” of (trade-)policy-oriented economists, the group of economists with very high capital is separated into two smaller clusters: The “ivory elite” cluster consists mainly of academic capital variables, while the “public econs” cluster is also composed of non-academic variables from the policy and media channels. So, even among elite trade economists, it is only as small number, who really is successfully gaining political and societal impact.

This article is the extension of a previous publication on the use of particitation as a thesaurus in the protest speech of Algerian demonstrators during the popular movement of February 22nd, 2019. This present study will take up the concept of particitation initiated by Maigueneau, while considering the digital language as the thesaurus which feeds in the background the militant discourse in the slogans of the young Algerian demonstrators. Thus, through a socio linguistic, enunciative and pragmatic study ; we will show that the use of computer code in these statements is not only the expression of a quest for recognition of a social category, but also a new means of mobilization.

Tom Stoppard is an outstanding playwright, embellishing his plays with scientific and philosophical approaches and presenting complicated, mysterious plots to the reader. He bases the plot of his postmodern play, Hapgood (1988), on quantum theory and draws an analogy between Werner Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminism, termed “The Uncertainty Principle”, and international espionage. Thus, he constructs the complicated relationship between the particle and the whole throughout the play to depict the relativistic and deceptive relationship between sex and gender. Focusing on the title character of the play, the present study proposes that the play represents the fluid and indeterminate nature of gender and identity within the context of espionage and indeterminism. Hapgood, who is a mother, a lover and a successful master agent in a man-dominated British secret service, navigates between “masculinity” and “femininity” during a day. Moreover, she metamorphoses into her twin, who is entirely different from her, except for their identical faces, to entrap the mole in the office. The study consults Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and fluidity to indicate the unpredictable and uncertain nature of ‘gender identity’, which formulates itself through performances in social relations and trespasses the heterosexual matrix. It juxtaposes the Butlerian approach with the Uncertainty Principle in quantum theory pertaining to the confusing relationship between gender, the body and identity. The Butlerian analysis of the play reveals that particularly the modern way of life makes women transgress the Cartesian dichotomies of sex/gender, masculine/feminine and man/woman through the fluidity of their roles even during a single day and makes it difficult to find out who is really who.

Copyright of Akofena is the property of Universite Felix Houphouet Boigny and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The proposed research falls within the framework of semiopragmatics, which brings together the theories of illocution and dialogism with narrative semiotics. The interest in an intersection between these theoretical models is to represent the perlocutionary transformation operated by the speech acts in different phases of Greimas’ narrative scheme, and to understand how the dialogic instances, by means of their enunciative postures, contribute to the performativity of the speech acts. This modelling also allows us to account for the existence of an implicit component of the institutional discourse and for the latency of certain speech acts in this kind of discourse. In our corpus, a text produced by The Mission of information on Islam in France, we aim at tracing the intertextual genesis of the discourse of expertise – and at showing that the performative power of the institutional subject passes through the non-inscription of the subject in the enunciation. Indeed, the ideologies that are transiting in the expert discourse through the voice of another are not so much summoned in a heuristic concern as to legitimize this performative power.

Disney princesses have evolved in recent years, as Disney seems to have re-appropriated Campbell’s monomyth of the hero’s journey for heroines. The paper discusses the narratives of Disney’s adapted or original fairytales and links the narratives to related issues with regard to gender representations, i.e. class, family relations, sexuality, drawing the characters and gender performativity

Much has been written on Derrida’s and Butler's discussions of Austin’s speech act theory, but one thing at least remains unclear: why does performativity hinge on the notion of “force,” and what “force” are we here talking about? For Austin, the force of the performative signals a performative enforcement, a validating repetition of prior conditions of legitimation: it testifies to the “felicity” or “success” of the performative event.According to Derrida, this articulation between force and success closes off the eventness of the event; it implies an ontological reduction and reconstruction, that is, an appropriation of the event in the form of performative power. However, the performative, if it is to truly produce an event, must exceed prior conditions of validation and transform, in its performance, the conditions of validity it was meant to repeat. Eventness must remain beyond and without power. In this perspective, the article explores the “force” which Derrida describes as “force of the event”: an excessive force in the face of which “performative force” must fail. At bottom undecidable, “the force of the event” suggests the fallibility of force and the force of fallibility. I compare this self-deconstructive notion of force with Butler’s subversive politics of the performative, which theorizes “performative force” as the force of a failure – but a successful failure – to comply with the norm: a non-normative repetition and a reappropriation that forces change, and of which “queer” is at once the example, the model, and the very name. While Derrida’s is an attempt to think the uncanny force of a strange, non-appropriable, non-ontologizable, and perhaps “queer” event or quasi-event, characterized by fallibility and undecidability, Butler’s theory of power and her notion of “performative force” reverse, but fundamentally maintain, Austin’s ontological oppositions between success and failure, legitimacy and illegitimacy, repetition and change.

In post-apartheid South Africa, the representation of queer identities in Afrikaans-language films have become increasingly prominent. However, many such films focus on past contexts or serve as comedic depictions, failing to confront the complex issues faced by individuals in contemporary Afrikaner communities. Etienne Kallos’s 2018 coming-of-age film Die stropers (The Harvesters) candidly depicts the challenges faced by adoptive brothers Janno and Pieter, who must negotiate desire and gender in a conservative, Afrikaans farming community. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity and recent reformulations of Raewyn Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity, we examine the discursive (re)production of hegemonic Afrikaner masculinity within the boys’ adoptive family and community. We investigate how the protagonists strategically deploy performative masculinities to achieve belonging and acceptance as heirs, even if the ideals they emulate oppress and restrict them. We propose that the protagonists’ strategic deployment of performative masculinities represents their claiming of agency in contexts where gender and desire are aggressively policed. Furthermore, their navigation of hegemony in this white, Afrikaner community through resistance and consent might point to a claiming of space for queer identities and the continued transmutation of hegemonic masculinity.

Our paper is situated within the broader exploration of the epistemic and aesthetic potential of biomedical imaging technologies on the human lived experience. Intra-Active Sense-Making is guided by the grounding thesis that imaging technology ought to be understood as a set of material, rhetorical and performative processes, and as a way to challenge the ocularcentric presuppositions. By drawing on the new materialistic theses that phenomena are not pre-existent to intra-action, and that agency should be understood as distributed on human, animal, objectual, and ‘physical’ levels, we offer a performative understanding of biomedical imaging operations complementary to the reflective paradigm. Biomedical imaging may be understood through our idea of intra-active sense-making; while much literature states that medical imaging establishes a view of the self as quantified, atomized, and governable, we argue that the co-configuration of human senses and digital sensors is a source of new sense-making capabilities.

New Performative Forms in Ancient Practices: The Greek Symposion as “mise en perf” . Synesthaesia, Sympotic Space and Performance The Greek symposion was an all-male drinking celebration that included wine consumption, love, games, philosophical conversation, and live performance by both the symposiasts and by professional artists. Using the terms “performise” and “mise en perf,” coined by Patrice Pavis, this article explores how new performative forms can be found in ancient practices and, more specifically, within the cultural performance that was the Greek symposion. These two terms encompass both the performative and the theatrical character of the symposion that can both be traced through the study of its specific ritual and of sympotic space (the dining room dedicated exclusively to the symposion). In this way, a reinterpretation of this ancient social and cultural event will be provided through the lens of Theatre Studies and Performance Theory.

The purpose of the research is analyzing philosophical and theological aspects of iconoclasm taking into account its various forms and secular analogies. The study concentrates on such semiotic features of iconoclasm as negation, prohibition, or deliberate breaking certain visual images. The principles, criteria, and practices of iconoclasm are examined in the aspects of semantics and pragmatics. It is emphasized that every society requires methods that provide the division of the visual images into the acceptable (true) and unacceptable (false) ones. Although it is considered to be a rule that iconoclasm appeared in conditions of monotheism, it is stated that iconoclasm had analogies in early forms of religion. The author claims that the manifestations of the iconoclastic attitude can be found in Platonic metaphysics and the metaphysical tradition, which fought against distorted or false copies of ideas. Iconoclasm is considered retrospectively; a special importance is paid to changes in the structure of representation in late modernity. Representation is understood as the substitution of one object by another, in which the object that is replaced is the referent, whereas the substituting object is the signifier. The analysis focuses on the evolution of mediation structures, which originates from the emergence of the concept of logos as the embodiment of a universally meaningful meaning. As a result, this evolution broke relationship between the referent and the signifier, and the signifier gets its autonomy. Despite the fact that the complete autonomy of the signifier is a characteristic feature of late modernity, as a trend it manifested itself already at the early stages of modernization and indicated a qualitative leap in the strengthening of the power of signs, including visual images. The new quality of this power in modern research is interpreted using a term borrowed from the linguistic theory of speech acts – performativity, the ability to “create things with words”. When applied to signs and, in particular, to visual images, this means that the representation that has been released and therefore has become self-referential takes the place of the referent and is understood as reality itself, which requires an appropriate course of actions from a person. At the same time, the treatment of self-referential representation as “the thing itself” is considered not only as a consequence of its performativity, but also as a paradigm of idolatry, which the iconoclasts criticized precisely for identifying the Deity with various images that were considered autonomous and self-referential. Therefore, in the context under consideration, self-referentiality means performativity, and iconoclasm seeks to reject not specific visual images as they are, but the internally contradictory idea of autonomous representation. Self-referentiality of representation as a condition of its performativity can arise in two ways. At the first stages of weakening the connection between the representation and the referent, it can be destroyed by a person consciously in order to give the representation an arbitrary meaning. At the last stage of the development of the structures of representation, this connection disappears for objective reasons, corresponding to the regime of signs, which is the reason for the steady predominance of simulacra. These changes turn the iconoclastic attitude into a necessary aspect of cultural criticism. Целью статьи является анализ философских и теологических аспектов иконоборчества с учётом его различных форм и секулярных аналогов. Исследование основывается на анализе семиотических особенностей иконоборческой установки в качестве отрицания, запрета или целенаправленного разрушения определённых визуальных образов. Принципы, критерии и практики иконоборчества рассматриваются в статье в аспектах семантики и прагматики. Подчёркивается, что каждое общество нуждается в средствах, обеспечивающих разделение визуальных образов на приемлемые (истинные) и неприемлемые (ложные). Хотя считается, что соответствующие принципы, критерии и практики возникли в условиях монотеизма, отмечается, что у иконоборчества есть аналог в ранних формах религии. Указывается также, что проявления иконоборческой установки могут быть обнаружены в платоновской метафизике и метафизической традиции в целом, боровшейся против искажённых или ложных копий идей. Иконоборчество в статье рассматривается в ретроспективе, особое значение придаётся изменениям структуры репрезентации в позднем модерне. Репрезентация понимается как замещение одного объекта другим, в котором тот объект, который замещается, является референтом, тогда как замещающий объект является означающим. Анализ сосредоточивается на эволюции структур опосредования, которая берёт начало от возникновения концепции логоса в качестве воплощения общезначимого смысла. Отмечается, что в итоге эта эволюция привела к разрыву отношений между референтом и означающим, то есть к появлению у последнего автономии. Несмотря на то, что полная автономия означающего является характерной чертой позднего модерна, как тенденция она проявилась уже на ранних этапах модернизации и указывала на качественный скачок в усилении власти знаков, включая визуальные образы. Новое качество этой власти в современных исследованиях интерпретируется с помощью термина, заимствованного из лингвистической теории речевых актов, – перформативность, способность «создавать вещи с помощью слов». В применении к знакам и, в особенности, к визуальным образам это означает, что высвободившаяся и поэтому ставшая самореференциальной репрезентация занимает место референта и понимается как сама реальность, которая требует от человека соответствующего образа действий. При этом обращение с самореференциальной репрезентацией как с «самой вещью» рассматривается не только в качестве следствия её перформативности, но и как парадигма идолопоклонства, которое иконоборцы критиковали именно за отождествление Божества с различными образами, считавшимися автономными и самореференциальными. Поэтому в рассматриваемом контексте самореференциальность означает перформативность, и иконоборчество стремится отвергнуть не конкретные визуальные образы как таковые, но внутренне противоречивую идею автономной репрезентации. Отмечается, что самореференциальность репрезентации как условие её перформативности может возникнуть двумя способами. На первых этапах ослабления связи между репрезентацией и референтом она может быть разрушена человеком сознательно с целью придания репрезентации произвольного смысла. На последнем этапе развития структур репрезентации эта связь исчезает по объективным причинам, соответствуя тому режиму знаков, который является причиной устойчивого преобладания симулякров. Указанные изменения превращают иконоборческую установку в необходимый аспект критики культуры.

The article discusses the semiotics of greeting card with focus on the discursive configuration of the recto side. The aim is twofold: to examine the possible ways image and verbal text are combined and identify the meaning produced by its different configurations. Soviet Lithuanian New Year greeting cards (dated from the late 1950s to 1989) are analyzed to accomplish the study. The methodological approach is compound. The guidelines of Greimasian theory of semiotics and Tartu-Moscow semiotic school as well as the ideas of Jacques Fontanille and Jean-Marie Floch are used to perform the study. The discourse analysis revealed that when placed on the recto side greeting text both anchors the content of the image and acts as a performative utterance. Depending on the specific configuration of the recto side and the material aspects of a greeting card, the role of enunciator can be subjected either to the artist or image figures. However, in some cases the performative function becomes secondary. For example, when playfulness established by the interrelation of image and verbal text is given priority over the greeting act.

Research has traditionally been conducted for clearly defined “purposes” rather than undetermined “things.” This discrepancy keeps research’s connotational field tied to scientific and epistemic fields but not to artistic or arts-related fields. The author starts with an outline of phenomenology and writing, followed by an analysis of performativity, its origins in ordinary language philosophy in the British tradition, and its influence on our ideas about embodied writing. Last, she presents prospects for “post-” writing, including types of writing based on other modes (post-linguistic performativity) and other languages (analphabetic writing).

Copyright of Savoirs En Prisme is the property of Universitaires de Reims and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The proposed research falls within the framework of semiopragmatics, which brings together the theories of illocution and dialogism with narrative semiotics. The interest in an intersection between these theoretical models is to represent the perlocutionary transformation operated by the speech acts in different phases of Greimas’ narrative scheme, and to understand how the dialogic instances, by means of their enunciative postures, contribute to the performativity of the speech acts. This modelling also allows us to account for the existence of an implicit component of the institutional discourse and for the latency of certain speech acts in this kind of discourse. In our corpus, a text produced by The Mission of information on Islam in France, we aim at tracing the intertextual genesis of the discourse of expertise – and at showing that the performative power of the institutional subject passes through the non-inscription of the subject in the enunciation. Indeed, the ideologies that are transiting in the expert discourse through the voice of another are not so much summoned in a heuristic concern as to legitimize this performative power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photograpy as a Performative Process In my study, I will examine photography as a performative process. According to Richard Shusterman, the operation of photographing a human subject “can be a locus of true aesthetic experience and value”. The process involves artistic performance and aesthetic experiences. Schusterman also points to the dramatic dimension of photography and stresses the importance of studying its somatic, dramatic, and performative operations. I consider it important to distinguish between photography and photograph. I dissect the components of the photographic process: the photographer, the subject or subject to be photographed, the camera and its associated technical accessories (i.e., the equipment), the location, and the spatial and temporal location of the subject. I also focus on the performative nature of theatrical photographs. In connection with the performative nature of theatrical photographs, I will examine the neglected area that relates to the performative operation of photographing theatrical photographs and may be a source of aesthetic experience.

This paper aims to weave a reflection from the performativity setback, when charting the politics’ aestheticization and art’s politicization, produced from the rise of the new right in recent Brazil, permeating aspects of its performativity. In conclusion, it is discussed aspects concerning the carnivalization, from the joy's strategies analyzed in Belo Horizonte and its street carnival. This is like an aesthetic-political glimpse amidst the new right’s ill-forged barrel of copies, characterized by the strategy of the hybrid war, a mark of History's falsification, as tactics for geopolitical territory dispute.

This article introduces performance philosophy, despite the risk of performative contradiction such an act involves. First, it considers performance philosophy as a field that questions how performance thinks and thought is performed (including, specifically as philosophy). Drawing from Laruelle’s non-philosophy, it then addresses performance philosophy as method, framing it as an alternative, performative paradigm to the philosophy of the arts approach that has historically dominated approaches to aesthetics. It concludes by affirming the call to the field to address the ethico-political dimensions of knowledgeproduction in not only disciplinary, but also geopolitical terms.

The article aims to investigate the Bassibus action, created and executed by the contemporary buffoon Leo Bassi, who travels through themes and problems that affect the place of the city and its inhabitants. Action that parodies the tourist activity, Bassibus promotes with its participants a dynamic of occupation of the city and the questioning about the forces that affect it. It is concluded that this praxis of Bassi creates an artistic phenomenon that touches the political as an intersubjective process of reconfiguration of the perceptible and the thinkable, carrying a call of confrontation and resistance, both to the artist and to the spectator/participant, in the face of the capture devices and expropriation of desire.

The short essay proposes a proto-queer reading of the work of playwright Raul Dalmonte (aka COPI), based on the author’s extensive research work on this champion of the Argentinian avant-garde. Here, the characters of COPI’s “theater of the world”, the puppets and mirages of his great baroque deception, are signaled as the standard-bearers of a new anthropology of the pose.

The constant and significant presence of queer motifs in Latin American literature of the last thirty years should not be glossed over. Of course, the recruiting of yet another imported label, trafficked from the geographical, economic and academic “North” into a third-world context should not be taken for granted; and it will also be important to vigilate over the modes and circumstances of a theoretical landing which will have to negotiate its ambiguous conquests with the specificities of a peripheral context. However, it is just as important to signal that the theory’s antinormative and destabilizing potential seems to find the “natural” context in which to unfold in a continent which, from a number of viewpoints, in the overlapping of its manifold wildcards, emerges into the history of Modernity without being able to fully dwell in any of its categories. In Latin America queer becomes the emblematic catalyst of the locally active difference in all possible inflections, the ideal trigger of the apocryphal versions of the apparently already written story of the plausible relationships between bodies and territories, versions which pour forth not only from the incongruencies of gender and sexuality, but also from the ethnic, sociopolitical, and epistemic discontinuity which is written in characters of blood in the mind-blowing chronicle of these lands. So that it comes to work as a powerful mechanism of contemporary interpellation of the old and deceitful story of “Latin American identity”.

This study’s point of departure is a question: given that the Old Testament God so categorically prohibits all images, why is His Word, i.e., the Bible, so full of visions and visual imagery? In this paper, the issue is discussed in terms of a distinction between the visual, broadly understood, and the pictorial, relating in a narrow sense to graphic artefacts. I argue that mental images are distinct from and, in a sense, superior to pictures. The latter are contrasted with an ‘enhanced’ visual imagery that includes sensory and motor images as well. Holistic units of these ‘enhanced’ visual memories are termed as ‘image-experiences’. The first and most important quality of the ‘enhanced vision’ is its spatial character, which can even predetermine the emotional key of the response. This is particularly the case with ‘limitless’ natural spaces, such as the sea, the skies, or mountainous landscapes. The complex structure of the natural sublime and its affinity with divine imagery is discussed using the concrete example of the modern European aesthetics of mountains in its historical evolution. Then the paper turns to the hierotopic approach, according to which the spatial experience of religious imagery emerges from organized ensembles of sacred objects and symbolic pointers, conceptualised as spatial icons. Another important quality of the enhanced visual is in its organic link with movement and action. Image-experiences are lived through rather than passively watched. Calvinist visual theology provides a remarkable example of an iconoclast ideology, which explicitly supports the ‘enhanced visual’ and shows a way to develop it into a form of understanding and transforming the world. The motional/actional aspects of the ‘enhanced’ visual are further discussed in terms of a hierarchical model of motion control proposed by Nikolai Bernstein in which two kinds of spaces are defined: first, space as a geometric medium of locomotion defined by delimiting surfaces and dynamic constraints; secondly, spaces of purposeful tool-mediated activity as collections of meaningful objects. Our human talent for identifying things by unclear or incomplete features is instrumental to our ability to recognize objects in drawings and photographs. The Bernsteinian system helps to explain why the perception of 2D images is dominated by object-oriented parsing. Hence, there is a danger that the response to pictures be reduced to subject-object interaction in which many important holistic qualities of the enhanced visual would be lost. Hierotopic creativity – the construction of sacred spaces – can be seen as a strategy to mitigate these dangers by integrating image-pictures into higher-level spatial constructs of enhanced visuality.

– In this article we examine ways in which gender performativity may be recognized by young children, looking at a drag queen’s mediation of literary encounters. The theoretical-analytical framework we employ comes from Gender Studies and Cultural Studies of post-structuralist inspiration. Our text recounts experiences from readings, conversation circles and play activities we organized in a small city in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Analyzing children’s play and interactions, we observe that from an early age they begin to recognize and question certain expectations about bodies. Contact with art, through literature and other modes of gender performance, can contribute to this reflexive process.

The present article provides a discursive analysis of several statements made by the Christian bishop as the celebrating par excellence of the Eucharistic Liturgy, the central office of Orthodoxy, and their linguistic performativity. Besides the discursive analysis, there is also a semiotic one of a few gestures, as accompanists or illustrators of these statements, made by the same liturgical figure, highlighting the ritual efficiency of his speech. We will refer to the French versions of the text of the Eucharistic Liturgy attributed by the Orthodox tradition to Saint John Chrysostom, the most frequently celebrated in Orthodox churches, carried out by Archimandrite Fathers Placide Deseille and Denis Guillaume. Both discursive and semiotic analysis will be underpinned by a theological reflection of a liturgical nature, which will be provided to us by two of the greatest contemporary French Orthodox theologians, Archimandrite Placide Deseille and Professor Jean-Claude Larchet.

This paper aims at a critical analysis of comedian Bo Burnham’s Netflix special Inside (2021) – a show filmed during the Covid-19 lockdown period – in terms of defamiliarization techniques, and especially through the lens of the Brechtian notion of Verfremdung. By resuming the main theories of estrangement, comparing Shklovsky’s ostranenie to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, and transposing them into the context of contemporary cinematic texts, the analysis foregrounds instances of the V-effect in Inside, namely the ironic exposure of the automatisms of contemporary society, the attention drawn towards performativity, and the goal of encouraging viewers to adopt a critical frame of mind. Despite the emotional detachment that Verfremdung conventionally pursues, this essay explores the complex interplay between estrangement and affective responses in the audience’s engagement with the comedy special.

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The paper proposes the concept of “misinformation ecosystems” to make sense of the contemporary fake news phenomenon. Misinformation ecosystems are interconnected chains of false or misleading reports that become real in their consequences. Misinformation ecosystems are discourse communities that emerged as side effects of affective and linguistic capitalism in contemporary society. Therefore, the performative character of mutually reinforcing false reports explains the social and political impact of fake news. By exploring the manifestation of fake news in Romania, the data analysis reveals a typology of deceptive content circulated in online environments. The typology includes five analytical categories of fake news that constitutes misinformation ecosystems: “recurrent occurrences”, “scapegoat offensives”, “pseudoscientific gaze”, “combo strikes”, and “humorous hijacks”. Empirical evidence supports measures against fake news that should address the social validation processes at the level of media or inter-media networks.

The study deals with the issue of performativity of contemporary Russian drama, the so-called new drama. It works within the examples of selected works, concept and strategy of the Russian playwright, director and performer Ivan Vyrypayev. From the point of view of the meaning of the literary communication model (author — text — reader), theory of performativity, reader-response criticism and literary anthropology, the author primarily monitors authorial and textual performativity and tries to name Vyrypaev’s tools of literary manipulation in the relationship to his recipient-reader-spectator.

This paper outlines the genesis of hierotopy, a notion serving to conceptualize the creation of sacred spaces as a particular form of human art. The concept encompasses the entirety of the multifarious components employed in Byzantine sacred spaces and analyzes the ways in which their cooperative interaction results in the formation of a 'spa-tial icon', or a kind of sacred ambiance. The very notion of a 'spatial icon' draws upon the central place of icons and iconicity in the Eastern Christian worldview. In Byzantium, icons were seen as windows opening out onto an otherworldly reality, or, rather, as doors opening up a two-way communication; in this way, the icon was understood as a means or a place, of immediate contact with the divine, or a sort of platonic chora, in which ideal divine forms assimilated material contours. Within the context of a sacred space, the icon appeared not only as a principal meaning-making agent, but also as a conceptual key for understanding the way in which other components, as well as the sacred space as a whole, effectively worked; each component was thus understood and experienced as being 'iconic', or icon-like, in the sense of providing other points (or, rather, spaces) of contact between the earthly and the divine. As this paper recounts, Alexei Lidov made his first steps towards forging the concept of hierotopy while studying the design, as well as the perception, of Byzantine iconographic programs; as his studies revealed, icons acted not simply as images, but also with the full deployment of their wonder-working potential evincing a powerful expression of religious meaning, particularly when purposefully employed together with wonder-working relics. Lidov's next step was to realize the fully performative nature of spatial icons by taking into account the crucial role played by the surrounding liturgical context, in which each beholder, or liturgical participant, played an active role in giving life to the spatial icon. Hierotopy was thus discovered (and formally defined) as a special form of art involving the performative creation of spatial icons. The paper also discusses the concept of 'image-paradigms' as multimodal units of meaning within sacred spaces, or as compound mental constructs combining together dogmatic ideas, imagery and holistic emotive components (so-called atmospheres).

This essay argues that the performed corporeality of performance artist Nina Arsenault demonstrates how gender can be constituted by two mutually exclusive theories of gender simultaneously. Specifically, Arsenault im/possibly embodies gender as performative and as an essential psychic sense of self. Her expression of a feminine identity onstage is incompatible with theories of gender performativity because it incorporates a voluntary act: performance in the theatre. Arsenault also opposes theories that claim gender is an essential psychic sense of self by expressing her sense of self in her art practice/everyday life. Arsenault highlights that the theatrical materiality she embodies, which also further establishes her femininity, is im/possibly performatively constituted. Put simply, Arsenault embodies gender through performance and performativity.

Sadomasochism played an important role in Foucault’s reflection on power and sexuality; according to this perspective, some theorists highlighted the queer potential of BDSM: the ability to create a space for the experimentation of new relationalities. This vision certainly depicts some subversive aspects of BDSM culture, such as the figure of the dominatrix or the practice of gender reversal, but it sounds too anarchistic and one-sided since in the BDSM prevails a fascination for totalizing and coherent roles. This paper will argue that the queer nature of the master and slave relationship lies in its performative and ritual character: in its exaggerating scenes and costumes in a specific setting, and in its presenting power as a consensual game, based on empathy and mirroring effects. After this theoretical discussion, which will cover Lacan’s concept of masquerade as re-used by Linda Williams, the paper will analyze some of the few literary and artistic representations of BDSM devoid of stereotypes: especially some recurrent scenes in Robbe-Grillet’s production, which can be read in parallelism with his wife’s Catherine Robbe-Grillet’s activity as dominatrix.

At first glance, H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) seems to question the boundary between humans and animals only to reaffirm its inescapable naturality, as Moreau attempts to turn animals into humans by altering their physiology and his creatures ultimately revert to their original animality. Yet, through the interpretive frame of animal queer and Harvey Sacks’s Membership Categorization Analysis, my paper aims to show how other elements of the text actually counter this perspective, thus suggesting a performative notion of humanity in its opposition to animality. By focusing on the role of the ritual recitation of the Law and on how the narrator’s experience on the island of Doctor Moreau radically affects his views on humanity, I will argue that the novel challenges well-established essentialist conceptions of the human-animal divide and boldly explores the disquieting possibility that humanity is nothing but a performance.

My aim is to examine the role played by the acknowledgment of performativity in the historical debate between the philosophers and the artists (especially poets and musicians). I will focus on the question of the legitimation of epistemological authority, which in the course of this debate is often called “inspiration”. I will observe the deconstruction process in the concept of poetic inspiration through the work of the two authors who most explored this issue: Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche. Both philosophers claim for themselves the ability to perform the acts which constitute poetic inspiration in a mimetic way, of their own free will and in accordance with rational schemes. Thus, philosophers not only prove the performative nature of the poet’s main legitimation tool but also appropriate it in order to acquire the social prestige traditionally conferred on the poets. This analysis, applying methods drawn from classical hermeneutics and from Sacks’s Membership Categorization Analysis, will show a strategy of broader relevance for queer studies: the acknowledgment of the performative nature of category-bound activities as a tool to understand and manipulate reality.

The contributions to this volume of Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and studies all engage with a seminal issue of queer theories and practices: performativity. By framing the keywords of the call for papers in the plural, and by including not only the presents and futures of performativity, but also its pasts, CIRQUE hoped to facilitate connections between queer studies and areas of the humanities and social sciences which are normally perceived by queer scholars as alien and remote. We are very glad that this challenge has been taken up, and hope that this will be the first step of a productive and exhilarating dialogue.

The present study aims at analysing female necrophilia in relation to female dominance. In order to do so, the theory elaborated by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble on gender performativity and the studies by Harvey Sacks on Category-Bound Activities are herein employed and problematized. Therefore, the paper proposes to look at representations of female necrophilia as “cover-up” performances of gender supremacy. For the purpose of the analysis, three films that explicitly represent female necrophilia have been chosen and investigated: Kissed (1996) by Canadian director Lynne Stopkewich, Nekromantik (1987), and Nekromantik 2 (1991) by German director Jörg Buttgereit.

After introducing the singular figure of the femminielloand presenting it as a performative identity, bearing in mind Butler’s theory of performance, I will focus on the rite of figliata,through which the femminielloperforms the bearing of a child, i.e. the natural act par excellence; in order to explore this performance, I will take into account Curzio Malaparte’s literary description of the figliatain La Pelle(1949). I will then retrace the supposed anthropological-religious origins of the femminielliin order to try to throw light on the roots, motives and implications underlying the performative ritual under study. This, along with a set of statements taken from interviews with a number of femminielli, will enable me to conclude my consideration of femminielli,viewing them as performative identities who on the one hand perform and subvert gender and at the same time perform and essentialise it.

Starting from the definition of “performativity” and “gender parody” developed by Judith Butler, this paper aims to investigate the performative functions of male cross-dressing within the dynamics of social categorization in classical Athens. For this purpose I have adopted an eclectic hermeneutic toolbox, borrowing elements from Harvey Sacks’ Membership Categorization Analysis to René Girard’s scapegoat theory. Through the philological analysis of some literary representations of transvestism, such as Pentheus’ cross-dressing in Euripides’ Bacchae, and the anthropological interpretation of the mythical-ritual complex relating to the effeminacy of Dionysus, my work focuses on the polyvalence of cross-dressing as an example of “rite of passage” that works subliminally, despite the subversive appearance, functioning as an instrument of cultural hegemony.

Amongst many skeletons buried in Sonora’s desert, the sexually dissident one is the least predictable. Nevertheless, in the Mexican parts of Bolaño’s 2666, the reader witnesses an authentic flourish of queer allusions, placed in decidedly strategic moments, always referring to the tragicomic questioning of the Latin American clichés crystallized in the most famous literary series of the Sixties and the Seventies. The queer, indeed, represents one of the possible variations of that characteristic lumpenism that imposes a necessary downgrade on Bolaño’s characters, making them reach a limit state where every cultural alibi loses consistency. In the posthumous novel that retrospectively reveals some of the secret reasons for his behavior in 2666 –Los sinsabores del verdadero policía–, Amalfitano is discovered by his young gay lover “as a continent is discovered”. Following the indication of this enlightening simile, I will study the paths through which Bolaño leads one of his most authorized aliases on a visit to the museum of static artifacts of Latin American performativity, denuding them of its characteristic pomposity with the help of a disruptively sharp queer eye.

Researcher Josette Féral has studied the reciprocity between performativity and theatricality in the field of theatrical studies. With the term “performative theatre”, she intends to build continuity between the notions against the traditional view which opposes theatre and performance. Taking her works as a starting point, I explore the dynamics of what I call the state of trans- (trance, transition, transformation, transidentity, transgression, transfer…) in performative theatre. The idea is therefore to go beyond the dualisms that oppose theatre and performance as well as femininity and masculinity, among others. How did the performative turn foster the emergence of a queer theatre? To what extent does this affect the way bodies exist on stage?

This paper analyses the film Mrs. Doubtfire and reflects on the representation of social categories provided by the film. The protagonist, an American male, convincingly performs the identity of a much older English woman in everyday life for weeks. Even if the success of his performance has the potential to show the performative nature of social identities, the subversive power of his actions is invalidated by other elements of the film. This article begins examining why Euphegenia Doubtfire’s identity is believed to be genuine by the other characters and following which criteria it is created; then, it takes into consideration the role played by the protagonist’s job as an actor and the implications of his decision of using his professional abilities in everyday life; lastly, it examines other devices through which his successful performance is made less dangerous to social order and the protagonist is discredited.

This article introduces performance philosophy, despite the risk of performative contradiction such an act involves. First, it considers performance philosophy as a field that questions how performance thinks and thought is performed (including, specifically as philosophy). Drawing from Laruelle’s non-philosophy, it then addresses performance philosophy as method, framing it as an alternative, performative paradigm to the philosophy of the arts approach that has historically dominated approaches to aesthetics. It concludes by affirming the call to the field to address the ethico-political dimensions of knowledgeproduction in not only disciplinary, but also geopolitical terms.

Theatrical works can now be documented with a range of new technologies; however, photography is still the most expressive and means of recording theatre. This essay reflects the curatorial progress of an exhibition about theatre photography and highlights some images which could illustrate a few memorable moments of Hong Kong theatre.

This article examines how the aesthetic particularities of rap music can stage social power dynamics. It analyzes the song “Créature ratée” by the rapper Casey at the level of its lyrics, vocal performance, instrumental, live performance, and music video in order to study how these forms work together to denaturalize the racializing gaze. The lyrics of “Créature ratée” reproduce colonial discourse in the first person, and thus create important interpretative work for the listener, as well as a complex listener-artist relationship. The productive interaction between the different elements of the performance invites the listener to bring together the said and the unsaid of the lyrics, and consequently inverse their signification. Through the imbrication of the lyrics, the voice, and the visual mode, “Créature ratée” empties out racial discourse from the inside, showing its ambivalences, the falseness of its supposed objectivity, and its total dependence on the Other in order to find meaning.