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The assertion that one plays like a girl has historically been an accusation of weakness and ineptitude. Traditionally thought of as a slur that disempowers girls, this phrase also disciplines boys’ performance in sports. A discourse that attempts to resignify the phrase you play like a girl has recently circulated in statements from, and about, the U.S. Women's Soccer Team, President Obama, and a Procter and Gamble brand's commercial campaign, to name a few. This rhetoric aims to break down stereotypes about what it means to play like a girl and to empower girls to play. Using theories of definition as argument and gender performativity, I argue that this discourse expands what it means to play like a girl. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

College campus-based surveys of sexual assault in the United States have generated one of the most high-profile and contentious figures in the history of social science: the ‘1 in 5’ statistic. Referring to the number of women who have experienced either attempted or completed sexual assault since their time in college, ‘1 in 5’ has done significant work in making the prevalence of this experience legible to the public and to policy-makers. Here I examine how sexual assault surveys have participated in structuring the ontology of date/acquaintance rape from the 1980s to today. I review the foundational work of feminist social scientists Diana Russell and Mary Koss, with particular attention to the methodological practices through which the concept of the ‘hidden’ or ‘unacknowledged’ rape victim emerged. I then examine a selection of early 21st-century sexual assault surveys and highlight the ongoing preoccupation with survey methodology in responses to their results. I argue that the survey itself has been a central actor in the ontological politics of sexual assault, and only by closely attending to its performativity can we understand the paradoxical persistence both of critical responses to the ‘1 in 5’ statistic and of its effective deployment in anti-violence policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from an observation about the high-profile predictive failures of Value-at-Risk (VaR), an internationally instituted financial risk model, this article has attempted to make sense of its continued use by analyzing its productive, rather than predictive, power. This line of inquiry leads me to identify VaR's (counter)performative effects and the way in which it produces banks as authoritative, responsible managers of an uncertain financial future. Viewing financial markets through the lens of Keynesian uncertainty and model performativity helps explain VaR's failures by revealing VaR to be an inherently limited and potentially destabilizing practice. Its use participates in the construction of a financial system that is only temporarily stable and controllable. At the same time, VaR is an important source of authority for banks vis-à-vis regulators and the public because it represents the future as statistically calculable and expert prediction as the optimal, objective mode of preparing for that future. This, in turn, makes less thinkable other responses to uncertainty – ones that might be better suited to contend with the possibility of devastating losses unforeseeable – and perhaps produced – by the widespread use of VaR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a year-long qualitative study, this article examines how one refugee student from the Vietnamese Central Highlands negotiated social and cultural constructions of patriotism and citizenship in a Junior Reserves Officer Training Corps (JROTC) class at an urban high school. Data are analyzed using Butler's (1990) the theory of performativity, and illustrate how this student appropriated and transformed language and ritualized action to assert individuality in an otherwise rule- and routine-driven classroom context. I conclude by theorizing cultural practices of citizenship as they relate to the education of refugee and immigrant youth, and argue that researchers and practitioners must acknowledge the pedagogical and social impact of peripheral spaces in school, such as the JROTC classroom, in shaping many students’ trajectories in and beyond school. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Across the United States, tens of thousands of souls are saved during Halloween. The mechanism for these salvations is Hell House--an Evangelical Christian haunted house that substitutes ghosts and goblins for "sinners" and "sin." These conversions occur through "the salvific performative," a speech act that embodies a convert's new faith, altering his or her biography and identity. This essay interrogates the salvific performative by theorizing how it operates within Hell House performances. To understand how conversions are created, one must understand the context by which they occur, and in Hell House, this is accomplished through a tactical deployment of violent theatrics and a manipulation of reality through theatre, which enables audience members to see theatrical representation as "truth." Finally, the essay suggests how Hell House's particular ability represents a particular manifestation of representation geared to transform its audience, and what the implications of this are on the medium of theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chaz Bono’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars (DWTS) marks one of the first primetime, network appearances of a postoperative transgender person. This article deconstructs the mediated gender subjectivities of Bono as constructed by the show itself via prerecorded segments, costume and song choices, dance partner interaction, and judges’ commentaries as well as those projected by Bono during the live, unscripted portions of the show. Combining notions of the normalization of taboo sexual subjectivities through mediated contexts with lens of gender performativity, we demonstrate how transgender subjectivities are presented to a mainstream audience via such mediated choices, but also how Bono welds some agency to resist such normalization through his live performances. Bono’s appearance on DWTS stands as an important step toward acceptance of transgendered persons in mainstream society, however through a neutered, sex-free rhetoric as projected by the mediated portions of the show, his appearance is not without controversy. Additionally, we posit that Bono represents a transnormativity of a White, upper-class postoperative heterosexual male, which others all transgendered persons who fall outside of those hegemonic parallels of safe subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For many critical aspects of family life, all the world truly is a stage. When a parent scolds a child on the playground, all eyes turn to watch and judge. When an executive's wife hosts a work party, the guests are witness to traditional gender roles. And when two fathers attend a back-to-school night for their child, other parents take note of this relatively new family configuration. Family is popularly considered intimate and personal, but in reality much of family life is lived in the public eye. These performances of family and familial roles do not simply communicate messages to others. They are also central to the deep structure of family law. Drawing on sociological and feminist theory, this Article argues that iterated, everyday performances are performative--that is, they create and then maintain collective understandings of mother, father, child, and family itself. The law plays an integral role in this by imbuing the performances with legal salience to define the categories at the heart of family law. This Article terms this dynamic process "performative family law." Aspects of this mutually constitutive relationship between performance and family law are deeply troubling, raising significant concerns for core areas of doctrine, policy, and theory. First, family law's prevailing approach to defining familial categories is normatively narrowing because legal actors tend to give effect only to traditional, dominant images of the family despite seismic demographic changes in family form. Second, the obscuring effects of the public face of the family often warp the policies designed to address family violence, most notably child sexual abuse. Finally, by ignoring the pressure of performance, scholarly debates over the public-private divide are incomplete and have failed to explain why the concept of family privacy retains such enormous appeal. In response, this Article proposes a new framework for family law that decenters dominant performances and provides an alternative means to define familial categories and counter family violence. It is not possible or even desirable to eliminate performativity entirely, but it is important to resist its more troubling aspects. A denaturalizing framework promises a more pluralistic approach to the emerging demographic transformation of the family and deeper engagement with the variety of family life today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a response to calls for more first-person accounts from researchers using narrative formats to interpret data. The authors examine the practice of ethnodrama as a means of exploring and analyzing the experiences of a Latina public-school student in a small South Texas coastal town during the 1950s and 1960s as she attempted to negotiate multiple ethnic spaces while resisting traditional behavioral expectations representative of that period. Through coding and synthesizing the participant's responses, the researchers established themes on which to base the composition of three dramatic scenes for purposes of data representation. In addition to conveying how the participant overcame challenges she faced as a young Chicana activist, we discuss implications surrounding current thinking on ethnodrama as a cross-cultural endeavor, a creative practice, and a potential emancipatory tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores strategies of celebratory performative protest in support of ecological entities in the contemporary United States. Drawing on the work of Linda Montano, Stephens and Sprinkle originally launched their wedding performances as a seven-year project to protest the prohibition of same-sex marriages under U.S. federal law. After three years and three human centered weddings they came to realize that these performances needed to explore larger issues than the right to join together two human beings in matrimony. Proposing to extend questions of legal rights to the Earth, this essay traces ways in which this performative protest project engages and critically brings together different domains of exclusion. Drawing on the work of Linda Montano, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Revered Billy, and Fluxus within performance studies, the wedding projects joining of sexual and environmental rights, what they term “eco-sexuality,” seeks to contribute to the opening up of spaces to highlight and question relationships, connections and possibilities of contemporary illegibility within the intimate and familiar every day context of the wedding ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article examines several “language practice” interactions among adult immigrant students in an ESL classroom in the U.S. from the perspective of performativity theory. In drawing on performativity theory, it conceptualizes such classroom interactions, along with the research practices used to investigate them, as constitutive actions. That is, it considers such practices as producing the social realities (such as language) and particular subjectivities (such as language learner) which are the concern of second language researchers. Using microethnographic methods, it explores two metaphoric processes at play in the classroom talk, those of sedimentation and appropriation, and analyzes them as performative and ideological activity. It concludes by discussing how performativity theory can enable second language researchers to carefully consider and seek to understand the performative effects of using normative social constructs (such as language and language learner) to explore classroom language learning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper is about expectations of oral PrEP, ‘a pill a day’ HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis that could be the first systemic form of HIV prevention for sexual or needle stick exposures. If found safe and effective—a difficult criteria to establish and, as such, is central to this paper—PrEP has the potential to significantly alter HIV prevention, well ahead of a vaccine or topical microbicide. Hence, despite uncertainty about PrEP''s viability, the potential significance of its impact on the HIV field requires early planning. In order to address this potentiality, we use a methodological approach drawn from the sociology of expectations to examine interviews with United States-based scientific stakeholders in the trialing of PrEP. We identify how PrEP is anticipated as both stable object and process involving multiple contingencies. These divergent conceptions enable us to illuminate a range of social, cultural, ethical, pharmaceutical and medical possibilities understood to potentially arise with PrEP. Further, they lead us to propose that the multiple contingencies that enact PrEP as an emergent entity offer scope for rethinking PrEP and, more broadly, the challenges of HIV prevention. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper retraces the conceptual development of Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology. It centres on three major conceptual achievements: first, the distinction between inside and outside and its more peculiar variants (like system and environment or friend and foe); second, the elaboration of the temporal axis as a distinct dimension of cultural analysis; and finally, the close focus on performativity that took centre-stage in cultural analysis during the last years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the performative language used by U.S. President George W. Bush in making announcements and comments about the war in Iraq in 2003. Conditions for a performative to function effectively; Analysis of the interpretation of the war pronouncements of Bush as truth; Significance of the staging of live demonstrations in the U.S. to oppose the Iraq war.

Analyzes the relations between human reproduction and the law in Florida. Absolute distinction between performatives and constantives; Performativity in relation to transformation; Mainstream culture's definition of black woman.

The article explores the limits of American experimental filmmakers on the physical/mental existence. It stated that filmmakers shared a deep felt vision of a new anarchic way of looking at film and video, fueled by the inexhaustible romanticism of the era. Meanwhile, the film "The Flower Thief," by Ron Rice is a good example of the essence of performativity as content and as the informing structure for creating a finished cinematic work. Moreover, Gerard Malanga created a series of deeply romantic films in which his own persona of the "young poet" was foregrounded in each frame.