Judith Butler’s Gender Performativity and Recognition

Abstract

Butler’s theory of performativity opens up a destabilisation of gendered norms through critiquing the repetitive acts that attempt to regulate how a subject is constituted. In this chapter, these connections are substantiated through my theoretical analysis of interview data which examines performative acts by participants. More specifically, I consider stories participants told about bringing their children on campus. I explore the subsequent encounters and negotiations of participant experiences when they have their children accompany them on campus. Participants largely regarded these acts as disrupting existing boundary maintenance which has established appropriate university spatiality as child-free. I incorporate overt and more subtle performative speech acts that I theorise as acts which sought to reinforce university spaces as child-free. I continue this analysis to consider ways in which the institutional structures of universities tend to assume and/or privilege the unencumbered academic subject as demonstrated through timetabling of university classes outside childcare operating hours. In this chapter, I argue that an analysis of performative acts by participant sole parent postgraduates is useful because it draws attention to taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in institutional structures of universities and can also open up the possibilities for disrupting and undoing existing academic norms.