The Descriptive Purchase of Performativity

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the politics of performativity that Judith Butler develops in Excitable Speech. In particular, I assess the usefulness of Butler's talk of performativity for describing discursive events involving victimised subjects. I propose that performativity's descriptive purchase is best gauged by foregrounding its presuppositions, and that these last include a Peircean conception of semiosis and a rhetorical postulate of genre.