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Drawing on speech act theory and Butler's theory of gender performativity, this approach analyzes how literary identities are constituted through repeated performative acts rather than expressing pre-existing essences. Identity emerges as an iterated performance within textual and social conventions.
From your study of queer theory and discourse and power, you already know that identity categories — gender, sexuality, race — are not natural givens but social constructions produced within specific historical and discursive contexts. Performativity is a more precise account of how that construction works moment to moment. The key move is from "identity is constructed" (a claim about history and structure) to "identity is performed" (a claim about what subjects do repeatedly over time).
The concept has roots in speech act theory, specifically J.L. Austin's distinction between constative and performative utterances. A constative describes something ("it is raining"); a performative does something ("I pronounce you married"). When a judge says "I sentence you to three years," the utterance itself is the act — it creates the legal reality it describes. Judith Butler borrowed this logic and applied it to gender in *Gender Trouble* (1990): when a doctor says "it's a girl" at birth, this is not simply a description of a biological fact but the beginning of a series of performances that will constitute the girl-subject. The declaration inaugurates an ongoing process of interpellation — you are called into identity, and then called on to repeat it.
Gender performativity does not mean gender is a costume you put on and take off at will. This is the most common misreading. Butler's point is almost the opposite: the repetition is compulsory, habitual, and largely unconscious. You don't choose each morning to perform femininity or masculinity — you have internalized a set of bodily habits, speech patterns, dress codes, and emotional styles that feel like expressions of an inner self but are actually the product of accumulated, repeated performances. The "inner self" is the effect, not the cause, of the performances. Identity is not what you express; it is what you do.
For literary analysis, this framework opens several lines of inquiry. You can examine how characters construct identity through speech acts, repeated gestures, and social rituals — and ask what happens when those performances fail, are disrupted, or are performed "wrong." Cross-dressing plots, identity confusion, mistaken identity (also the engine of farce) — these are not just comic devices but moments when performativity becomes visible, when the machinery of identity construction is exposed rather than concealed. You can also ask what norms a performance is iterating: gender is performed within a field of norms that precede the individual and constrain what performances are legible, punishable, or subversive. A character who performs gender "incorrectly" may be revealing those norms precisely through the violation. Discourse and power, which you've already studied, provide the broader context: the norms that performances iterate are maintained by institutional power and produce real material consequences for bodies that violate them.
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