Bodily Performativity: Enacting Norms (original) (raw)

The Performative Body: Symbolic Interactionism, Dramaturgy, Affect, and the Sociology of the Body

With diet and exercise bodies are routinely shaped and sculpted to adhere not only to standards of health and medicine but also, and perhaps more regularly, to sociocultural appearance norms. Likewise, we can just as routinely observe how bodies are subject to the regimented norms of posture, somatic rules for how they smell, and both written and unwritten rubrics of exposure-especially how much flesh may be revealed, under what circumstances, and with whom. Bodies are clothed with garments, both visible and veiled, that simultaneously conceal as much as they expressively accentuate. Everywhere, and at all times, bodies are actively inscribed with any one or more of the physical markers of powerful social institutions including age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. Bodies are habitually maintained, and chiefly not for functional but aesthetic qualities in acts including the various means of growing hair in some parts of the body while, elsewhere, cutting, shaving, plucking, or chemically removing it. Similarly, other body maintenance regimens include things such as altering the color and texture of hair, skin, eye, finger or toe nails. Teeth are straightened, whitened, polished, and replaced if necessary. Bodies are stylized with piercings, tattoos, hairstyles, and procedures for tanning, bleaching, and painting. Bodies are perpetually on display although, as we learn through the course of socialization, one must be cautious about whose bodies we gaze upon, where specifically we affix that gaze, for how long, and at what proximity. In all of these ways and a multitude of others, the body is clearly the site of enormous expressive and impressive appearance management as well as a focal point for significant ritual activity-two dynamics that are, without question, foremost to dramaturgical analysis.

Doing Gender Differently. The Embodiment of Gender Norms as Between Permanence and Transformation

Political Phenomenology: Experience, Ontology, Episteme (Routledge), 2019

The aim of this chapter is to investigate how gender norms enter human bodily experience. My focus is not on the explicit ways in which social norms affect and constitute our relation to knowledge and the world but how these epistèmes become embodied, that is, become an assimilated part of our bodily experience. Gender, as a specific social norm, is of particular interest for a number of reasons. First, gender structures all domains of human social life: From matters of family, education, profes- sion, and public life. Second, gender is a norm that structures life not only in explicit ways (e.g., when one is directly addressed as or identifies oneself assertively as female, male, or other) but also in implicit ways and thereby operatively defines our sense of normality. Third, gender norms typically mirror existing power relations insofar as they represent forms of socio-political organization. Gender is not a norm that we are necessarily forced to obey or even naturally identify with, but it remains incorporated and acquired within concrete and repeated bodily experi- ences and practices. In this way, the following analysis is inspired by Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. While Butler is well-known for her analysis of the discursive, I will probe the phenomenological potential of performativity by applying the analy-sis to the human body. Butler’s theory of gender performativity opens up the picture of social norms as a two-way street – not only do norms effect our language and discursive behaviors, but language must also enact (take up or appropriate) norms in order for them to be effective. This applies, as I will argue, also in the case of the human body. As material and lived bodies, we are situated in a historically and culturally- informed world, wherein norms manifest as well-ordered and typified social practices according to which we live. Yet, at the same time, we are practical agents insofar as we must bodily enact certain norms for them to be effective.

Performativity and the Altermodernities: Occupy, Bodies and Time-Spaces

2021

This project would not have been possible without the support of many people. Special thanks to Professor Erika Fischer-Lichte and Professor Matthias Warstat, my supervisors, who patiently helped me to make sense out of what was originally confusion, and also Dr. Sruti Bala, who never stopped supporting me, even in my most difficult times. Many thanks to InterArt fellows and staff, for creating a community in which all ideas of the following dissertation have been produced in many collective debates. Thanks to German Research Foundation (DFG) for awarding me the scholarship and providing me with the financial means necessary to complete this project. And finally, thanks to all my past and future comrades in struggles for a better world, especially to my colleague and partner in life, Mohadeseh Zareh; and to the comrades in our anonymous collective back in Tehran, who cannot even leave Iran because of senseless prosecution of their thinking; and finally to dear friends,

Phenomenology as Performative Exercise_PREVIEW

Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology Vol. 19 Brill, 2020

This volume, edited by Lucilla Guidi and Thomas Rentsch, establishes the first systematic connection between phenomenology and performativity. On the one hand, it outlines the performativity of phenomenology by exploring its enactment and the transformation of attitude it effects; this exploration is conducted through a number of parallels between phenomenology and the ancient understanding of philosophy as an exercise and a way of life. On the other hand, the volume examines different notions of performativity from a phenomenological perspective, so as to show that a phenomenological understanding of embodied experience complements a linguistic account of performativity and can also offer a ground for bodily practices of resistance, critique, and self-transformation in our own day and age.