Oslo Summer School in Comparative Social Science Studies 2000
Performativity/Prohibition/Desire
Main discipline: Social Anthropology
Lecturer: Professor Don Kulick,
University of Stockholm, Sweden
1. Course description
Performativity is a concept that in a very short time has gone from the relative
obscurity of arcane philosophical discussions about language to a buzzword that
increasingly appears in a wide array of social science and humanist studies.
This course offers a firm grounding in performative theory. It traces the theoretical
roots of performativity and examines in depth various dimensions of how the
concept has been developed and employed, especially by Judith Butler. Because
performativity in Butler's theorizing is intrinsically bound up with psychoanalytic
understandings of repression and foreclosure, the final lessons address the
status and role of the prohibited in understandings of performativity, and ask
how silences in social life can be identified and analyzed. Teaching will consist
of both lectures and discussion seminars, at which participants summarize and
discuss the literature.
2. Basic readings
- Billig, Michael (1999), Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the
Unconscious, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Selections.
- Butler, Judith. (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative,
London & New York: Routledge.
- Butler, Judith (1997), The Psychic Life of Power. Introduction &
Chapter 6 (Melancholy, ambivalence, rage), Stanford: Stanford University Press:
pp. 1-30 & pp. 167-198.
- Derrida, Jacques (1991), "Signature Event Context" in A Derrida
Reader: Behind the Blinds, edited by Peggy Kamuf, New York: Columbia University
Press.
- Foucault, Michel (1981), The History of Sexuality Volume 1. London:
Penguin.
3. The lecturer
Don Kulick is professor of anthropology at Stockholm University. He is the author
of Travesti: sex, gender and culture among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes
(University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Language shift and cultural reproduction:
socialization, syncretism and self in a Papua New Guinean village (CUP,
1992). He has also edited several anthologies, including Taboo: sex, gender
and erotic subjectivity in anthropological fieldwork (with M. Willson, Routledge,
1995), and Queer theory (Scandinavian U Press, 1996). His current research
interests center on the relationship between language, sexuality, desire, and
silence.