Performance
by
“Performance” can mean the everyday accomplishment of a task or function, or acting in special contexts such as plays, music, or sports. The first meaning links “performance” to the fulfillment of social roles; in both cases, instances of “performance” reference and reiterate the conventions of meaning that define communities, societies, or nations (“as American as [eating] apple pie”). Scholars have adopted the term “performative” (derived from language philosopher J. L. Austin’s “performative utterance” in How to Do Things with Words [1962]) to good effect in analyzing the everyday enactments that constitute aspects of identity such as gender, sexuality, class, and race (Butler 1988; Parker and Sedgwick 1995). These understandings of “performance” and its variants are tied to what Erving Goffman (1959) called the “presentation of self”: how words and actions manifest human signification, relationship, status, and power. The more specific case of theatrical performance is never far from these usages. Different attitudes toward theater, evidenced by those who applaud actors for their virtuosity or those who react with more puritanical suspicion, engage theater’s basic tensions between actor and character, action and interpretation, and private motivation and public show. That Asian American studies and other studies of race and ethnicity frequently...
This essay may be found on page 185 of the printed volume.