Movements

Movement is the politicized version of performance because the term carries two connotations in the twentieth century that are distinct from performance: (1) collective action and (2) perpetual change. Movement remains tethered to social organization and in motion. In terms of gender and sexuality studies, movement draws from the theoretical context in which the idea that the consolidation of repeated actions (performance) over time constitutes identity (J. Butler [1990] 1999; Roach 1996; E. Johnson 2003; D. Brooks 2006). Judith Butler (2007) argues in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” that history, power, and repetition produce gender as a performative—the crystallized, hailing, regulatory force of identity categories and social positions. Performance shapes the individual because it renders them answerable to an ideal, which, as Butler explains, becomes sedimented as a performative. Performatives—such as gender roles or other identitarian categories and “reiterations of stylized norms, and inherited gestural conventions from the way we sit, stand, speak, dress, dance, play, eat, hold a pencil and more” (Madison 2014, viii)—exert social force through the perception of their stability, through the idea that they are stable and not in flux. Paradoxically, performatives accrue value through repetition inherent to performance. Butler’s formulation thus depends on a logic of accumulation. Over time, the appearance of identity flattens the “internally discontinuous” (J. Butler 2007, 154) aspects of gender in order to produce continuity. Joseph Roach offers a similar rendering of the term performance, explaining, “[It] offers a substitute for something else that preexists it. Performance, in other words, stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace” (1996, 3). Although the filling of the vacancies, as he explains, never amounts to a perfect replica, the desire attached to performatives conceals inconsistencies.