Wounds and reinscriptions: schools, sexualities and performative subjects



Butler’s more recent refinements of her understanding of the performatively constituted
subject takes up Bourdieu’s notion of bodily habitus (Bourdieu 1990). Taking bodily
activity to be formed by and
formative of ritual and convention, she argues that the bodily
habitus can be seen as ‘a citational chain lived and believed at the level of the body’
(Butler 1997a:155). She suggests that this might be understood as a ‘tacit performative’
which gives the body ‘a practical sense’ (Butler 1997a:159-60), a tacit awareness of its
potential performative force as well as its limits. Butler also makes use of Althusser’s
notion of interpellation (Althusser 1971) suggesting that being interpellated - named - is
a prerequisite for being ‘
recognizable’ (Butler 1997a:5, original emphasis) as a subject.
Reflecting Althusser’s notion of subjection and Foucault’s understanding of
subjectivation, Butler suggests that such naming may well be injurious, it may wound,
but in so doing it also constitutes an intelligible subject (Butler 1997b).

The subject who has been so named is able to name another - he/she has what Butler
calls ‘linguistic agency’ (Butler 1997:15) or ‘discursive agency’ (Butler 1997a:127). This
latter notion allows us to take account of the range of discursive practices that are non-
linguistic, for instance representations, non-verbal utterances, or performative habitus.

With this understanding of discursive agency, the performatively constituted subject
retains intent and can seek to realise this through the deployment of discursive practices
but the efficacy of these discursive deployments is never guaranteed. Butler suggests that
such a subject might practice resistance through a
politics of performative resignificationi
(Butler 1997a). By tying together a notion of misfire and discursive agency, Butler



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