Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay compares Judith Butler’s and Erving Goffman’s theoretical contributions to performance and performativity with the goal of bridging their approaches, usually seen as mutually incompatible. Using eighteenth-century women’s politeness as a case study, it argues that politeness is a practice that is essentially both performed and performative; analysing it as such offers us valuable new information on eighteenth-century subjectivities. The essay suggests that combining performance and performativity can be used to reconceptualize agency and find a way out of the Butlerian impasse of the impossibility of resistance. Performance thus has the potential to confound the paralyzing non-agency of performativity.

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