Performativity as an Account of Agency

The theory of performativity has always been almost automatically linked to the performativity of gender. Gender is, as we have seen, one – albeit extremely powerful – norm that in multiple ways conditions the lives of the bodies in the world given to us long before we are capable of being autonomous. However, the idea that we do or craft our bodies into genders, that the reality of our bodies is the reality of our acts, unmoored from any givens, has from the very start demanded elaborate theorisation of what it means to act. On several occasions, Judith Butler has claimed that performativity is an account or a theory of agency (Butler 2009b: i; GT: xxv). Drawing on the notion that Butler's philosophy is an insurrection at the level of ontology, we can say that the account of agency she has attempted to offer refers to the crucial question of how reality might be remade (PL: 33).

The theory of agency can also be read as Butler's theory of the subject. This is why we must begin with the vexed debate on voluntarism and determinism – the unsolicited legacy of Gender Trouble – which further splintered into debates on subject constitution and the character of the agent. The debate revolves around two questions: does Butler's notion of agency enforce a subject who freely decides with which norm to comply with today and which to violate tomorrow? Or, contrarily, to what extent is the social character of reality permissive of a free action, if ‘the social conditions of my existence are never fully willed by me, and there is no agency apart from such conditions and their unwilled effects’ (FoW: 171)? The third issue, to which we will return in the latter part of this chapter, is how individualist this account of agency is, if it is bodies that act, but their acting is in some crucial sense a ‘shared experience and “collective action”’ (Butler 1988: 525)?

With her rejection of both biological and social determinism (GT: 10), yet without an unambiguous answer to the question of what urges us to act the way we do, Butler encountered accusations of radical voluntarism: if there are no internal restrictions preventing us acting as we please, we may act in whatever way we like.