See the difference?

So here is an excerpt from the dissertation. See how I've bowed down to "academic language?" It happens so slowly that one doesn't even notice. I'm now looking for a path out of here.

This is from chapter one, in my explanation of performatives:

I begin with J.L. Austin and his groundbreaking work on the performative quality of language, How to Do Things with Words. Austin begins by distinguishing constatives from performatives. A constative, he argues, is an utterance that describes or reports something while a performative is a contractual or declaratory utterance. To be a performative, the utterance must be spoken during particular socially acceptable circumstances and must be voiced with intention. This means that drama, soliloquy, and poetry cannot be performative because they are understood, in their acceptable circumstances, to be non-serious and non-intentional. Austin says that in these cases where intention and circumstances are correct, “to say something is to do something” (12).[i] In other words, in some cases, when we speak, we act. His most relevant example to this study is marriage. He says:

One of our examples was, for instance, the utterance ‘I do’ (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony. Here we should say that in saying these words we are doing something – namely, marrying, rather than reporting something, namely that we are marrying. An the act of marrying, like, say, the act of betting, is at least preferably (though still not accurately) to be described as saying certain words, rather than as performing a different, inward and spiritual, action of which these words are merely the outward and audible sign. (12-13)

Here Austin illustrates the way language can be action rather than description. The case of marriage calls into question his insistence on intention for an utterance to become performative because it illustrates that no matter if/what the internal feelings or thinking of the person speaking, it is the spoken words, the performative act, within a particular cultural ceremony that contracts the marriage. It does not matter if a bride is screaming inside that she does not want to marry the groom; if she says, “I do,” the social and legal contract is in place. She is considered willing and is married.

Butler, building on Austin’s work on performatives, argues in Gender Trouble that gender is “a corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (177). Just as Austin did before her, Butler considers the possibility of an inner gender (a “true” or “real” gender) that might be different from the performed bodily acts. However, she rejects such a notion: “there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed,’ but that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed” (181). The bodily acts, then, according to Butler, are gender and become gendered. “That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (173). While it may seem contradictory to her statements about the potential ontological being, I do not believe that she means here that there is no ontological being, but rather she is arguing that there is no ontological status to gender. Femininity is one gender performance, as is masculinity or drag. For Butler, gender is not essential and is certainly not attached to sex or being. This means that the performances of masculinity and femininity, as well as other possible combinations, can be performed by a variety of anatomies.

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[i] In his article “Signature Event Context,” Jacques Derrida points to the problems of Austin’s definitions and declares some writing to be performative: particularly signatures. Derrida deconstructs Austin by pointing to the slippage in intention and convention. He shows that because the convention requires an utterance already in existence that is transferred to another time and place, that speech act cannot be defined. See Jacques Derrida. “Sign Event Context.” Glyph 1 (1977). 172-197 and Christopher Norris. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. New York: Methuen. 108-115.