Teaching trouble. Performativity and composition pedagogy: Composing connections
Abstract
The 1990 publication of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble was arguably the last decade's shot heard 'round the theorizing world, disrupting feminist and other identity-based paradigms for politics and theorizing across disciplines, and helping to found queer theory itself in that process. Yet, despite the first-order theoretical interventions wrought by Gender Trouble, and, most notably, by the text's central concept, performativity, Butler's work has been slow to enter composition studies, and remains especially underexplored in composition scholarship that is expressly pedagogical in focus. This project demonstrates the vital relevance of the theory of performativity to composition's pedagogical scholarship, and illustrates the particular contributions it can make to that body of work that takes issues of identity, difference, and resistance to difference to be a central pedagogical concern. Yet, the project also problematizes and complicates appropriations of performativity that are already circulating in composition studies and closely related fields, ultimately suggesting, through discrete though overlapping engagements with various texts, that, conceived in and as pedagogy, performativity both needs, and inherently bears traces of, the identity-based politico-theoretical paradigms that preceded and gave rise to it.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Sullivan, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Rhetoric|Composition|Language arts
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