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This chapter interrogates the assumption of natural maleness and femaleness found in feminist theological writings on the imago dei and so-called women's sin. A sex binarism is problematic because of its link to heteronormativity (the notion that heterosexuality is the only legitimate form of sexual desire) and thus to heterosexism. Judith Butler's poststructuralist theory of performativity is used to deconstruct that sex binarism. The theory of performative sexed identity is applied theologically in order to reformulate the notions of sin and women's creation in the image of God. The chapter's critical examination of Grace Jantzen's alternative proposals about women's selfhood and desires opens up a larger issue of how in the process of rethinking sex, sin, and the imago dei, the feminist theologian can rediscover desire for the tradition itself.

This chapter focuses on an alternative vision of agency found in what has come to be called the politics of difference. It presents a critical engagement with one of the most influential contemporary theorists of agency: Judith Butler. The chapter begins with some background on the politics of difference, specifically in the context of how it developed within feminist theory. It then moves to a sketch of Butler's work on agency, specifically her theory of performativity: from her early critiques of subjectivity and the (near) totalizing effects she grants to power, to her more recent work that nuances the claims about power and agency, specifically in light of her use and appropriation of the idea of melancholy/melancholia. It is argued that a comparison between Taylor and Butler shows how each of their projects begins with distinctive forms of melancholy that create the conditions for the possibility of agency. Butler's focus on the relationship between the social and the psyche/psychic life is a search for possibility and hope under conditions of subjection by power. This search also effectively marks Butler's work as a project of regenerating agency.

This chapter examines Taylor's and Butler's accounts of melancholy and agency. It is argued that the form of melancholy shared by their accounts is a key feature of symbolic loss in the constitution of the self, and symbolic loss has a central role in creating the conditions for the possibility of new modes of agency. The convention in appropriating melancholy follows the comparative example Freud established between mourning and melancholia (melancholy), in which the character of loss and the reluctance to give up on an object of love in the latter (melancholia/melancholy) takes its lead and form from the former (mourning).

Since its inception in 1987, The Journal of Ritual Studies, has published many seminal articles on the definition, recognition, and interpretation of ritual practices. The journal's approach has been interdisciplinary from the start, enriching the scope of contributions and broadening the base of conversations about theory. Its corpus of contributions can be a useful resource for teaching ritual, and this chapter demonstrates how this potential can be realized, using five articles from recent issues analyzed at a graduate or upper-level undergraduate level. The five articles chosen for this task all consider current themes in religious studies, ritual studies, and anthropological studies: the local and the global; ritual and invention; performance and performativity; embodiment and communication; and ritual and human consciousness.

Working with and against the arguments of Dworkin, Ignatieff, and Sen, this chapter argues that contemporary liberal and deliberative democratic conceptions of rights fail to fully capture the performativity, and thus the democratic character, of the practice of rights claiming. It sheds light on the investment such perspectives have in assuring the felicity or successful outcome of a rights claim, and suggests that this investment is evident in an ongoing tendency to treat rights claims as trumps or claims that bring an end to a particular contest. In other words, this chapter suggests that traditional liberal and recent deliberative democratic defences of rights claiming go awry to the extent that they treat rights claims almost exclusively as illocutionary utterances.

This chapter explores one of the most difficult questions facing citizen participation and deliberative democracy: What is the role of emotion in political deliberation and public policy? The fact that emotional passion is basic to politics is clear, but the question of how to handle it both analytically and procedurally in the deliberative process is not easy to answer. In search of a better understanding of emotion in reason and politics, the chapter examines a range of perspectives, from Aristotle's theory of rhetoric to contributions from modern neuroscience. All show emotion and reason to be tied together in a complex relationship. The insight leads to the consideration of emotional expression in terms borrowed from drama and performativity. Emotion is then explored through experiences drawn from efforts by urban planners to revitalize depressed communities. The chapter concludes by suggesting a two-step process for dealing with ‘passionate reason’.

While commonsense attributes unproblematic and positive meaning to concepts of identity and community, a critical approach to these concepts uncovers their contingency, instability, and awkward relationship to structures of inclusion and exclusion. The four chapters commented on here foreground this critical approach in different ways: by demonstrating how agents can develop life narratives replete with discontinuity and unpredictability; by analyzing how one visible marker of ethnic identity (e.g., a piece of clothing) can become the object of conflicting perspectives for those who sport it; by exploring the complexities of seemingly simple performatives like “I am an X”; and by showing how particular markers of identity carry different meanings in multi‐ethnic contexts. The chapters develop a model for the exploration of ethnicity and identity as discursively achieved categories.

In examining the status of music in the cross-cultural encounter, this chapter focuses on Captain Cook's second voyage (1772-5) and the role played by Burney's son James and the German naturalist Georg Forster in transcribing and commenting on Polynesian music. It shows that the discovery of part singing in New Zealand and Tonga conflicted with Rousseauvian assertions about polyphony as an exclusively European invention. Music scholars like Charles Burney, Johann Nicolaus Forkel, Eduard Hanslick, and August Wilhelm Ambros subsequently played down the polyphonic and affective character of Polynesian music so as to uphold theories about music's universal progress and its hierarchical ordering. The chapter argues that this move, and others like it, had lasting implications for the development of western musicology and ethnomusicology, which would come to be predicated on a series of radical distinctions between the European and non-European. Where Orpheus had once signified the harmonizing powers of music, he would now be transformed into a cautionary tale about musical difference and the dangers of music's instrumentality.

This conclusion argues that auto/biography is shadowed by the alter ego of scepticism, whether directed at the reality or intelligibility of selves; their representability; or the adequacy of the available forms of representation. It summarizes the resulting positions of anti‐subjectivity and autobiograficton, arguing that the sceptical engagements with life‐writing display a markedly performative dimension, using theoretical concepts from Judith Butler and Sidonie Smith. The notion of the performative reintroduces the ideas of fictionality and creativity to the heart of the autobiographic project; and to that extent could be said to inscribe even in formal autobiography some of the key qualities discovered here in more hybrid works, of ‘autobiografiction’ and imaginary writing. A literary autobiography's relation to a fictional oeuvre is discussed as working according to Derrida's logic of the supplement, with a comparable effect: posing autobiography as outside fiction, but infiltrating the autobiographical into the fiction, and thus reciprocally, the fictional into the autobiography. What such arguments bring out is how autobiography and fiction, while posed as mutually exclusive, are in fact profoundly interdependent, and constitute throughout the last two centuries a system of modern self‐representation which might itself be termed ‘autobiografiction’.

Chapter 6 discusses the process by which young unmarried Jain women reconstitute themselves as wives through the embodiment of Jain satis—in particular Candanbala—and the adoption of the body practices of wifehood. At the same time, these Jain women also use fasting rituals to covertly explore the possibility of renunciation without stating any overt intention to renounce. Jain karma theory supports conceptualizing young women's ritual lives as a form of performativity in which they constitute their future bodies as wife or nun or, fleetingly, something in between. When comparing young women's embodiment of sati Candanbala in one fast with their reenactments of Rajul, it is clear that these young women strategically deploy these satis' incipient renunciation to embody their own experimentation and negotiation with wifehood and renunciation in ways that position themselves as agents controlling their own futures.

This chapter uses the trope of autochthony in order to consider Antigone as the figure for a radical kind of self‐authorization. Following Judith Butler, this chapter considers Antigone as the occupant of an unnamable and unrecognizable subject position. As such an impossible, even erased inhabitant (as simultaneous daughter‐sister to Oedipus), Antigone threatens the integrity of the symbolic system in which she is nonetheless enmeshed. As one who defies socially sanctioned forms of genealogy, Antigone exists both within and without known social structures; she seems to generate her own, unique genealogy. Finally, this chapter asserts that Antigone represents a problematic surplus, which the play struggles to contain; Antigone is considered as disruptive not only in familial, social, and political terms, but in representational terms as well. The trope of burial can thus be understood as a way for the play to manage the disruptive force that is Antigone.

This chapter analyzes a kind of lucidity characteristic of oppressed subjectivities: a meta-lucidity produced by epistemic friction. I address the issue of how to promote this kind of meta-lucidity for differently situated subjects, including those in a position of privilege. I discuss the phenomenon of epistemic heroes—extraordinary subjects who under conditions of epistemic oppression are able to develop epistemic virtues. I argue that epistemic heroes should be understood as emblems: figures who become emblematic because they come to epitomize the daily struggles of resistance of ordinary people. I argue that the transformative impact of performance that we consider heroic is crucially dependent on social networks and daily practices of resistance in which the performance in question is taken up or reenacted (the phenomenon of echoing). I offer two examples of cultural icons of resistance who appear to be “epistemic heroines”: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Rosa Parks.

Having considered the theorisation of performativity by Judith Butler and Mary Louise Pratt, this chapter uses theatrical performances both in the fictional writing of Colette and Rachilde and in the travelogues of Isabelle Eberhardt to demonstrate how performance and performativity intertwine in the disorderly motion of vagabondage. The second section examines the Orient as a staging space for female movement, where a potent form of gender proxemics comes into play between the body of the woman travel writer and her Oriental subjects. The travelogue becomes a location of misfiring gender constructions, temporary contact zones and dramatic destruction. Finally, the chapter explores the disconcerting effects produced when textuality and the female body in motion collide in vagabondage travelogues.

This section introduces the twin chapters on Homeric epic, the Iliad and Odyssey. Its methodological basis for comparison derives from J. Foley, who proposes using the idea of resonance—the process by which formulae evoke a wider epic tradition and, in turn, resonate through each and every particular instance—to explore inter-poetic rivalry. It identifies scenes of debate through a lexical study of the term ‘agora’ and its associated formulae, on the basis of which the assembly may be regarded as an arena in which the relationship between the leader and his people is examined, questioned and forged. While other studies have compiled lists of attributes of the assembly, however, this section draws attention to the performativity of the text-how debates work in context and develop over the course of the narrative—which may help to account for the often commented absence of a clear polis structure in either poem.