Performativity confounded: agency, resistance, and the history of politeness

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.