Like Judith Butler so famously attested to in the 80’s, we are all performing. Not only through gender and other ideas of socially constructed identity, but through the constant process of subject formation that permeates every facet of our lives from representation to language.

The noun ‘identification’ and the verb ‘to identify’ come from the Latin identificare, which combines identitas and -ficare (from facere: to make)

Extending our ideas of bodies into the more-than-human world and suggesting that performativity can be stretched to encompass the wider sphere of relationality that we exist within, Barad* writes that ‘performativity is not only linked to the coming into being of the human subject and the materialization of bodies, and the socio-political interpellation process that goes along with, but is about the processes of the materialization of ‘all bodies’ and the ‘material-discursive practices’ that engender differences between human and non-human bodies. Donna Haraway’s notion of the material-semiotic also thinks of material, bodily fleshiness and the discursive-linguistic together.

*Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity: 810

The move toward ‘performative alternatives to representationalism,’ Barad argues, ‘shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality (e.g., do they mirror nature or culture?) to matters of practices, doings and actions.’

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: 135

'Performance is the art form which most fully understands the
generative possibilities of disappearance.'

Pegggy Phelan, Unmarked: 27