Queer Theory Passages

Question 1

performative (Sedgwick)

Answer 1

(page 3)
“one characteristic of the readings in this book is to attend to performative aspects of texts … in the vicinity of the closet, even what counts as a speech act is problematized on a perfectly routin basis. As Foucault says: ‘there is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say … There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.’ ‘Closetedness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a slience - not a particular silence, but a slience that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitute it.”