Aula Magna
The English Graduate Program invites the students to take part in the Master Lecture presented by Dr. Tommaso M. Milani (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa) on March 22th, 2016, at Henrique Fontes auditorium, 10:00 a.m.
Queer performativity
Over the last two decades, performativity has become one of the most significant notions – if not the most influential one – in the study of language and socio-cultural processes. Most commonly associated with the work of the American philosopher Judith Butler on gender, sexuality and the sexed body (1990, 1993, 2004, 2011), performativity’s uptake has far exceeded the original focus of the concept. Though appreciating the wide-raging impact of the concept, in this talk, I propose that it is perhaps time to “bring performativity back” (Livia and Hall 1997) to its origins; this time though it’s not its linguistic heritage that we should rediscover but its queer pedigree (Sedgwick 1993), which lies at the crossroads of gender, sexuality and the body. Such a suggestion might sound paradoxical, because the very existence of an origin(al) is undermined by a performativity approach. However, renewed attention to the body brings with it the promise of broadening the remit of inquiry beyond a narrow focus on language so as to encompass “aspects of experience and reality that do no present themselves in propositional or even in verbal form” (Sedgwick 2003: 6), such as affect and materiality (see also Bucholtz and Hall, in press, Peck and Stroud 2015). A re-centering of performativity around its queer roots also has the potential to re-frame ongoing discussions about (anti)normativity in gender and sexuality research.
Bio-Data
Dr. Tommaso M. Milani is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is Co-Editor of the journals African Studies (Taylor and Francis) and Gender and Language (Equinox) with Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard; he is also Editor of the book series Advances in Sociolinguistics (Bloomsbury). His work has appeared in many international journals, including Discourse & Society, Journal of Sociolinguistics, and Language in Society. He has recently edited the book Language and Masculinities: Performances, Intersections, Dislocations (Routledge, 2015).
