Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space

Theories of performativity have garnered considerable attention within the social sciences and humanities over the past two decades. At the same time, there has been a growing recognition that the social production of space is fundamental to the practices of everyday life. However, comparatively few studies have explored the full implications that arise from the confluence of these two streams of social thought. Feminist geographers were among the first to highlight the importance of space and place to the performativity of gendered identities, and, in recent years, this line of thought has been extended to a broad range of spatial practices, including the cultural politics of street naming, the bordering of political territory, and even the performative enactment of geographical scale itself. This is the first book-length, edited volume to showcase recent geographical scholarship on the spatial politics of performativity and offer a timely intervention within the field of critical human geography by exploring the performativity of political spaces and the spatiality of performative politics.