Grosz, 1994; 1995). Such environments have a
concrete spatiality with encoded meanings that
may be reproduced or resisted through the ongo-
ing negotiation of everyday life in homes, work-
places, communities and nation-states in the
context of audiences of the repeated performativ-
ity of identity (see Butler, 1990: 25 for the type
of performativity we refer to here).
However, like Lise Nelson (1999), we are
leery of grasping onto an uncritical acceptance of
Judith Butler’s (1990) notion of performativity.
On the one hand, ‘by interrogating implicit
norms within enunciations of “identity” and
recognizing it as a process of identification,
something that is done over and overinstead of
something that is an inherent characteristic’,
Butler’s notion of ‘performativity opens up new
terrains of analysis’ (Nelson, 1999: 339, empha-
sis in original). On the other hand, according to
Nelson, Butler inevitably has to invoke the
notion of conscious agency in order to overcome
the contradiction of intent and action in her theo-
rization of performativity. Nelson proposes that
conceiving identity formation as an ‘iterative,
non-foundational process’, one that articulates
with intentional human practice, is preferable to
the dichotomous conceptualization in Butler’s
work: ‘between the masterful humanist subject
and the subject as a node in the power discourse
matrix, a site of compelled repetition of hege-
monic identities’ (1999: 333, 347). An uncritical
acceptance will no doubt reproduce the same
weaknesses and constrictions of performativity,
much like Gillian Rose’s (1997) critique of
‘transparent reflexivity’.
Unlike Nelson, though, we do not think it
necessary to enter (back) into discussion of the
intentionality of human action and agency as
the basis for a materially embodied critique of
Butler’s theory of performativity. Butler’s refusal
of any pre-discursive sex assignment sets up a
non-biologically determined framework that
could demonstrate the power of discourse not
only to shapebut also to readbodies. Identifying
and elaborating a process – performativity –
through which discourses inscribe onto the body
particular renditions of sex as well as through
which we can make bodies culturally intelligible
is the strength of Butler’s work in the context of
theorizing body and embodiment (see also
Butler, 1993). This (purposeful?) overemphasis
of discourse, although useful in understanding
how the body relates to society and even strategic
in practising a feminist body politics, eclipses the
power of materiality not only to shapebut also to
readbodies. Actual bodies as concrete entities –
or our corporeal embodiments – are locales of
human being(s) and media through which people
exist, act and experience environments. Readingother bodies inevitably relies on the materiality
of the particular bodies doing the reading. When
dealing with body and embodiment, avoiding
traps of binary thinking – whether it be not
resurrecting the structure/agency debate, the
nature/nurture argument, the subject/object
controversy or the discourse/materiality divide –
is vital because the body, viewed as a nexus, is
where binaries exist in tandem. Hence, drawing
on Butler’s notion of performativity as reiterative,
routinized behaviour is as useful as Sawicki’s,
Probyn’s and Grosz’ attempts at destabilizing
binary notions of the body.
In our own work, we find the variably ill body
a useful example to demonstrate the intertwining
of the corporeality and constancy of performance –
of multiple positions of gender, ‘race’, class,
sexuality, ability and age, for example – in
establishing or attempting to maintain, or alter-
natively resisting a destabilization of, a cohesive
identity. In our work with women diagnosed with
multiple sclerosis (MS), myalgic encephalo-
myelitis (ME) or rheumatoid arthritis (RA), we
found that many women experience changes in
their corporeality that threaten their previous abled
and gendered identities. As a way to deal with
these ‘new’, sometimes well-scripted notions of
their body as ill and/or diseased, the women were
forced to renegotiate both their social and physical
environments as well as the representations of
their body as ill and/or diseased. These negotia-
tions, with varying degrees of ‘success’, took
place within a web of power relations predicated
on biomedical discourses and practices which
continually inscribe the women as ‘deviant’. In
Foucauldian terms such inscription acts to mediate
access to resources and use of space through
regulation and self-surveillance, for the diagnosis
and prognosis set expectations of what a woman
might be able to accomplish in day-to-day life,
whether corporeally ‘accurate’ or not. Yet the
unpredictability of much chronic illness makes
the re-establishment of identity through routine
material practices and performance difficult as the
body slips between hegemonic notions of what
being well and being ill are.
We explored women’s experiences of chronic
illness from their accounts of living with a body
constructed as ‘deviant’ through biomedical rep-
resentational and material practices (see Moss
and Dyck, 1996; 1999a). Rather than ‘fixed’ – in
terms of capacity to perform ‘as usual’ – the
women’s bodies were sometimes ill, sometimes
well, and sometimes both ill and well at the same
time (Moss, 2000). Uncertainty prevailing in
what women might expect to be able to do and in
how others in positions of power might perceive
them, such as employers and disability insurers,
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