Performative Politics and Nonverbal Political Acts
Luke Lavender (Queen Mary University of London); Moya Lloyd (University of Essex)
This workshop is orientated around a trend in recent political theorising to move away from framing being silent as inherently depoliticising or politically irrelevant and towards the idea that being silent or acting silently can be a constitutive and productive part of being political (Ferguson, 2003; Mihai, 2023). This is captured in instances where being silent is a key part of how being political is expressed and thus feeds into a wider impulse to theorise how nonverbal enactments of agency are politically significant in so far as they move us beyond logo- and speech- centric accounts of political agency (Rollo, 2017; 2019; 2021 Vieira, 2019; 2020; 2021; Freeden, 2015; 2023; Gest and Gray 2015).
To this end, there has been an impulse to try and capture said instances of silent agency through a performative framing of their political effects (Butler, 2015; Vieira, 2021; Gómez-Barris, 2012; Athanasiou 2018). Performative accounts of language are viewed as a promising way through which the subversive capacities of resistance and action can be envisioned discursively/linguistically (Butler, 1997; Allen, 1998; Isin, 2019). One purpose of this workshop is to explore both the potentialities and the limitations of understanding the politics of silence as performative by considering what performative theories of (spoken) action make possible, as well as reflecting on their potential blind spots and limits for conceptualising and representing what is political about these enactments of agency. Indicative examples of how others have approached issues of, or specific examples of, silent agency can be seen in studies that have looked at: demonstrations of grief by Women in Black; protests against enforced disappearance by the Saturday Mothers; the silent protest of the standing man in Taksim square; the use of die ins by black lives matter; alongside practices of lip-sewing by asylum-seeking populations.
The workshop thus directly speaks to researchers working on silent protests/acts of dissent, performative accounts of political protest/action, and work that looks at how to conceptualise or represent the relation between silent actors and political communities. It is open to, but not limited to, scholars who work around the topics of: discourse theory, performative (speech-act) theory, agency and resistance, the politics of representation, radical democracy, the politics of the body/corporeal politics, alongside work on critical deliberative accounts of political action or agency more broadly.
