Narrative and Embodied Temporality: Revisiting Performativity

Discussions on the relation between gender-forming discursive practices and biological reality inevitably turn to the body where nature and culture intersect.

Is the body a mere canvas for symbolic practices to inscribe divisions and exclusions or does biological reality dictate divisions and limitations to symbolic practices?

Both symbolic practices and biology rely on a temporal dimension that shapes the discussion: Is a historical or a discursive time able to effectuate these radical inscriptions or does biological time generate these practices? Our project will address this issue by synthesizing multiple perspectives.

First, we will sketch an innovative framework for addressing embodied temporality by tackling from a phenomenological perspective the complex relation between time, body, and motivation. Our programmatic emphasis on motivation's relation to embodiment will initiate a series of innovative shifts. We will proceed to the dimension of language at the level of narrative.

Dismissing recent naturalistic approaches, we will instead revisit Ricoeurs work searching for a novel perspective that will allow us to reinstate the pertinence of narrativity.

We will then address Butler's conception of gender-performativity by first carrying out an investigation of speech-acts and their temporal structure. Ricoeurs and Butlers respective critical accounts of speech-acts will serve as our guide.

We will claim that non-discursive elements of speech-acts determine their temporal structure and we will thematize their bodily origin.

Exploring the bodily involvement of motivation will form a novel framework that will allow our investigation of the embodied nature/culture intersection to move beyond the models of naturalization and performativity.

We will be discussing with feminist and gender theorists who have variously thematized the problem of biological materiality.