Visible identity markers are everyday evidence that identity is performed, not natural.

Evidence

Another critique of digital drag was that it obscured the fact that all identity is performative, as Judith Butler would say. When introducing my students to the concept of performativity, I often explain to them that although I may have a computer, I cannot have the Internet, because the Internet is not a thing, but rather the effect of multiple networked performances among computers, phones, cable, satellites, and power lines. Likewise, I can have a body, but I cannot have a gender or race, because these are the result of a series of networked performances among doctors, families, communities, judges, and so forth. And just as the average Internet user does not see how her Google search result comes from the exchange of billions of bits of information flowing between cooperating computers, we rarely notice the ways gender and race is embedded within culture, because its end result—the ‘having’ of it—strikes us as transparent, intuitive, and natural. Yet identity is hardly natural. If it were, we wouldn’t spend our days validating who we are with our clothing, makeup, photos, sound clips, iPod playlists, working papers, and cross-referenced, interactive blogs. — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls, 252

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives a lucid, concrete pedagogical gloss on Butler’s performativity via the Internet-as-network analogy.
• SEED: The teaching move here is itself reusable: explaining an abstract concept (performativity) by the parallel of a network being an effect, not a thing — a candidate for a craft note on explanation.
• ADDENDUM: Reinforces the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article: daily dress as a running validation ritual of identity shows why sumptuary anxieties recur across eras.
• XREF: connects to: Performance can unmask identity as something performed, not essential. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 99; Human identity is constructed and occasionally invented, not natural and stable — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 839; Cultural identity operates as a positioning, not an essence — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 267 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Identity can be denaturalized to reveal its crafted and contingent nature. #corroborates (0.92) — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction, 94
• Human identity is constructed and occasionally invented, not natural and stable #corroborates (0.90) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 839
• Performance can unmask identity as something performed, not essential. #corroborates (0.88) — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction, 99
• Identity is both a source of agency and increasingly constructed rather than given #corroborates (0.82)
• Cultural identity operates as a positioning, not an essence #corroborates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 267
• Group identity is fluid and contextually chosen, not fixed. #corroborates (0.75)