<!DOCTYPE html>
<html class="client-nojs vector-feature-night-mode-disabled vector-feature-language-in-header-enabled vector-feature-language-in-main-page-header-disabled vector-feature-page-tools-pinned-disabled vector-feature-toc-pinned-clientpref-1 vector-feature-main-menu-pinned-disabled vector-feature-limited-width-clientpref-1 vector-feature-limited-width-content-enabled vector-feature-custom-font-size-clientpref-1 vector-feature-appearance-pinned-clientpref-1 vector-sticky-header-enabled" lang="en" dir="ltr"><head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Performative interval</title>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_interval"> <link href="./mw/skins.vector.icons.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href="./mw/skins.vector.search.codex.styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href="./mw/skins.vector.styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<link href="./mw/user.styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<meta name="ResourceLoaderDynamicStyles" content="">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./mw/site.styles.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./mw/noscript.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./footer.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./vector-2022.css">
</head>
<body class="skin--responsive skin-vector skin-vector-search-vue mediawiki ltr sitedir-ltr mw-hide-empty-elt ns-0 ns-subject page-Performative_interval rootpage-Performative_interval skin-vector-2022 action-view">
<div class="mw-page-container">
<div class="mw-page-container-inner">
<div class="mw-content-container">
<main id="content" class="mw-body">
<header class="mw-body-header vector-page-titlebar">
<h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading mw-first-heading">
<span id="openzim-page-title" class="mw-page-title-main"><span class="mw-page-title-main">Performative interval</span></span>
</h1>
</header>
<a id="top"></a>
<div id="bodyContent" class="vector-body ve-init-mw-desktopArticleTarget-targetContainer" aria-labelledby="firstHeading" data-mw-ve-target-container="">
<div id="mw-content-text" class="mw-body-content mw-content-ltr" lang="en" dir="ltr"><div class="mw-content-ltr mw-parser-output" lang="en" dir="ltr"><p>The <b>performative interval</b> in <a href="Sociology" title="Sociology">sociology</a> refers to a unit of analysis in the interaction order defined by the disjunct between practice and the self, or between what an actor "does" and what an actor "is".
</p><p>The concept is developed by sociologist Adam Isaiah Green, <a href="University_of_Toronto" title="University of Toronto">University of Toronto</a>, as a <a href="Heuristic" title="Heuristic">heuristic</a> device to illustrate the irreducibility of the self to a social category in <a href="Symbolic_interactionist" class="mw-redirect" title="Symbolic interactionist">symbolic interactionist</a> and <a href="Queer_theory" title="Queer theory">queer theory</a> renderings of the subject (Green 2007). In Green's reflection on these two latter literatures, the actor "acts toward" a given social category — be it a racial, ethnic, <a href="Gender" title="Gender">gender</a> or <a href="Sexual_orientation" title="Sexual orientation">sexual orientation</a> classification — through aligning behavior, affect and the body with <a href="Norm_(sociology)" class="mw-redirect" title="Norm (sociology)">norms</a> that define the category. Nevertheless, the category is never fully realized in the self, an insight that builds directly on <a href="Judith_Butler" title="Judith Butler">Judith Butler</a>'s (1997) conception of "performative failure" (for more, see the concept of <a href="Performativity" title="Performativity">performativity</a>), but also on the earlier sociological work of <a href="Mead" title="Mead">Mead</a> and <a href="Goffman" class="mw-redirect" title="Goffman">Goffman</a>, among others. According to Green, whereas pragmatist and interactionist <a href="Sociological" class="mw-redirect" title="Sociological">sociological</a> approaches to the self typically focus on how a given actor shores up the gap between "doing" and "being" in the performative interval, queer theory focuses on the inability of the self to ever realize a social category as an ontological property of the self. Rather, for queer theorists and within <a href="Poststructuralism" class="mw-redirect" title="Poststructuralism">poststructuralism</a> more generally, the self is an ever-dissolving iteration of a norm absent a knowable interior or a stable core.
</p>
<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="See_also">See also</h2></div>
<ul><li><a href="Outline_of_sociology#General_sociology_concepts" title="Outline of sociology">Outline of sociology#General sociology concepts</a></li></ul>
<div class="mw-heading mw-heading2"><h2 id="References">References</h2></div>
<ul><li><a href="Judith_Butler" title="Judith Butler">Butler, Judith</a> 1997. <i>Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative</i>, London: Routledge</li>
<li>Green, Adam Isaiah. 2007. “Queer Theory and Sociology: Locating the Subject and the Self in Sexuality Studies”, <i>Sociological Theory</i>, 25, 1:26-45.</li></ul></div><!--htdig_noindex--><div><div class="zim-footer">
This article is issued from <a class="external text" title="Last edited on 2025-07-27" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?title=Performative_interval&oldid=1302815237">Wikipedia</a>. The text is available under <a class="external text" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en">Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0</a> unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.
</div>
</div><!--/htdig_noindex--></div>
</div>
</main>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body></html>