Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the "Performative"

Tropes that use performance and to make claims about identity and politics have been proliferating recently in cultural and critical theory. The metaphor of location currently echoes through a number of contemporary political and academic discourses. In feminist studies and activism, for one example, positionality is a strategy that locates one's personal and political investments and perspectives across an argument, a gesture toward placing oneself within a critique of objectivity, but at the same time stopping the spin of post-structuralist or postmodernist instabilities long enough to advance a politically effective action. A position is an unstable but effective point of departure.1