“Infected with Queerness,” Or, You’re So Performative, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You

This essay argues that contemporary political and scholarly discourse often casts those who champion felicity to genealogies of performativity grounded in speech act theory as perpetuating excessive attachments, not only to a piece of “jargon,” but to Judith Butler herself. By reducing such theoretical commitments to youthful Butlerian reverence, these critiques enact and obscure the very problems and possibilities of queer performativity theorized by Eve Sedgwick, problems and possibilities that are especially generative for thinking about the experiences of immunocompromised or otherwise disabled people amid debates about the supposed “performativity” of mask wearing in a pandemic. Drawing upon the crip valences of Sedgwick’s work and reception amid the HIV/AIDS epidemic, I argue that commitments to particular genealogies of performativity might best be considered and approached not as shaming, moralizing correctives to critics who mistake the performative for the theatrical, but instead as a form of camp attachment.