WRITING IDENTITY - A SAMPLER

Stoppard

The trouble with concentrating on the specific is that it leads to delusions of grandeur.

There is a scene in the film Shakespeare In Love (1998) (written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard) which has the following dialogue:

(The company of actors are about to put on Romeo and Juliet. A young girl is questioning one of the actors)

Girl: So what's this play about then?

Man playing nurse: Well, there's this nurse...

This same attitude applies to most everything with which we are individually concerned. It is that thing with which we currently identify. Any scholar’s subject is the centre of his or her world. It is from that particular perspective an individual tends to develop theories concerning the world and everything in it. So it is with performance writing.  When I consider the scope of performance writing in relation to the matter of identity, any form of textual display signifying identity will fall within that compass. Indeed any display signifying identity will do and every signifier becomes a form of text. That ‘text’ can be written in any number of languages, some of which are more universal than others. This notion is of particular importance when considering the question of identity. Accepting that writing is performative is part of that notion. ‘Texts’ do things. 

Butler

To give an example of where I am going with this, I turn to Judith Butler. As to the question of gender, she argues that gender is performative, “...that is, a sense of gender identity for an individual or group develops from actions such as wearing certain clothes (skirts and dresses for women, ties and jackets for men), engaging in certain rituals (such as marriage), taking certain jobs (fewer women on construction sites) and employing certain mannerisms; there is no natural, true, or innate essence of gender, or for that matter any other identity.” For Butler identity is “performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be it results”.

Derrida

The clothes a person wears are clues to their particular choice of identity. We can ‘read’ from the colours, the materials, the cut and style of their clothing not only what gender they purport to be, but many other aspects of their particular personality. Each item of clothing on display is a textual display. It is a performing text. Dressing is a means of writing identity just as much as billboards, numbers on houses, car registration numbers and any other method of textual display. As Jacques Derrida proposes “there is nothing outside the text”.

So when you next hear an actor say “Well there’s this nurse…” you can identity with Romeo or Juliet, or whatever you happen to be wearing at the time.