Towards a Performative Turn in Intercultural Communication

ABSTRACT

To engage the contributions of Performance Studies for the study of culture and communication, this article offers an initial exploration of a performative turn in intercultural communication. Using performances of sexuality with a focus on the declaration of one’s own sexual non-normativity – commonly known as “coming out” in Western discourses – as an example, I first discuss how a performance analytic might examine cultural particularities of this communicative action. Next, I discuss the notion of “hardening performances” and introduce three processes – sedimentation, calcification, and ossification – for the examination of power in intercultural communication. I conclude by exploring some implications of a performative turn in culture and communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• calcification
• intercultural communication
• ossification
• performative turn
• sedimentation
• sexuality

Acknowledgments

I thank Tony, Tyler, Dino, and Yogi for their ethereal presence, and Pierre Lucas, my sweet furry bodhisattva, for his embodied presence and loving companionship, and Dawn Marie McIntosh and Shinsuke Eguchi for their flexibility and understanding during the period of preparation of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The essay is, in many ways, my ruminations about the potential of adopting a performance analytic to produce different ways of knowing in intercultural communication.

2. To be clear, the exploration of the three cultural contexts – postsocialist China, Taiwan, and the United States – is not a cultural comparison project, which, often implicitly or more explicitly, creates a hierarchy of value (e.g., culture “A” is more “developed” than “B” or “C”) that can potentially have profound symbolic and material consequences for the groups involved.

3. The research on sexuality – particularly on visibility of non-normative sexualities reported in this article – suggests a number of similarities between postsocialist China and Taiwan. Because of this, I often discuss them together. It is important, however, to note that postsocialist China and Taiwan are distinct cultural, economic, and political systems.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gust A. Yep

Gust A. Yep (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is Professor of Communication Studies, Graduate Faculty of Sexuality Studies, and Faculty in the Ed.D. Program in Educational Leadership at San Francisco State University. His research focuses on communication at the intersections of culture, race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and the body in sexual and gender minority communities nationally and transnationally. In addition to three books and a monograph, he has authored more than one hundred articles in (inter)disciplinary journals and anthologies. Finally, he has received a number of teaching, mentoring, research, university and community service awards locally and nationally.