Performative writing, like other modes of qualitative inquiry, makes a bid as an alternative form of scholarly research. Such a bid often works by definitional opposition to positivist, objectivist logics that, as the argument goes, remain trapped in the Cartesian mind/body split. Work that is not qualitative is often called out as being cold and heartless, unreflective, unreadable and unread (boring), misguided, elitist, unethical, or simply wrong headed. Such name calling may seem a caricature when one remembers that objectivists operate from a desire to minimize, but not deny, the influence of researchers on those they study, to privilege others at the expense of themselves, and to predict so that they might take reasoned actions in the world. The “devil,” dressed in such clothing, may not be as frightening a figure as qualitative researchers often suggest. Qualitative scholars feel that what is driving the uneasiness most likely comes from the devil’s rejection of their claims to legitimacy. Earning legitimacy, however, does not have to come by constituting a devil and then calling for its demise. I would rather not make the case for qualitative inquiry in oppositional terms, although I have done so in the past (Pelias, 1999, 2004). Suffice it to say that I believe qualitative scholars proceed in a different way, a way that offers insights into human behavior and works on behalf of social justice. If I am correct, I am happy to be engaged in this line of scholarship. In particular, I have found performative writing a most appealing and productive research strategy.
This chapter, however, is not a celebration of performative writing, although I remain ready to toss the confetti at the performative writing dance. Instead of tossing confetti, I take this opportunity to tell a cautionary tale in the back corner of the performative writing festivities. My design is not to spoil the performative writing party, but to enhance its ethical practice. This cautionary tale, then, is an inquiry into the ethics of performative writing but without any desire to stop the celebration. It locates performative writing by outlining its definitional complexities before identifying a number of ethical issues about performative writing as a representational form. I end the chapter with a performative writing oath. I see it as a personal guide and as an invitational call for ethical practice. Much of what I have to offer can be applied equally well to a number of other associated forms. As I make my case, I quote researchers who speak directly to performative writing, those who would encompass performative writing under their own labeling, and those who may feel uncomfortable with my application of their ideas. To the last group, I apologize and hope that my borrowing is seen as a tribute to the productivity of their offerings.

Locating Performative Writing

Performative writing is a slippery term, in part because it resists its own containment. It is always writing and performing its way against satisfied representations. At its core, performative writing is an intervention in the crisis of representation. The intervention may stake its claim as a better, but never complete, form of representation, as an ongoing critique of representation’s seduction, or as a continual, but never attainable, effort to escape language’s hegemonic force. Despite this commonality, scholars, who have wed these two close, but at times squabbling, writing, and performing cousins, remain unsure of their own enunciation. “Performative” emerges as the contested cousin, even though “writing” carries its own troublesome history. Two differing, but not incompatible, conceptions of “performative” are prevalent, one that privileges “performative” as an adjective and the other that underlines it as a noun.
As an adjective, “performative” qualifies writing, telling what kind of writing is operative. In this usage, the page becomes a place where a performance can happen, where a writer can present for consideration a self speaking from the body, evocatively. The performance on the page parallels a performance on stage. It offers a bodily staging of a speaker—conceived variously—who engages personal, relational, cultural, historical, and political phenomena. Through monologue or dialogue, it makes present its topic, notes its investment, and is reflective and reflexive about its own workings. This ludic enterprise lives in the subjunctive, the “as if” (Turner, 1982, pp. 82–84), always holding itself up as a possibility. It “stands in” (Wilshire, 1982) for those who audience, offering language they may or may not claim as resonant. As it calls on the sensuous, the figurative, and the expressive, it is simultaneously confidant in and skeptical of language’s abilities. Its speakers command, order, and trust in their linguistic constructions as well as mock, reject, and wrestle with their own efforts.
As a noun, “performative” is a speech act that accomplishes what it says (Austin, 1980). In this sense, language is a constitutive action, a productive mechanism that can reify and dismantle ongoing normative logics. Language, always repetitive and reiterative, is an obstinate discursive system, but it allows space for alternative possibilities, for disrupting the conventional and taken-for-granted, and for substantive change. As an utterance participating within or against performativity, a performative, then, is always partial and material. Its partiality speaks to its inadequacy; its materiality recognizes its force. When working to disturb and alter the normative, the performative labors in excess, engages in an ongoing play between presence and absence, and, in the doing, becomes a material intervention.
Thinking of “performative” as an adjective and a noun implies an emerging set of procedural precedents or stylistic conventions associated with performative writing. In this chapter, I rely on four organizing features of performative writing to begin the discussion of the ethical issues related to the form. I deploy the labels embodied, evocative, partial, and material as defining characteristics. Such a generic move may permit some organizational tidiness, but it obscures performative writing’s power to perform against its own established boundaries. This reminder is in keeping with Pollock’s (1998) caution before giving her own list (evocative, metonymic, subjective, nervous, citational, and consequential) of the “descriptive/prescriptive, practical/theoretical” characteristics of performative writing. She notes her intent is “to map directions/directives for performative writing without foreclosing on the possibility that performance may—at any moment—unhinge or override its claims” (Pollock, 1998, pp. 80–81). I use embodied, evocative, material, and partial in the same spirit, recognizing that the ethical issues discussed below are both prevalent and provisional.

The Ethics of Performative Writing’s Form

Embodied

Performative writing’s call for embodied speech is a bid to make the body relevant, a recovery gesture designed to intervene in the mind/body split. It asks the body to stand in for a number of perceived absences in traditional research practices. In general, the body is solicited to bring forth the researcher’s presence. As Spry (2001) notes, “Performative writing composes the body into being. Such a praxis requires that I believe in language’s representational abilities, thus putting my body at (the) stake” (p. viii). This interpellated presence takes four primary, and at times, combined forms, each carrying ethical pitfalls.
First, the body becomes a troubling presence by acknowledging that all claims are filtered, positioned, subjective, located in interaction, historical, cultural, and so on. The troubling presence is a nervous one, always questioning its own assertive rights, always reminding listeners to be leery of its claims, always turning back on itself to inquire: What, if anything, do I really know? What, if anything, can I claim without doing harm? The troubling presence emerges as humble, self-conscious, and self-effacing. In its reflexive move, however, it may take more space than it ethically requires or deserves. Those who encounter such accounts may wish researchers would simply get on with the claims they wish to make.
Second, the body is rendered as an affective presence. It is a container of our sensate and emotional beings. This affective presence speaks from and to the senses; it speaks of passions and feelings; it speaks from the heart. It offers a vulnerable self, exposed, presented bare for its personal and social curative value, for its articulation of a site for identification, and for its power as political intervention. The affective presence insists on its right to speak in its own register knowing that it may ridiculed, sacrificed, and dismissed. It finds comfort in Behar’s (1996) claim that research “that doesn’t break your heart isn’t worth doing anymore” (p. 177). Such comfort, however, begs the ethical question of what should be told, of whose interests are privileged in the telling. It opens the door for those who would claim that the affective leads to self-indulgence, narcissism, and public therapy (Parks, 1998; Shields, 2000), to privileging self over others (Buzard, 2003; Hantzis, 1998; Madison, 2006), and to situating listeners into problematic stances (Terry, 2006). Such concerns, I believe, are misplaced. A more productive ethical question is what work is accomplished by an affective self.
Third, the body is brought forth as an authentic presence. As an authentic presence, it strives for an honest unfolding of self, a genuine display of the real, hidden self. The “true self” is there to be uncovered, probed, revealed. The authentic is what one deeply feels, what one seldom says. This construction carries the questionable assumptions that the authentic is found most fully in the hidden rather than in the typically shared, that the authentic is stable and unchanging, storied into coherence rather than always in flux and contingent, and that the authentic is something one possesses rather than something constituted in interaction. Regardless of how an authentic presence might be conceived, the ethical task reaches toward both self and other. As Guignon (2004) explains, “Authenticity is a personal undertaking insofar as it entails personal integrity and responsibility for self. But it also has a social dimension insofar as it brings with it a sense of belongingness and indebtedness to the wider social context that makes it possible” (p. 163). Embodied authenticity carries its greatest ethical force when it invites individual introspection as well as social deliberation and connection.
Fourth, the body emerges as a political presence. In doing so, it brings forward bodies that are marked differently, have been historically denied speech, and have been unrecognize...