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Abstract:
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative inquires into the status of speech as conduct from the perpective of social theories of discourse. In a critical encounter with the work of Catharine MacKinnon and Mari Matsuda, this text asks whether and under what conditions hate speech and pornography can be considered "performative", and in what sense. Following the work of J.L. Austin, this work argues that there are at least two ways of construing the performativity of such expressions: (a) as perlocutionary and, therefore, producing a possible set of effects, and (b) as illucotionary and, therefore, as conduct itself. MacKinnon tends to construe pornographic harms as illocutionary, and Excitable Speech offers arguments against this construal. The book offers a theory of speech acts within the context of a doctrine of interpellation, derived from Althusser. According to this view, the names that persons are called are discursive occasions not only for social existence, but also for the possibility of the subversion of injurious utterances within discourse. Cases considered include R.A.V. v. St. Paul, Wisconsin v. Mitchell, the military regulations on homosexual conduct and expression. The book argues that the conflation of speech and conduct can work tactically in favor of sexually conservative public policy, and that regulation of injurious speech offers ambivalent consequences for policies that seek to redress racial discrimination. It also offers a way to think about the interpellative force of injurious speech through an account of the speech act that has both deconstructive and social dimensions.
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