Browsing by Subject "Performativity"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Here be dragons: performing virtual embodiment, social conduct, and racial imaginaries in World of Warcraft
    (2014-12) Johnson, Kimi Diana
    This dissertation examines the performance of racial identity in the long-running, fantastical multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW) and its role in shaping digital embodiment, guiding player conduct, and maintaining white racial hegemony in the virtual play space. As a space where players devise, build, and perform digital characters to play fictional scenarios, WoW is the world's largest form of participatory theatre. While this space provides a form of immersive escapism, it also asks players to emotionally invest in a narrative that reactivates the problematic racial imaginary of 19th century imperial modernity. Through the methodologies of cultural criticism and autoethnography, this dissertation investigates three components of WoW's gaming environment: the narrative devices that shape a player's avatarial identity, the process of embodying a gendered and racialized virtual character, and the structural design of a gaming system that encourages players to perform white, heteronormative, hypermasculine, and neoliberal capitalist behaviors online or acquiesce to operating within a space that defines itself along such lines. The project focuses on the development of racially coded and narratively complex virtual bodies and analyzes how avatarial embodiment shapes player perceptions of self, race, and gender online. It relies on the concept of the interaction continuum, a term that describes the overlap between the social, virtual-active, and real worlds that form the game space, and stresses the importance of online sociality as the locus of the game's value. This study also utilizes the concept of governmentality to describe how the game designers structure knowledge of and about WoW's citizenry such that small player populations govern themselves, but within the strictures of the game's digital code and the context of its fantastical yet whitewashed narrative. My analysis demonstrates that ludic online culture not only shapes player behavior in the role-playing space of a game, but also alters how players interact with one another in less narrative virtual social spaces.
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    Performative socialization in world politics: Islamism, secularism and democracy in Turkey and Egypt
    (2014-08) Yaylaci, Ismail
    How do norms and discourses travel across cultural difference? How do actors negotiate the constitutive norms of liberal global governance at the juncture of the domestic and the international? This project provides an answer to these questions by developing a performative account of norm socialization and uses this theoretical framework to analyze Islamist negotiations of secularism and democracy in Turkey and Egypt. I suggest that the International Relations scholarship often takes socialization as a pedagogic process in which the non-West is made to transition into the norms of liberal modernity in a hierarchical relationship of authority. In this perspective, actors either socialize into liberal norms or resist them. After identifying the shortcomings of these narratives, I develop a reading that takes socialization as a performative process of cultural translation and norm appropriation. By so doing, I analyze the ways in which norms can be adopted non-normatively--at once inhabited and resisted. I argue that a performative reading enables a more complex understanding of the dynamics of normalization and resistance in socialization. Then I employ this framework to analyze Turkish AK Party's and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's negotiation of secularism and democracy by drawing mainly on the data I collected in my fieldwork research in Turkey and Egypt. More specifically, I examine the performative politics of translation and appropriation in the AK Party's notions of `democratic secularism' and `conservative democracy' and the Muslim Brotherhood's notions of `civil state within an Islamic framework' and `Islamic democracy.'