Amelia Jones's In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance begins by observing that the formulation “queer performativity” has, since at least the late twentieth century, become a fixture in performance and visual art discourses, humanities scholarship, and even some larger “fields of popular culture” (1). Jones aims to “denaturalize” (xvi) this union of terms, while parsing what critical capacities they afford. Her book maps out the cultural and conceptual developments that have positioned the linguistic category of the performative—an utterance that does what it says—as a lodestar for studies of gender and sexuality: an association cemented (though not, as Jones demonstrates, inaugurated) by the blockbuster scholarship of Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick in the 1980s and 1990s.

For this thorough-going assessment alone, Jones's study proves significant and valuable. She examines cardinal debates too numerous to name comprehensively here. Jones revisits Butler's foundational contributions and underlines Jacques Derrida's insistence...

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