Charlotte Chadderton - Judith Butler, Race and Education (2018)

Judith
Butler,
Race &
Education
charlotte chadderton
Judith Butler, Race and Education
Charlotte Chadderton
Judith Butler, Race

and Education
Charlotte Chadderton
Institute for Education
Bath Spa University
Newton Saint Loe, Bath, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-73364-7 ISBN 978-3-319-73365-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73365-4
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To Rick and Rubaica
Acknowledgements
Thank you especially to John Preston and Helen Colley, for all your support
and encouragement, and for helping me develop my thinking. Thank you
also to Harry Torrance, Lorna Roberts and Lisa Mazzei for support and
ideas, and to Anke Wischmann, Jasmine Rhamie, Vini Lander and Shamim
Miah for discussions without which I would never have written this book.
vii
Contents
1
Introduction 1
2 Judith Butler, Race and Education: What Can a Butlerian

Framework Provide? 27
3 The Work of Judith Butler and the Study of Race 47
4 Race as a Hegemonic Norm: Citizenship Education

and the Production of Raced British Subjects 81
5 Making Whiteness and Acting White: The Performativity

of Race and Race as a Performative 109
6 Aspirations and Intelligible Subjects 131
7 The ‘Prevent’ Agenda in Higher Education: Sovereignty

and State Power to Desubjectivate 149
ix
x Contents
8 The Role of Race in Research Through a Butlerian Lens:

Representation, Knowledge and Voice 167
9 Conclusion: A Butlerian Approach to Social

Transformation in Education 187
Index 203
1
Introduction
Judith Butler’s work is variously regarded as radical, liberating, complex,

controversial, inaccessible and all of these. She is considered an academic
celebrity (Hey 2006). Her work contributes to the fields of Philosophy,
Gender Studies, Politics, Sociology, Religion, Literary Theory, Ethics,
Cultural Studies, Education and others, although has probably had the
most impact in the field of Gender Studies. Many however have argued for
its wider applicability and she herself has written that her work wanders
between ‘literary theory, philosophy and social theory’ (Butler 2010, 148).
Judith Butler tends to be best known for her work on gender and sexual-
ity. However, her work is also more broadly about power and the workings
of power (Loizidou 2007; Chambers and Carver 2008). Many of her argu-
ments and ideas are in fact very relevant to debates around race and racism,
and a small number of race theorists have demonstrated the usefulness of a
Butlerian framework in theorising the complexities of race, although this
has not yet been widely taken up, particularly not in the field of education
(for example Kondo 1997; Warren 2001; Rich 2004; Alexander 2004;
Warren and Fassett 2004; Youdell 2006a, b; Nayak 2006a; Byrne 2000,
2011; Chadderton 2013; Kitching 2011, 2014). Equally many of Butler’s
© The Author(s) 2018 1

C. Chadderton, Judith Butler, Race and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73365-4_1
2 C. Chadderton
readers remain unaware of the aspects of her work which address issues
around race directly (for example Butler 2004, 2010).
Race still matters, and racial inequality persists. Despite the US having
elected a black president, and resulting claims that we are now in an age
where race no longer plays a role in society, race still matters. Even as
president of the US, Barack Obama, could not escape being defined by
his race. The doubts raised about his ‘Americanness’ would not have been
raised had he been white. At the time of writing, a new US president,
Donald Trump, has been elected at least in part based on his appeals to
restore what is regarded as a lost white privilege. Equally across Europe,
right-wing populism is on the rise. The outcome of the 2016 Brexit ref-
erendum in the UK, the 2017 electoral successes of parties such as
Alternative fuer Deutschland in Germany and the Front National in
France are in part based on the appeal of narratives of perceived threats to
(white) natives by refugees, migrant workers from Eastern Europe, and
workers in countries such as India and China who work for lower wages.
These narratives, even those around Eastern Europeans, who are generally
pale-skinned, are racialised, and contain messages about ethnic threat.
The narratives mask the complex structural, political and economic
arrangements which have created the real threats to the lives of British,
German, French and North American workers: late capitalism and neo-
liberal politics: the gradual removal of the protection of the state of the
populations’ welfare systems and workers’ rights, and the marketisation
of public services. Such ethnic threat narratives also fuel individual acts of
racial violence: it was recently argued that race crimes involving racial or
religious hatred rose by 23% in the eleven months following the Brexit
vote (see for example, Bulman 2017). Despite the gains made by the
Civil Rights movement and the introduction of anti-discrimination laws
in many countries, racial inequalities have not disappeared, neither in the
US, nor in the UK or Europe. On the contrary, in some areas they have
increased, fuelled by the neoliberal politics of the last 40–50 years (Omi
and Winant 2015). Wealth and success continue to be concentrated in
white families and individuals. Notions of race continue to shape social
structures, identities, institutions, attitudes, interaction and policy.
Little contemporary scholarly work is explicitly based on biological
notions of race, in which individuals are seen in terms of essential
Introduction 3
c haracteristics believed to be natural properties of certain bodies, as

such notions have now been scientifically disproved (Gates 1985;
Solomos 1993; Winant 2000). However these notions still carry some
currency. Some of the more recent examples of work underpinned by
biological theories of race include Herrnstein and Murray’s work The
Bell Curve (1994), in which it was claimed that African American
children attain low grades at schools because they are naturally less
intelligent, and geneticist James Watson’s 2007 comments about peo-
ple of African descent allegedly being less intelligent than whites
(McKie and Harris 2007).
Most recent academic research on race is instead underpinned by the
idea of race as a social construction, by which I mean that race is seen as
not inherently present, rather it is considered to be ‘an arbitrary sign used
to divide up the human population’ (Nayak 2006a, 415). Much of this
work is based on the pioneering work of people such as sociologist and
activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who saw race not as biological fact, but an arti-
ficially constructed notion through social and historical conditions, with-
out inherent or essential meaning, historically and geographically
contingent and changing over time. Work which takes a social construc-
tionist approach includes various different theorisations of race, such as
the Marxist theory-informed racialisation (for example, Miles 1993; Cole
2009), which argues that all social relations are historically specific and
therefore socially constructed, and will reflect the economic system of the
time. It also includes Critical Race Theory, which argues that race is
socially constructed (for example Haney Lopez 1995) and that society
and social and political arrangements are racially structured. However, it
has been argued that much social constructionist work, while abstractly
claiming to be socially constructionist, is still underpinned by the notion
that culture is tied to ethnic group, that race is attached to bodies: white-
ness is enacted by white bodies and blackness by black ones (Ali 2005;
Nayak 2006a, 420; Byrne 2006). This seems to reify a kind of racial or
cultural specificity. As Ali (2005) argues, ‘[s]ocial constructionism still
holds to the idea of race as some kind of ontological category, a real foun-
dation for what one “is”’ (p. 324). Partly, the reason for this is that this work
focuses on illustrating the effects of racial stratification, discrimination and
racialised thinking, and does not pay much attention to how race is
4 C. Chadderton
constructed, or how people come to be located in racialised spaces. On

the other hand, there are those who argue that if race is socially con-
structed, perhaps even just an illusion, why is racial inequality real and
why is race still experienced as real by so many (see for example Winant
2000; Warmington 2009; Murji 2015)?
Race continues to be an unstable concept and there is confusion over
what it actually is (Byrne 2011; Omi and Winant 2015). Is it real and
natural, or constructed? If it is not real, why does it seem real and have
real consequences, and how should we understand that racial inequalities
persist? If it is constructed, who is doing the constructing? What is the
relationship between bodies and race, as the existence of different pheno-
types cannot be denied? What are racial categories based on and who can
be included and excluded in the different categories?
Butler’s writings can be said to belong to a body of work which calls
into question the ontological status of race. The approach of these schol-
ars has been described by Nayak (2006a) as ‘tentatively anti-
foundationalist’ or ‘decipherable as an emergent post-race paradigm’, and
includes the work of Butler, as well as, for example, Frantz Fanon, Homi
Bhabha and Paul Gilroy. These scholars theorise the ways in which identi-
ties are produced by power, examine the construction of race and racial
subjects, challenge the existence of racial specificity, explore racial posi-
tioning and how this shifts, and deconstruct essentialised notions of race
whilst still investigating how these notions have so much potency.
However, such work while not novel, is still relatively rare, under-
developed and controversial (Sanada 2012), especially in the field of
education.
The work of Judith Butler, with its focus on the operation of power,
the formation of the subject, and the workings of marginalisation poten-
tially offers an alternative framework to understand, theorise and address
issues such as racial and cultural essentialisation and the way in which
race, like other categories and identifications such as gender, sexuality
and disability come to be understood as real and natural. In this book,
taking examples from education in England, I argue that Butler’s work
offers us a way of building on social constructionist views of race, to pro-
vide a view of race as non-ontological, which appears real and indeed is
made real, through the repeated performativity of racial identities. Rather
Introduction 5
than a pre-given or fixed identity, a Butlerian view of race is of race as a

complex and dynamic performative, and as a hegemonic norm. A perfor-
mative is a citation of a discourse or norm via an act or utterance, spoken
or unspoken, which reactivates the discourse and constitutes subjects.
Performativity is an ongoing, repeated process of citation which makes
identities and situations appear real or natural (Butler 1990, 1997, 2008).
Unlike other, quite common understandings of performativity in educa-
tion scholarship, in which performativity tends to be understood as an
insincere act, one performed in order to appear to others to be compliant
(for example Ball 2003, 2010), Butler’s understanding of performativity
is neither necessarily conscious—although it can be—nor insincere.
Performativity for Butler is the witting and unwitting repetition or cita-
tion of norms, which serve to shape reality. Butler considers race and
racial identities to be discursively and performatively constructed and
continually shifting. These ideas build on the work of Foucault and
Althusser, and also postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha and Fanon.
Some of Butler’s work focuses on the state’s power to create racially
marginalised subjects. This aspect of her work has received somewhat less
attention from scholars and in particular the implications for education
have not been fully explored. In particular her work on race focuses on
the (re)production of raced subjects via hegemonic discourses shaped by
the ‘war on terror’ (Butler 2004) and develops the notion of a racial
frame, a collection of discourses which shapes perception which is similar
to her earlier work on the racial episteme. Whilst discursive, these frames
are not ‘merely’ perceptual or cultural: they have material effects on real
lives and interaction (see for example, Butler 1998). I argue then, that the
work of Judith Butler can offer a framework for understanding race and
racial oppression and the ways in which individuals and groups become
racialised, which can add to other, existing frameworks. Of course it is
not intended to replace other approaches, nor to answer all, or even many,
of the questions we have about race, but her work on subjectivation,
hegemonic norms and performativity as applied to race, can offer a useful
insight into the workings of racial oppression and privilege, and into the
possibilities for resistance and social transformation.
It could be argued that work which problematises the ontological sta-
tus of race and notion of racial specificity is itself problematic. It could be
6 C. Chadderton
seen as naïve or overly liberal, or it could end up perpetuating racial dis-

crimination rather than challenging it (Sanada 2012), or seem to be a
rejection of the concept of race altogether (as explained for example by
Carbado and Gulati 2013). In particular perhaps it could be argued that
it is problematic for white scholars such as myself to question the onto-
logical status of race, because the removal of race might be seen to have
fewer consequences for those whose racial positioning tends to be
unmarked anyway (see for example, Nayak 2006a). For minority ethnic
groups, the implications may be regarded as significant, as race for many,
provides a marker for an identity, experiences shaped by race, and politi-
cal and social change. Equally, taking an anti-foundationalist approach to
race might suggest to some that positionality does not matter. These con-
siderations should be taken seriously. As a white researcher in the UK, I
inevitably benefit from white privilege in different forms, some more vis-
ible to me than others. In this book I argue this approach to interrogating
race is not unpolitical, and anti-foundationalist approaches to under-
standing race neither claim that race does not matter, nor that it does not
shape identities and experiences, nor that racial oppression and privilege
does not exist. Equally, a critique of essentialised notions of identity does
not necessarily lead to the rejection of any concept of identity at all.
Rather Butler’s work offers a lens which on the one hand takes into
account the reality of people’s identifications with different group identi-
ties, experiences of oppression and essentialised subjectivities as a result of
the structures of oppression, and on the other, explicitly theorises the
production and performativity of identities, recognising the complexity
and fluidity of identity. Rather than a natural, fixed or essential category,
race is seen as a hegemonic norm which forms subjects, and a performa-
tive, which is made to appear real though the repeated citations, acts,
practices, and institutions which make it. Notions of essentialised racial
difference, white privilege and racial disadvantage, for example, are
viewed by Butler as produced and reproduced culturally and institution-
ally. By abandoning the view of a unified or homogenous subject with a
central ‘essence’, Butler’s work allows us to theorise, interrogate and chal-
lenge the diversity of discourses and acts that shape and subordinate the
subject. As Butler (2008) argues, ‘[t]he deconstruction of identity is not
the deconstruction of politics; rather it establishes as political the very
Introduction 7
terms through which identity is articulated’ (p. 203). An understanding

of race as a performative, as I explore in the concluding chapter, poten-
tially opens up the possibility of it being destabilised and subverted, of
the reinscription of its meaning, and of rendering the unintelligible,
intelligible. The explicit aim of such work is to question and disrupt racial
discourses and norms which form the basis of oppression and privilege.
Whilst this book explores an anti-foundational approach to race, I am
still faced with the issue of terminology. How does one refer to something
which is not real? Does discussing and interrogating it make it more real?
Of course, this book is not challenging the reality of the impact of race
and racialised thinking. However, from a Butlerian point of view, race is
not a fixed, pre-given identity, it is a performative. The different mean-
ings of race are made to appear real via repeated citations of these mean-
ings. Thus this book exists in a somewhat paradoxical space. I therefore
refer to race, and for example to whiteness and blackness and Asianness,
and white people and minority ethnic people, as these are the most
acceptable terms used to describe race and racial identities currently in
England, whilst at the same time interrogating and challenging their
meanings and their essentialising and subjectifying force.
Race in Education
We are living in neoliberal times. It is not uncommon for scholars to
argue that neoliberalism is a class project, which transfers wealth from the
poorest to wealthiest, and from public to private coffers. Some also argue
that neoliberalism is also a racial project (Roberts and Mahtani 2010;
Kapoor 2013; Goldberg 2009; Omi and Winant 2015). Not only do the
disproportionate levels of poverty and disadvantage among minority eth-
nic people render the impact of neoliberal policies harsher on these
groups in general, but ‘race and the racialization of immigrants is embed-
ded in the philosophical underpinning of these policies.’ (Roberts and
Mahtani 2010, 254). In neoliberal regimes, dominant political narratives
claim colour blindness or post-racial times. This tends to be connected to
the notion that western societies are meritocracies with equal opportuni-
ties for all, where race no longer matters. One of the best examples of this
8 C. Chadderton
discourse was the way in which the election of Barack Obama to US

president in 2009 was heralded by some as symbolic of an America (and
indeed, the world) emerging from its violent history of slavery and racism
and opening the possibility of a new and hopeful politics where race no
longer matters (Roberts and Schostak 2012). Gwen Moore, a candidate
for the Congress in 2004 described Obama as being, ‘all of us! … not
black! … not white!’ (Ripley 2004, cited in Roberts and Schostak 2012,
10). In this idea of Obama being neither black nor white, Obama is
viewed as transcending race. Myths of meritocracy and individualism
mask issues of race and structural racism and the history of racism and
postcolonialism and render race inequality an individual choice or per-
sonal pathology (Robbins 2009).
[S]uccess is attributed to...entrepreneurial genius while those who do not

succeed are viewed either as failures or utterly expendable...neoliberal rac-
ism either dismisses the concept of institutional racism or maintains that it
has no merit (Giroux 2008, cited in Roberts and Mahtani 2010, 254)
Equally if a group identified as a racial, ethnic or religious group is

judged as failing in some way, this is often attributed to a group defi-
ciency—most commonly based on historically developed cultural defi-
ciencies, rather than biologically determined deficiencies—but which
serves to mask structural disadvantage (Goldberg 2009).
Ideally, within a neoliberal theorization of society, the success of the indi-

vidual is directly related to his/her work output. Modalities of difference,
such as race, do not predetermine one’s success as each individual is evalu-
ated solely in terms of his or her economic contribution to society. (Roberts
and Mahtani 2010, 253)
Neoliberal regimes in fact further marginalise minority ethnic popula-

tions and polarise racial identities. Racial profiling is increasing and anti-
immigration sentiment is stoked. Unemployment has increased
disproportionately among the minority ethnic population in the UK, for
example, black people were more than twice as likely to be unemployed
than white people in 2008–2009 (Gillborn 2013; Chadderton and
Introduction 9
Wischmann 2014) and the most recent figures show that the level of
unemployment for minority ethnic groups stands at 9.9% in comparison
with 5.4% for the overall population despite a recent improvement
(Department for Work and Pensions 2016). In line with the neoliberal
focus on containment and policing, incarceration rates are also increas-
ing, and proportionately far more black individuals are serving a prison
sentence than whites. The all-pervading and never-ending state-run ‘war
on terror’ is also legitimising racism, as Kapoor (2013) argues, ‘[c]onse-
quently we move towards a place where the only mode in which race is
spoken by the state is for the purposes of discipline and control.’ (p. 1028).
In addition some have argued that the notion of an ‘underclass’, a class
of people who are constituted as lazy, feckless and irresponsible, is a
racialising discourse, in which the ‘underclass’ is imagined as a racial
group (Tyler 2013, 188). Although the members of this underclass will
be of all ethnic backgrounds, this is a notion of ‘contaminated whiteness’
(Tyler 2013, 187), an underclass situated ‘at the borders of whiteness’
(Nayak 2006b).
Neoliberal politics is shaping educational policy in the UK. Firstly,
policy tends to be deracialised or colour blind, by which I mean that it
does not explicitly mention race. This lack of explicit mention suggests
that race no longer matters, despite a wealth of research which suggests a
deeply ingrained, structural racism in the UK education system as a
whole (for example Gillborn 2005, 2008). New Labour, in power between
1997 and 2010, focused on inclusion and exclusion in general,1 but none
of the initiatives they introduced specifically targeted black and ethnic
minority children (Majors 2001; Tomlinson 2005) and thus did not
address racial inequalities. Race was subsumed into other categories of
deprivation and inner city children (Gillborn 2001; Archer 2003).
Neither the coalition government, in power from 2010 to 2015, nor the
current Conservative government have explicitly mentioned issues of
race in relation to education. Secondly, the neoliberal narrative of meri-
tocracy dominates the education system (Gillborn et al. 2012), suggest-
ing that everyone can succeed, they just need to work hard and aspire
highly. This focus on the individual masks external and structural factors
influencing lives, and impediments to success are attributed to personal
flaws (Roberts and Mahtani 2010).
10 C. Chadderton
Despite the deracialisation of policy, educational experiences and out-

comes differ for different ethnic groups. Studies show that neoliberal ini-
tiatives such as the academisation process in England—the removal of
schools from local authority control, allegedly to increase school auton-
omy—is increasing existing inequalities, including race inequality
(Gillborn 2013; Kulz 2017). Equally the introduction of the English
Baccalaureate, which is a school performance measure which prioritises
pupil success in five core areas, English, Maths, Science, History or
Geography and Languages, is in fact disadvantaging black students, who
are disproportionately more likely to be entered for Arts subjects (Gillborn
2013). I have argued elsewhere that initiatives such as Troops to Teachers
(the fast-tracking of ex-service people into teaching positions) and
increased surveillance measures in schools through new technologies
such as CCTV (Chadderton 2012, 2014) are disproportionately target-
ing black and minority ethnic young people. In addition programmes
such as the government-run ‘Prevent’, which aim to tackle extremism in
young people, although it states its focus is all types of extremism, focuses
on Muslims (see for example Sian 2015). The withdrawal of the Education
Maintenance Allowance, a payment which allowed disadvantaged stu-
dents to stay on in education past compulsory schooling, supported a
significant proportion of minority ethnic students (Gillborn 2013).
There is also a renewed focus on improving behaviour in schools, includ-
ing giving school staff greater powers in the use of force, involving
increased freedom on exclusions and detentions and increased search
powers. These increased powers for staff are likely to impact much more
harshly on young people from minority ethnic groups who already expe-
rience high levels of exclusion, (Gillborn 2006; Majors 2001; Blair and
Cole 2000) and therefore increase racial inequality. Thus whilst possibly
implicitly giving credence to the notion that the UK is post-racial and a
meritocracy, educational policies, whilst ignoring race and racial discrim-
ination as an issue, are contributing to an increase in racial inequality.
Equally, research shows that curricula and school activities often con-
tribute to the notion that there are stable and innate differences between
ethnic and cultural groups, giving credence to fixed notions of race and
culture. These include the way in which culture, religion and race are
presented, at for example, Black History month, religious lessons,
Introduction 11
resenting essentialised categories, and implying that race is a valid physi-

p
cal classification (Chadderton 2009; Moulin 2016). As many scholars
have pointed out, race equality and understanding difference is absent
from most teacher education courses (Sian 2015; Lander 2014). Research
has also shown that teachers are influenced by stereotypical and essen-
tialised notions of race, meaning, for example, that black pupils are
treated more punitively than white pupils when engaging in similar
actions (for example, Maylor et al. 2006; Kulz 2017).
A Butlerian Framework for Race in Education

Butler herself has not explicitly paid much attention to education in her
work. However, others have applied her theories to their own work in
education. Butler writes that schooling ‘is the time when humans enter a
very specific threshold of vulnerability’ (Butler 2014, 176). Indeed,
school is an important site of identity formation, where norms circulate
which the individual has to negotiate, trying perhaps to conform or resist.
Much work in education understands the subject as stable, self-evident,
reasonably autonomous, and able to make rational choices with a certain
amount of choice as to who they want to become, and how they behave.
Equally, identities and cultures tend to be essentialised as they are por-
trayed as fixed to the student rather than (re)produced by the institution
(Chadderton 2013; Stewart 2015). Scholars have thus employed a
Butlerian framework in order to challenge the assumed neutrality of
schools, and the lack of consideration in education scholarship of the role
of the institution in the formation of the subject, arguing that student
and teacher identities are discursively and performatively constituted
through educational discourses, by the schooling system and through the
day to day practices of the institution, which operates according to hege-
monic norms (for example Youdell 2006a). Butler’s work has been
employed extensively by scholars in particular to explore the production
of gendered subjects in the education. They have examined the role of
gender and heteronormativity as constituting norms, challenging the
notion that gender and sexuality are pre-given (see, for example Youdell
2004, 2005; Atkinson and DePalma 2008; Ruitenberg 2010). They have
12 C. Chadderton
examined how non-normative identities, such as non-heterosexual, are

rendered unintelligible, or unviable in education (for example, Renold
2006).
This book takes up Butler’s ideas on subject formation, the production
of identities, performativity, cultural intelligibility, and the creation of
viable and unviable identities and argues that this work has potential
implications for an anti-foundationalist understanding of race in educa-
tion. Following Butler, I argue that race can be seen as a hegemonic con-
stituting norm in education and functions as performative, meaning that
race and racial identities do not pre-exist their citations in any fixed or
ontological way, rather they constituted via repeated acts and practices
and utterances in educational spaces, institutions, and policies. Butler’s
work potentially provides us with a framework which deals with the pro-
duction and performativity of racial identity, explicitly challenging the
notion which implicitly underpins much work on race in education, that
racial identities are fixed or homogeneous, or tied to certain bodies.
Unlike much work in education, which precludes the notion of multiple
cultural influences on subjectivities, Butler’s work allows us to consider
the ways in which identities are negotiated, and are complex and dynamic.
Her theory of subjectivation also provides us with an understanding of
why many individuals might understand their identities as essentialised.
Offering an alternative understanding of how marginalisation and
oppression functions in education, Butler’s theoretical tools enable an
analysis of the constitution of unintelligible racial subjects: those subjects
who do not conform to dominant racial norms, and who therefore sim-
ply cannot be imagined educationally. The book focuses on topics such as
the production of citizens and non-citizen-subjects in education, the
constitution of white hegemony, educational programmes to raise stu-
dent aspirations and their implications for racial intelligibility, the cur-
rent counter-terrorism agenda in education and the way it functions to
de-subjectivate Muslim citizens, the implications for educational research
where race matters if race has no ontological status, and the possibilities
for social transformation and resistance to hegemonic racial norms in
educational spaces.
Introduction 13
Of course Butler’s work does not provide us with a ‘truth’ or an access

to a reality. Butler’s work provides us with a lens, a tool for understanding,
a framework for analysis, which will do just that: allow us to analyse cer-
tain aspects. No lens or framework could offer a complete picture, and it
would be nonsensical to claim otherwise. Like any other framework,
what is argued will be contestable. Butler’s work, for example, does not
provide us with an explicit framework of structural racism. However, dif-
ferent frameworks highlight different aspects of an issue, increase our
understanding in distinct ways and result in different outcomes. It does
not cover all of Butler’s work, nor does it claim to provide a definitive
interpretation of her ideas. Research which explores race in education
using a Butlerian framework does not aim to fix or define individual
identity, or to reveal the individual subject, nor does it view research par-
ticipants as representatives of any group: gender, religious, ethnic or class.
Rather it examines questions such as:
• How are racial norms cited by individuals and policies in education

settings?
• How do individuals negotiate the racial discourses and norms available
to them?
• How are people constituted by racial norms?
• How do racial norms interact with other hegemonic norms in educa-
tional spaces such as citizenship, security, threat and aspiration?
• How do individuals or groups resist the hegemonic norms and consti-
tute themselves or others differently?
The empirical data used in the book comes from a range of different
educational projects in which I have been involved between 2006 and
2016. The projects themselves, the educational settings and the individu-
als are anonymised in this book. Most of this data has not been presented
elsewhere, either because I collected too much data from the original
project to be able to use it all, or in some cases, because it was considered
too sensitive by the funders for use in final reports. However, every indi-
vidual referred to in this book gave their informed consent for the data to
be used both in the relevant project or any publications.
14 C. Chadderton
The Structure of the Book

The rest of this book is divided into eight further chapters. Each chapter
focuses on aspects of Butler’s work and examines how they might be
applied to explore race in education. Chapter 2 explains how a Butlerian
framework might be understood in relation to other approaches to study-
ing race in education, as well as looking in more detail at how her work
has been employed by others. Chapter 3 introduces the main themes in
the book. This is followed by four chapters that pick up on different con-
temporary issues in education with implications for race, and examine
these issues through a Butlerian lens. The eighth chapter explores meth-
odological issues which arise in qualitative research. The ninth chapter
concludes the book, and looks in more detail at the opportunities in
Butler’s work for social transformation. The chapters vary in their
approaches and take up different aspects of Butler’s work to look at dif-
ferent ways race operates in education.
Chapter 2 then functions as a bridging chapter between the introduc-
tion and the rest of the book. Its purpose is firstly to suggest where a
Butlerian framework for studying race in education might ‘fit’, in rela-
tion to other frameworks, and secondly, to explore how Butler’s work has
otherwise been employed by scholars in education. In this chapter I
briefly consider four other approaches to researching race in education:
Critical Race Theory, theories of Whiteness, postcolonialist theories, and
intersectionality, how they have been employed, their main advantages
and what their main limitations might be considered to be. In the latter
half of the chapter, I consider how Butler’s work has been employed by
scholars in education, mostly to explore educational discourses which
constitute specific educational subjects, rendering some intelligible—
heterosexual, middle class, female, white—and others—non-heterosex-
ual, working class, male, minority ethnic—unintelligible.
Chapter 3 is a key chapter, in which I select what I consider to be some
of the most important of Butler’s main ideas, for the study of race. I
explore the following ideas from Butler’s work: subjectivation, the
strength of hegemonic norms, performativity, intelligibility and desub-
jectivation, and investigate how they can be, or indeed have been (by
Butler herself or other scholars), applied to the study of race. I argue that
Introduction 15
Butler’s work offers a framework in which race can be seen as a hege-

monic norm and performative, which both subjectivates and desubjecti-
vates, and shapes notions of intelligibility. Whilst there is much work on
marginalisation in education, the notions of subjectivation and perfor-
mativity offer an alternative understanding of how discourses and social
norms are internalised, which much work on marginalisation does not
cover. In the latter half of the chapter, I consider the political implications
of employing a Butlerian framework for studying race and racial oppres-
sion, addressing some of the most frequent criticisms and controversial
aspects of her work. I address, for example, critiques of her denial of the
existence of a unified subject, of her rejection of identity categories, of her
view of the body as discursively and performatively constituted, her focus
on discourse and culture, and her approach to social transformation.
In Chap. 4 I consider in more depth the notion that following Butler,
race can be understood as a hegemonic norm. Like all social norms, race
through a Butlerian lens subjectivates, shapes and constrains subjects. It
upholds certain privileges for groups and individuals designated as white,
and disadvantages those classified as ethnic or racial minorities. Race in
Butlerian terms is therefore maintained, produced and reproduced
through a series of discourses, acts and practices which cite racial norms,
either explicitly or implicitly. In this chapter I explore the idea that citi-
zenship and the notion of good British citizen functions as a constituting
norm, a discourse which shapes realities and identities (Butler 2004; see
also Pool 2006). Citizenship is a socially constructed and historically spe-
cific notion, and a raced, gendered and classed discourse, which produces
raced, gendered and classed subjects. I explore how both race and
racialised subjects are constituted in education via these discourses, by
examining data collected from classrooms in secondary schools in
England where Citizenship Education was being taught, and argue that
raced notions of citizenship are employed to constitute both ideal citizens
and unviable citizens. This is done via utterances and practices which
explicitly and implicitly constitute Britishness as tolerant (non-racist),
white and monocultural, and by implication, ethnic or cultural plurality,
ethnic minorities, intolerance or prejudice are constituted as non-British.
I also consider students’ resistance to their constitution as unviable or
unBritish subjects. I interpret their resistance as an example of Butlerian
16 C. Chadderton
parody which subverts hegemonic norms of Britishness, and which, while

it is extremely unlikely to lead directly to educational reform, exposes the
assumed fixedness, truth and naturalness of discourses such as Britishness
as non-original and constructed. ‘As imitations which effectively displace
the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself ’
(Butler 2008, 188).
Chapter 5 focuses in particular on Butler’s thinking around performa-
tivity and its relevance for the study of race in education. In this chapter
I consider how, through a Butlerian lens, race operates as a performative:
it is both performatively produced and functions as a constituting norm.
As a performative then, race can be understood as citations of discourses
and norms. Performatives, although often referred to as ‘utterances’, are
frequently unspoken, but can be recognised as discourses and citations
which subjectify individuals and groups. A racial performative thus sub-
jectivates the subject on racial terms (Ehlers 2006; Warren 2001; Warren
and Fassett 2004). A performative is perceived to be, or even made to be
‘real’ in some sense, through the accumulation of both explicit and
implicit speech acts, or citations of norms which creates the illusion of
naturalness (Butler 1990). In this chapter I argue that there are signifi-
cant implications for an understanding of race as performative. Firstly, it
refutes the notion that race can have any ontological reality, secondly it
provides a challenge to exclusionary notions of authenticity because for
Butler, there is no essential identity behind expressions of identity, and
thirdly, it enables us to understand how dominant norms shape our intel-
ligibility as subjects, explaining why individuals might internalise stereo-
types in order to be recognised as a fully viable subject. I illustrate some
of these ideas by presenting data from educational projects and analysing
it to exemplify how race functions as a performative. I explore firstly how
whiteness is performatively constituted by senior school staff, in this case
as absence, as cultural oppression and as privilege. I consider secondly
how whiteness and blackness are performatively constituted via student
narratives around ‘acting white’ and ‘acting black’, which shift between
understandings of race as phenotype and race as attitude and affiliation,
and thus challenge the fixidity of race to bodies.
In Chap. 6 I explore the constitution of intelligible and unintelligible
subjects via educational discourses around student aspirations in a neo-
Introduction 17
liberal context. Firstly, I provide an analysis of a political focus on aspira-

tions from a Butlerian point of view, arguing that this focus is problematic
because there is an assumption implicit in the discourses around aspira-
tions that learners are rational, self-sufficient, autonomous and agentic
subjects who make individual choices which they fully understand, whilst
Butler argues that subjects are discursively and performatively constituted
and the conditions of subjectivation are not chosen by individuals.
Secondly, employing the example of an aspirations programme in a sec-
ondary school in England, I reveal moments where it constitutes unintel-
ligible subjects. Butler (1993) argues that in order to be intelligible as a
subject, the subject must conform with conventions for that racial sub-
ject. Certain actions, attitudes, patterns of behaviour, accents are sanc-
tioned, and if the subject does not conform, it is likely they will be
unintelligible. In this analysis, female students, mainly Muslims, are
intelligible to their (mostly white, non-Muslim) teachers only through a
raced lens as passive and subservient to their families by teachers, and
thus the opposite of the neoliberal ideal of agentic and individualistic.
Students’ displays of collective agency and decision-making serve only to
confirm their unintelligibility as successful neoliberal subjects because
agency is defined as individual in neoliberal discourses.
Chapter 7 draws on Butler’s work on state power and sovereignty to
examine the notion that state power in education both constitutes sub-
jects and desubjectivates. I explore Butler’s (2004) claims that we are cur-
rently experiencing an incipient return towards sovereignty and more
overt exercise of state power, away from what Foucault termed ‘govern-
mentality’, a system in which power is de-centred and exerted by shaping
the behaviour, attitudes and subjectivities of the citizens in order to pro-
mote self-regulation. This shift is justified by the introduction of a ‘state
of emergency’ across the western world in response to the (perceived)
threat from Islamist fundamentalists. I take the example of the British
government’s counter-terrorism agenda, ‘Prevent’, focussing on its role in
Higher Education, and argue that this can be considered an example of
the shift towards sovereignty. I consider that, viewed through a Butlerian
lens, the discourse of ‘state of emergency’ functions as a performative
which is cited repeatedly and functions to actually produce the state of
emergency as a ‘reality’. Employing Butler’s work on subjectivation and
18 C. Chadderton
the potency of the racial frame which shapes discourses and materialities,
I argue that the way in which the counter-terrorism agenda and sur-
rounding discourses constitute the threat of terror as Muslim, actually
serves to desubectivate Muslims by removing them from the realm of citi-
zenship protected by law. Equally, I argue that ‘Prevent’ can be seen as a
tool for the British government to construct itself as progressive, white,
non-terrorist, as part of it casting itself in the civilising mission in the ‘war
on terror’ (Butler 2008), which functions to mask the state’s own impe-
rial violence.
In Chap. 8 I consider the implications of Butler’s thinking for the role
of race in research. I explore what Butler’s thinking on subjectivation,
intelligibility, the limits of knowledge and an anti-foundationalist view of
race might mean for ethical issues in research such as representation,
knowledge creation and voice. I argue that Butler’s thinking disrupts
many of the most common assumptions made by researchers. For exam-
ple, for Butler, race is not ‘only’ a stereotype, or a factor influencing
research, it is a performative which is produced by research. I conclude
that her work has significant implications for the purpose and aims of
research: firstly, since research constitutes both the researcher and the
researched, a main purpose for research work within a Butlerian frame-
work would be an interrogation of categories, discourses and norms. The
second main purpose would be to broaden the category of human so that
it includes all humans as fully intelligible subjects. Such thinking chal-
lenges both more traditional research which aims to establish the ‘truth’
about an issue, but also more conventional recent thinking around social
justice research, which aims to emancipate, empower or capture the
voices of marginalised and disadvantaged groups.
In the final chapter I explore the implications of Butler’s thinking for
social transformation and change. Butler’s work has been critiqued both
for not having a clear framework for social transformation, and also for
not focussing on equal rights. However, I argue that her work potentially
contains many transformatory implications for thinking through issues
of race in education. For example, firstly, Butler’s work concentrates on
change at the level of civil society and cultural representation, rather than
at the level of the state. Butler would argue that influencing cultural intel-
ligibility is perhaps a more effective way of effecting political change than
Introduction 19
political lobbying and redirects the notion of resistance away from the
individual, and away from individual acts (Butler 1990). Secondly,
Butler’s understanding of the subject as produced by discourse means
that hegemonic meanings can be unsettled, the subject can be reconsti-
tuted due to the wide range of discourses that constitute it (Butler 2004,
2010), we may potentially be able to identify spaces where race might be
unmade or disrupted (Byrne 2011, 5), and focus can be shifted away
from stable identities such as whiteness or blackness (Warren and Fassett
2004). Thirdly, in work which employs a Butlerian framework, the focus
is not on recognising specific identities or groups. It is about interrogat-
ing whose lives are valued and creating the conditions for all lives to be
valued, intelligible and liveable. I then tentatively consider what this
means for transforming education, and argue that an aim of transforma-
tory work informed by Butler’s thinking would be to unsettle race as an
ontological category, challenge the more usual hegemonic norms and
essentialising notions of fixed racial difference, and interrogate the educa-
tion system and educational practices and discourses, and the way these
produce raced subjects, as this book has done.
Note
1. These include Excellence in the Cities, Every Child Matters, City
Academies, Education Action Zones, mentoring programmes (Majors
2001) and the setting up of a Social Exclusion Unit (Tomlinson 2005).
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2
Judith Butler, Race and Education: What
Can a Butlerian Framework Provide?
This chapter functions as a bridging chapter between the introduction

and the rest of the book. Its purpose is to suggest firstly where a Butlerian
framework for studying race in education might ‘fit’, in relation to other
frameworks, and secondly, to explore how Butler’s work has otherwise
been employed by scholars in education. I argue in this book that her
work on power and subject formation has implications for the study of
race, as well as drawing on other work where she does explicitly address
issues of race. Therefore the framework I develop in Chap. 3 is based on
my own interpretations of her work. In this chapter I consider, briefly,
four other approaches to researching race in education: Critical Race
Theory, theories of Whiteness, postcolonialist theories, and intersection-
ality, and in the second half of the chapter, move on to consider how a
Butlerian approach has been employed by scholars in education to explore
the production of learner subjects.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73365-4_2
28 C. Chadderton
Research on Race and Education

There is now a wealth of research on race in education in the UK. Its
focus is most frequently related to the attainment of specific minority
ethnic groups, a racist curriculum, an unequal distribution of resources,
differential teacher expectations of different ethnic groups, the different
experiences of racialised groups (Fuller 1984; Gillborn 1995; Mac an
Ghaill 1988; Mirza 1992; Troyna 1994; Basit 1997; Blair and Cole 2000;
Gaine 2005; Bhopal 2010). However, much of this work, particularly
until recently, whilst it provided examples and descriptions of racism and
racialised experiences, remained undertheorised and did not critically
theorise issues of inequality (Lynn and Parker 2006).
Many of these studies are implicitly underpinned by the notion that
populations are separated by culture, which is seen as static and mono-
lithic and attached to specific groups, and people are seen as separate and
fixed to those who are regarded as ‘their own’. Equally, as in much work
on education in general, students and staff were understood in liberal
humanist terms, as autonomous individuals. Frequently, the reason for
this is a lack of theorising about the production of identities, or how
individuals come to be located in racialised spaces, which can imply an
unrealistic homogeneity within ethnic groups, or suggest binaries which
may create implied ethnic hierarchies or fixed difference between groups.
Moreover, liberal humanist understandings of identity presuppose a fixed
essence in each individual, which is frequently linked to race or gender,
e.g. an essence of femaleness or of blackness (Weedon 1997). Many of
these studies have promoted an understanding of identity as relatively
stable, fixed and uncontested, which, it can be argued, leaves little room
for a consideration of multiple identities and implicitly connects race
with identity without problematising this connection (Youdell 2003).
Scholars have drawn upon theories from outside the field of education
in order to address some of these gaps in education scholarship. One of
these theories is Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Ladson-Billings 1998;
Gillborn 2005, 2006; Lynn 2002; Rollock 2012), which originated in
the US and was based on Critical Legal Studies (CLS). Critical Race
Theorists argued that the civil rights movement had ensured gains mainly
for white people in the US, leaving African Americans disadvantaged.
Judith Butler, Race and Education: What Can a Butlerian… 29
CRT is widely used in the field of education in the US, and its use is
growing in the UK. Although CRT constitutes a large and diverse body
of a work, in general it provides scholars and activists in education with a
framework for analysing structural discrimination which is viewed as per-
meating all aspects of society (Lynn and Parker 2006). It explicitly
addresses covert racism (Solorzano and Yosso 2002, 24) by rendering the
frequently hidden racial context of interaction visible. It challenges the
widespread understanding of racism as an individual or a deliberate act
by theorising society as racially stratified, and challenges the idea of edu-
cation as equal by arguing that all social systems reproduce racial struc-
tures. As critical race theorist, Duncan (2002) argues, ‘CRT is a tool to
analyse race and racism in social interaction as a structure and discourse
which shapes the interaction. Importantly, even if race is not specifically
mentioned, the starting point is that race plays a role in social interaction’
(p. 87). Some critical race theorists write about white supremacy, which
in this case does not refer to neo-Nazism or apartheid (although these are
products of a white supremacist system), rather it ‘is seen to relate to the
operation of forces that saturate the everyday mundane actions and poli-
cies that shape the world in the interests of White people’ (Gillborn 2008,
35). This does not mean that all white people are inevitably privileged in
every way, and recognises that they could be marginalised by class, gen-
der, disability or sexuality, however it does emphasise that white people
benefit as a group from the disadvantaging of minority ethnic people.
CRT in education highlights and discusses the daily reality and lived
experiences of racism in education, exposes and challenges dominant
myths of meritocracy, fairness and neutrality in education systems by
revealing racial stratification which disadvantages minority ethnic people,
and promotes the voices, perspectives and experiences of people of colour
or minority ethnic people in order to challenge white norms (Ladson-
Billings 1998; Stovall 2006; Gillborn 2005). It challenges the under-
standing of people of colour as culturally, socially or educationally
deficient (Yosso 2005). Critical race theorists argue that people of colour
will only gain benefits in society or education when their interests coin-
cide with majoritarian, white interests (interest convergence) (for exam-
ple Bell 1980). David Gillborn, critical race theorist in education in the
UK, states that ‘[e]ducation policy is not designed to eliminate race
30 C. Chadderton
inequality but to sustain it at manageable levels’ (Gillborn 2008, n/p).

Gillborn argues that it is not a coincidence that the education system is
racially unequal, and in fact, education policy designs the system like
that. Critical Race Theory did initially focus on the experiences of African
Americans in the US, but the theory has been extended and adapted to
other groups such as Latinos (LatCrit), Asian Americans (AsianCrit),
native Americans (TribalCrit) and minority ethnic people in the UK
(BritCrit).
Some argue that work by critical race theorists in the field of education
implicitly portrays identity as fixed and reproducing notions of fixed cul-
tural difference which tends to mask the complexity of identities (Carbado
and Gulati 2013; Andreotti 2011; Chadderton 2013). There seem to be
two main reasons for this: Firstly, the strategic mobilisation of essen-
tialised identities for political reasons, which is an important focus of
CRT, is rarely theorised explicitly. Secondly, to date, CRT has examined
little about the production or performativity of identities in education.
Although there is an awareness of shifting and fluid identities in CRT,
and some CRT is implicitly underpinned by a notion of race as socially
constructed, still little work has been done in this area (Lynn and Parker
2006), particularly in education, with the exception of a small body of
work (for example Leonardo 2009). A small number of scholars using
critical race theory in education have focused on how race is constructed,
or theorised the performativity of race (Youdell 2006a, b; Chadderton
2013), and work which, for example, explores racial positioning in edu-
cation, is quite rare (for example Rollock 2012). Some have also argued
that CRT implicitly links racial identities to notions of authentic voice
and unique consciousness, and potentially reductionist notions of experi-
ence without explicitly complicating or problematising these (as reported
by for example, Andreotti 2011).
Theories of whiteness have also been employed to explore race in edu-
cation. The study of whiteness occurs in different fields and connects to
many different theoretical approaches, including Critical Whiteness
Studies, Critical Race Theory, Marxism and phenomenology. Broadly,
this wide body of work aims to illustrate the impact of structures of white
privilege on the lives both of white people and people of other ethnicities.
In particular though ‘[t]he term “Whiteness” signals the production and
reproduction of dominance rather than subordination, normativity

rather than marginality, and privilege rather than disadvantage’
(Frankenberg 2009, 526). It is often conceived as invisible or hidden
taken-for-grantedness of privilege for white people, or those categorised
as white, which maintains their hegemonic dominance over people of
other ethnicities in a given society, or an ‘unremarked normality’ (Rollock
2016). The focus is generally on the ways in which whiteness is con-
structed, such as Roediger’s Wages of whiteness (2007), which explores
the ways in which the US labour market ensured privileges for white
people.
There is a lack of agreement among scholars over what whiteness is,
with debates focussing on whether it is a structural factor, or an identity,
or both, and some work not defining how it is being understood (for
example Pilkington 2014). Kolchin (2002) objects to ‘a persistent dual-
ism evident in the work of the best whiteness studies authors,’ who often
claim that whiteness is a social construct while also arguing, paradoxi-
cally, that whiteness is an ‘omnipresent and unchanging’ reality existing
independent of socialization. Indeed, some work on whiteness seems to
reify the existence of a white race (for example, Allen 1994), despite argu-
ing that the existence of separate races with different characteristics is a
historical construction. Bonnett (2000) views ‘whiteness as a social ideal’
(p. 1) with distinct local expressions, inflected by class and gender,
Leonardo (2009) as a privileged social category or a social concept, and
those taking a Marxist approach view it as a direct function of economic
and class interests (for example Allen 1994). Work which views whiteness
as an identity more often than not treats it as a monolithic identity
(Kolchin 2002).
Work which takes an anti-essentialist view of whiteness includes
Ahmed (2007), who takes a phenomenological approach, in which she
argues that race is an orientation, which makes certain things possible,
and others, less so. ‘Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and un-
finished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting
how they “take up” space.’ (Ahmed 2007, 150). Ahmed argues that the
way that whiteness is reproduced in given places and cultures makes it
seem like there is a biologically inherited relationship. Her work explores
how bodies become white (or not) and how spaces also become white
32 C. Chadderton
(or not). Equally Leonardo (2009) argues that ‘[w]hiteness is less of an

essence and more of a choice’ (p. 174). Leonardo considers there is a
difference between acts of whiteness, and acts carried out by white sub-
jects, which can potentially be against whiteness. Whilst this challenges
the notion of whiteness as an identity and its inevitable attachment to
white people, it also suggests that there is some element of autonomous
or sovereign choice.
Work on whiteness in education is more common in the US than in
European countries, however in the last ten years has become a more
frequent focus in the UK (Picower 2009; Lander 2014; Pilkington 2014;
Chadderton and Edmonds 2015; Preston 2007). Work has focused on
for example, the different strategies employed by white teachers in order
to maintain white hegemony (Picower 2009; Lander 2014), and the pro-
tection of white privilege in vocational and non-compulsory education
(Chadderton and Edmonds 2015; Preston 2007). Torslev et al. (2016)
published a recent study of the lived experience of whiteness in a Danish
school, exploring the way in which bodies occupies time and space, which
takes phenomenological approach based on Ahmed’s (2007) work. This
is a study of racial positioning which sees race as ‘an everyday practice’
(p. 137) in which whiteness is not an ontological given, and is not reduc-
ible to white skin.
Alternatively some scholars have used a postcolonial theoretical
approach to analysing education. Like CRT, postcolonial theory encom-
passes a diversity of work and approaches, however explicitly postcolonial
frameworks in the field of education remain comparatively unusual.
Whilst generally not analysing race explicitly, postcolonial theories tend
to focus on a critique of identities and knowledge in a world still shaped
by colonial relations, structures and discourses. Postcolonial theorists
analyse the construction of the coloniser and colonised, arguing that these
unequal identities and structures continue to define global relations today.
In education, postcolonial theorists problematise the role of education,
educators and the curriculum in sustaining western and European cul-
tural supremacy (for example Spivak 1990; Andreotti 2011) as well as
foregrounding the voices of the colonised, and countering the dominance
of ‘Western’ theories of knowledge with knowledge from colonised parts
of the world and their populations. Scholars critique the role of education
to ‘civilise’, ‘modernise’ and ‘develop’ the colonised Other, as a form of

continued domination (for example Said 1978).
Postcolonial theorists tend to share a suspicion of the Enlightenment
and its institutions, including scientific objectivism, the nation state and
liberal democracy (Prasad 2005). There is much diversity in postcolonial
thought. Some work is more Marxism-influenced which focuses more on
a critique of capitalism, international solidarity and social emancipation,
other work is more poststructuralist in nature, which focuses on the pro-
duction of knowledge, power and identities, discourse and representation
(for example Spivak 1990), a conceptualisation of identities as socially
and discursively constituted, hybrid and contradictory (for example
Bhabha 1983, 1994) and shaped by colonial relations and practices (for
example Fanon 1967). Work in the first strand argues that solidarity
between the oppressed and the would be emancipated through sharing of
their subjugated knowledges would lead to moving beyond colonial rela-
tions. Work in the second strand tends to analyse and problematise the
construction of knowledges in order to allow both the oppressor and the
oppressed to reflect upon and better understand their complicity in
oppressive and unequal relations.
Poststructuralism is considered by some to be too Eurocentric to be an
acceptable approach to understanding issues of colonial and racial
inequality, and the notions of complicity, hybridity and uncertainty (for
example, the work of Spivak) have been criticised as unsuitable and even
unethical for the study of postcolonialism. Similar objections could be
raised for the use of a Butlerian framework to analyse racial inequality, as
I discuss in Chap. 3. Nevertheless, whilst acknowledging these complexi-
ties and contradictions, many scholars employ poststructural tools and
find them very productive. Bhabha (1983), for example, views the rela-
tionship between East and West as complex and negotiable whilst still
emphasising the strength of colonial discourses which create unequal
binaries. He argues that identities are constructed in relationship to oth-
ers and that the identities of the coloniser and colonised influence each
other. He rejects notions of cultures as fixed or ‘authentic’, seeing them
instead as hybrid and dynamic, ‘an uneven, incomplete production of
meaning and value often composed of incommensurable demands and
practices produced in the act of social survival’ (Bhabha 1994, 172).
Equally some postcolonial theorists such as Said have been accused of
34 C. Chadderton
essentialising and fixing representations of the East and the West and
producing a binary, and also regarding power as travelling in one direc-
tion and solely possessed by the coloniser (see for example Bhabha 1983).
Some of Butler’s work draws on that of postcolonial theorists, in particu-
lar those who take a poststructural approach such as Fanon and Bhabha,
something which is seldom acknowledged by scholars employing her
work in the field of education.
Fourthly, intersectional analyses have been employed by some to con-
sider issues of race in education. Intersectionality can be defined as ‘the
complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when mul-
tiple axis of differentiation – economic, political, cultural, psychic, sub-
jective and experiential – intersect in historically specific contexts. The
concept emphasizes that different dimensions of social life cannot be
separated out into discrete and pure strands.’ (Brah and Phoenix 2004,
76). There has been a recognition among some scholars that race inter-
sects with other identities and forms of oppression/privilege such as gen-
der, class and sexuality to impact differently on the outcomes and
experiences of education for different population groups.
Intersectional frameworks of understanding developed from the work
and activism of black females who highlighted the exclusion of black
women and their perspectives from debates, scholarship and activism of
white women and feminists. One of the first people to draw attention to
this publicly was Sojourner Truth, a campaigner for anti-slavery and
women’s rights who was born into slavery and whose speech, known as
‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in
1851 in which she highlighted that women’s experiences are different
depending on their racial, socio-political and economic position in soci-
ety has become well-known for highlighting that the experiences and
perspectives of women vary enormously across different racial and class
groupings. Her speech addressed the exclusion of black enslaved women
from the Seneca Falls Anti-Slavery Convention of 1848 where middle
class white debated women’s suffrage and challenged the idea that woman
was a straightforward, fixed category, as well as longstanding stereotypes
about women which endure today, such as the perception that women
are physically less strong than men or cannot manage the same amount
of heavy, manual work.
Well over 100 years later, and intersectionality tends now to be linked

to third wave feminism, and the work and activism of feminists of colour
to draw attention to the way in which earlier feminist movements tended
to have continued to neglect the different experiences of women from
different backgrounds and have been dominated by the concerns of
white, middle class women (see for example Frankenberg 1993). Black
feminists and scholars who take an intersectional approach frequently
argue that ones positionality provides one with a distinct and unique
social perspective. The notion that educational experiences and outcomes
differ according to gender, social class, race, religion, cultural background
and sexuality has informed work in education more recently. Whilst ini-
tially intersectionality did tend to mean a focus on the experiences of
women and girls from different ethnic and cultural groups and different
class backgrounds, the notion has been extended by scholars to consider
other positions and work also focuses on the experiences and positioning
of men, sexuality and disability as well. Work by scholars such as Mirza
(1992, 1997), Bhopal and Preston (2012), Mac an Ghaill (1988), Youdell
(2006b), Walkerdine et al. (2002), and hooks (1994) shows how race,
gender and class intersect to shape both the ways in which students are
perceived and positioned, the extent to which the capitals they bring to
the education system are valued.
The focus on distinct experiences and perspectives being shaped by
race, gender and class positions has led to the development of distinct
frameworks of analysis such as endarkened female epistemologies (Dillard
2000), ‘which embodies a distinguishably different cultural standpoint,
located in the intersection/overlap of the culturally constructed socializa-
tions of race, gender’ (ibid, 661), to analyse the social position and expe-
riences of African-American women. For some scholars, this focus on the
idea of ‘a distinguishably different cultural standpoint’ is essential in soci-
eties in which women, minority ethnic individuals and working class
people continue to be marginalised and oppressed (e.g. Hill Collins and
Bilge 2016). Others, however, have argued that intersectional approaches
can be essentialising and tend to be underpinned by (sometimes implicit)
assumptions of a fixed or homogeneous black female, or working class
female experience or perspective, and indeed have explicitly focused on
36 C. Chadderton
the decentring of the ‘normative subject’ of feminism and the multiplic-

ity of discourses with which the subject has struggle (hooks 1981; Brah
and Phoenix 2004). Moreover, some literature in this field interrogates
the notion of race as itself an essentialist and essentialising discourse
rather than a fixed identity (for example Tizard and Phoenix’s (1993/2002)
work on what they refer to as ‘mixed race identities’). Some scholars,
however, have argued that intersectionality does not address well enough
the relationship between the identity categories, nor the formation of the
subject (see for example, Youdell 2011). Butler (2007) herself has argued
that intersectionality promotes the notion of pre-existing identity catego-
ries, which her work problematizes, arguing that no subject can pre-exist
its subjectivation. Butler’s work in some ways can indeed be located
among the responses to this ongoing debate. Her focus on the discursive
and performative formation of the subject, her questioning of the cate-
gory of woman, and her focus on the exclusionary nature of fixed catego-
ries, the decentred subject, her explicitly anti-essentialist approach to
subjectivity, perspective and experience, as well as her theorizing of race
as a discourse, can be said to (not always explicitly) draw on, and build
upon, the work of black feminists on intersectionality.
The above accounts of different approaches to studying race are neces-
sarily brief, unsatisfactory and of course contestable. However they do
give a sense of where Butler’s work might be considered to ‘fit’ theoreti-
cally. In this book, I identify some of the best-known aspects of Butler’s
work on subject formation and explore their implications for the study of
race. I focus mainly on the following: subjectivation, the strength of
hegemonic norms, performativity, intelligibility and desubjectivation.
Following Butler, I argue that race can be seen as a hegemonic norm and
performative, which both subjectivates and desubjectivates, and shapes
notions of intelligibility. I argue that race can be seen as discursively and
performatively constituted, and is therefore has no ontological status,
however, as a performative, it is understood as a ‘natural’ part of one’s
identity. These ideas will be addressed in Chap. 3, where I develop the
framework in detail.
J udith Butler and the Production of Gendered

and Raced Subjects in Education
Butler has not explicitly paid much attention to education in her work.
However, others have applied her theories to their own work in educa-
tion. Butler’s work has mostly been employed by education scholars to
explore the production of the educated subject (Kohli 1999). Scholars
have employed Butler’s understandings of subjectivation, interpellation
and performativity to challenge notions of the subject as essentialised,
fixed and autonomous (for example Kohli 1999; Davies 2006; Youdell
2006a), and to better understand how the subjects of education are pro-
duced, ‘how the body is “schooled” into particular identities, subjectivi-
ties – even as they may be resisted or transformed’ (Kohli 1999, 321).
Scholars have argued that Butler’s work gives us a framework for better
understanding how social norms are communicated to the next genera-
tion, which has always been one of the main functions of formal
schooling.
Schools are places where one learns what can be said and what must be left
unsaid, what is acceptable to do and be – and what is not. Once the indi-
vidual comes to know what to expect as ‘normal’ through the dominant
regimes of truth that circulate in schooling, she actually constructs herself –
and is constructed – through particular speech acts that are the effects of
these dominant discursive practices. (Kohli 1999, 323, author’s italics)
Youdell (e.g. 2006a) employs a Butlerian framework to explore educa-

tional discourses which constitute, such as student, learner and teacher.
She shows how Butler’s theoretical tools can help researchers explore
moments in which subjects are constituted and identify the subjectivat-
ing effects of unspoken discourses, arguing that this helps us understand
how some students are rendered subjects within student-hood, and some
without. These notions are gendered, raced and classed. What is appro-
priate behaviour for some, is not necessarily for others. Youdell argues
that feminine, middle class and white is the constellation which produces
the ‘ideal learner’ in the UK context. Masculine, working class and black
produces what Youdell refers to as the ‘impossible learner’. Youdell and
38 C. Chadderton
others argue that students are included or excluded through the normal-
izing power of what is said, done, and erased in schools in mundane and
everyday situations.
“who” a student is – in terms of gender, sexuality, social class, ability, dis-
ability, race, ethnicity and religion as well as popular and subcultural
belongings – is inextricably linked with the “sort” of student and learner
that s/he gets to be, and the educational exclusions s/he enjoys and/or the
exclusions s/he faces. (Youdell 2006a, 2)
Much scholarship employing a Butlerian framework to explore educa-

tion focuses on the reproduction of social norms by which the individual
becomes viable and intelligible within an educational context. Most of
this work has focussed on the constituting norms of gender and hetero-
normativity (for example Youdell 2005; Atkinson and DePalma 2008;
Ruitenberg 2010) and the operation of these norms in schools. Butler’s
notion of the hegemonic heterosexual matrix (Butler 2008, 1999) is used
to challenge both the frequently held view that sexuality has no place in
schools, and the widespread belief that there is a distinction between gen-
der, sex and sexuality (Ruitenberg 2010). The heterosexual matrix is the
structure which produces gender and sexuality, norms which Butler con-
troversially argues are inseparable. It therefore also produces the different
forms of non-heterosexuality (Atkinson and DePalma 2008, 29) and ren-
ders them unintelligible.
I use the term heterosexual matrix … to designate that grid of cultural

intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized …
a hegemonic discursive/epistemological model of gender intelligibility that
assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex
expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine
expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through
the compulsory practice of heterosexuality. (Butler 2008, 151)
Employing the work of Butler allows scholars to argue that schools and
school activities are structured in very heterosexual ways, and since following
Butler, gender and sexuality are inseparable, schools not only (re)produce
fixed notions of gender, but also of sexuality. Scholars employing a Butlerian

framework have shown that policies, interactions, activities in education,
which are thought to have nothing to do with sexuality, actually produce
intelligible gender and heterosexual identities, as well those which are unin-
telligible and therefore marginalised (Renold 2006).
Discourses and practices of homophobia, (hetero)sexism and misogyny all

operated to consolidate and maintain Butler’s hegemonic heterosexual
matrix whereby gender (masculinity/femininity) and sexuality (heterosexu-
ality/homosexuality) are both hierarchically and oppositionally organized.
(Renold 2006, 499)
This work challenges more conventional work in the field which tends
to take sexual identities as given. Butlerian scholars argue that categories
of gender and sexuality constitute subjects, rather than describe. As
Youdell (2005) argues ‘sex-gender-sexualities are constituted, resisted,
and reinscribed through the day-to-day practices of students’. Equally,
scholars examine the way in which the heterosexual hegemony needs
constant maintenance (Atkinson and DePalma 2009) and ‘active identity
policing’ (p. 20). Renold (2006), for example, shows how the heterosex-
ual matrix constrains boys’ and girls’ friendships with each other. She
argues that children feel pressured to ‘strategically deploy […] the boy-
friend/girl- friend discourse as a way of legitimately hanging out with the
opposite sex’ (Renold 2006, 501). Further, Youdell (2005) has applied a
Butlerian framework to provide insight into why, for example, policies or
curricula which aim to improve girls’ educational attainment—and may
have achieved this—may not also have changed girls’ aspirations: because
such moves do not take into account the way in which students’ identities
are constituted by the heterosexual matrix operating in education.
Employing a Butlerian framework to examine race in education is
quite unusual and such work has been conducted by relatively few schol-
ars. Poststructural notions of race are in fact relatively rare in education
scholarship (Chadderton 2013). Scholars who have used Butler’s work to
explore issues of race in education have tended to use her work on subjec-
tivation and performativity to explore micro-processes of racialisation at
classroom level in formal schooling (for example Warren 2001; Willie
2003; Youdell 2006b; Kleiner and Rose 2014).
40 C. Chadderton
Youdell (2006b) for example, employed a Butlerian framework to

investigate how young male students of Arabic origin at an Australian
school are constituted as subjects by implicit discourses of Orientalism
(Said 1978) and terrorism. Youdell describes how a minor incident at a
‘Multicultural Day’ event involving the boys—‘a playful skirmish’
(p. 522)—escalates because their behaviour seen as threatening by white
male staff who are patrolling the event with walkie-talkies. She argues
that the boys’ behaviour is taken so seriously because it calls up the threat
of terror in this specific context and because it potentially challenges
white hegemony. The young men are constituted as threatening to stud-
enthood, the teachers are allocated a role of police through norms of
whiteness and these implicit discourses of Orientalism and terrorism. The
staff response cites and thus reproduces these hegemonic norms. Kleiner
and Rose (2014) use Butler’s work to suggest that the discourse of ‘diver-
sity’ in German schools is constituting racial privilege and marginalisa-
tion and fuelling white hegemony. The authors look at the way in which
schools are currently described as ‘characterised by diversity’, a diversity
which refers to racial/ethnic background of the pupils rather than any
other form of diversity. Kleiner and Rose argue that difference is not
inevitably present, rather it is created by the way in which it is spoken of
in the system. They argue that such discourses subjectify children as
racially privileged, or racially marginalised. Questions like ‘Where do you
come from?’, still frequently heard in German schools, interpellate a child
as not belonging, and thus racially ‘other’. Those who are not asked this
question, are interpellated as belonging, and thus racially privileged. They
argue that the discourse of diversity is further activating norms which
have already subjectivated pupils in German society. This book draws on
this work and the work of others to explore what a Butlerian approach to
studying race in education can offer scholars in this field.
Conclusion
A Butlerian approach to studying education potentially challenges more
conventional work which might take identities as a given, and cultures as
static or fixed and tied to bodies. Butler’s work has mostly been employed
by scholars in education to analyse the constitution of educational sub-

jects, with a focus on gender and heteronormativity, with just a few schol-
ars employing it to analyse race. Other theories, such as CRT, whiteness
studies, or postcolonialism, provide an explicit framework for analysing
race and racism in education, whilst the main focus of Butler’s work is
power and subject formation.
However, a Butlerian framework provides an explicitly anti-
foundationalist approach to race, not dissimilar to the approaches of
Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha and Paul Gilroy. These scholars theorise the
ways in which identities are produced by power, examine the construc-
tion of race and racial subjects, challenge the existence of racial specificity,
explore racial positioning and how this shifts, and deconstruct essen-
tialised notions of race whilst still investigating how these notions have so
much potency. In this book, I explore how Butler’s work can be used to
analyse race in education focusing on the subjectifying power of racialised
discourses and norms, how racialised subjects are (re)produced, how race
is produced and reproduced via practices, acts and institutions, how
notions such as whiteness, blackness, Asianness are (re)produced, how
subjects become racially intelligible or unintelligible, how race interacts
with other, racialising discourses in education such as diversity, threat,
citizenship or aspiration, to fuel racial privilege and marginalisation, how
racial norms desubjectivate as well as forming subjects, and how racialised
discourses are resisted. Race in this book, following Butler, is seen as a
subjectifying force, a hegemonic norm, and a performative. Race consti-
tutes, rather than describes subjects, and is performatively constituted,
that is, it is created via the continued citation of the discourse.
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3
The Work of Judith Butler
and the Study of Race
In this chapter, I consider some of Butler’s main ideas, and investigate

how they can be, or indeed have been (by Butler herself or other schol-
ars), applied to the study of race. In the first half of the chapter, I explore
the following ideas from Butler’s work: subjectivation, the strength of
hegemonic norms, performativity, intelligibility and desubjectivation,
and explore what they contribute to the study of race. I argue that race
can be seen as a hegemonic norm and performative, which both subjecti-
vates and desubjectivates, and shapes notions of intelligibility. In the sec-
ond half of the chapter, I consider the political implications of employing
a Butlerian framework for studying race and racial oppression, addressing
up front some of the most frequent criticisms of Butler’s work. I address
critiques of her denial of the existence of a unified subject, her troubling
of identity categories, her view of the body as discursively and performa-
tively constituted, her focus on discourse and culture, and her approach
to social transformation; and consider an interpretation of her work
which is explicitly political when it is applied to explore issues of race.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73365-4_3
48 C. Chadderton
Subjectivation: Race as a Hegemonic Norm

Race is often presented as an innate and natural aspect of an individual’s
identity, and much scholarly work on race and racial identities reifies this
notion, whether explicitly or implicitly. As Gunaratnam argues, ‘despite
theoretical understandings of “race” and ethnicity as relational and
socially constructed, there is still a voracious appetite for approaches that
freeze, objectify and tame “race”/ethnicity into unitary categories that can
be easily understood and managed’ (2003, 33). Judith Butler’s work gives
us the tools to view race, rather than a fixed or innate aspect of identity,
as a hegemonic, subjectifying norm, calling into question its ontological
status. Butler’s work is well-known for theorising the process through
which identities are produced and shaped. She argues that norms, often
considered to be identity categories, produce subjects, rather than reflect-
ing or describing (pre-existing) subjects, as is widely believed. From a
Butlerian point of view, an individual is subjectivated, or rendered a sub-
ject, through norms and discourses. Identity is ‘a normative ideal rather
than a descriptive feature of experience’ (Butler 2008, 23).
This approach challenges the liberal humanist belief reflected in much
literature that the subject is the author of the discourse she speaks
(Weedon 1997). Viewed as discursively constituted, identities for Butler
are not considered to be an essential essence coming from within a pre-
existing subject, but are negotiated reactions to social norms coming
from without and are therefore historically and socially situated. This
explicitly contests the notion that there is a single, unified essence of self:
[T]he terms that make up one’s gender are, from the start, outside oneself,
beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author. (Butler 2004b, 1)
Identities are understood as the effects of social norms, discourses and

practices, and are entirely socially shaped and produced and emerge in
relation to these discourses and norms (Chambers and Carver 2008).
Subjects are formed fully in relation to others and do not pre-exist their
subjectivation—there is no ‘original’ subject which is not formed histori-
cally, culturally, and socially.
The Work of Judith Butler and the Study of Race 49
In the moment in which I say ‘I’, I am not only citing the pronominal place
of the ‘I’ in language, but at once attesting to and taking distance from a
primary impingement, a primary way in which I am, prior to acquiring an
‘I’, a being who has been touched, moved, fed, changed, put to sleep, estab-
lished as the subject and object of speech. My infantile body has not only
been touched, moved, and arranged, but those impingements operated as
‘tactile signs’ that registered in my formation. These signs communicate to
me in ways that are not reducible to vocalisation. They are signs of an other,
but they are also the traces from which an ‘I’ will eventually emerge, an ‘I’
who will never be able, fully, to recover or read these signs, for whom these
signs remain in part overwhelming and unreadable, enigmatic and forma-
tive. (Butler 2005:70)
According to Butler then, there can be no essential, stable or unified

subject. Butler bases her theory of subjectivation to some extent on the
work of Althusser, who argued that the subject is formed at the moment
it is hailed, or interpellated. The subject will recognise itself in the inter-
pellation. For Butler though, the interpellation takes place not only once
but continually throughout our lives.
Subjectivation is not a conscious process, and all are implicated, as
every individual is subjectivated in our very formation as subjects. Social
norms are constitutive, meaning they create a materiality. For Butler, it is
for this reason that it is often presumed that identities are ‘natural’ or
innate, and individuals tend to assume themselves to be independent,
sovereign subjects. In fact, for Butler, there is no ‘natural’ identity, and
there is no aspect of ourselves which pre-exists our subjectivation. Identity
categories are not actually fixed to bodies, they are just perceived as being
so because we are not able to see beyond our subjectivation. Like mascu-
linity, femininity, and heteronormativity, race can be said to function as
a hegemonic subjectifying norm (Butler 2004a, 2010). Butler somewhat
controversially regards identity categories as constraining and the source
of oppression. In her writing she aims to encourage a destabilising of
categories: male and female, black and white, hetero and homosexual, as
she considers the only way to challenge oppression at its roots and address
the hegemony of oppressive social norms such as heteronormativity,
patriarchy and white hegemony.
50 C. Chadderton
Butlerian scholars often point out that Butler’s approach to subjectiva-

tion draws originally on the work of Foucault. It is based on the
Foucauldian notion that power forms the subject, and on Foucault’s use
of the psychoanalytic notion of ‘the gaze’, by which is not meant a con-
scious seeing, rather the establishment of a relationship of power which
produces the subject. Under the gaze, an individual will tend to self-
regulate in response. More seldom picked up on by readers of her work,
Butler’s notion of subjectivation also explicitly draws on the work of
Frantz Fanon in developing the notion of the racial gaze, imbued with
power and subjectivation (Bell 1999b). Fanon (1967) argues that the
black man (sic) is subjectified through the power-laden gaze of the white.
Butler takes this up herself, arguing that Fanon’s work shows ‘how the
black male body is constituted […] through a naming and a seeing’
(Butler 1993, 18). Both Butler and Fanon argue that the gaze produces
material reality, in this case, norms of colonialism and race produce racial
difference, racial identity and racialised subjects.
This is not a simple seeing, an act of direct perception, but the racial pro-
duction of the visible, the workings of racial constraints on what it means
‘to see’. (Butler 1993, 16)
Butler explores how lives and bodies are understood, or ‘recognised’,

through ‘a racialized episteme’ (Butler 1993, 16), or what she in later
work refers to as racial ‘frames’ (Butler 2004a, 2010). A ‘frame’ in
Butlerian terms is a collection of discourses, or a gaze, that shapes percep-
tion. The notion of racial frames offers a way of understanding the para-
dox of race: how race is a social and discursive construction, yet is
perceived (and thus mostly lived and experienced) as an essential aspect
of identity.
“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter, I made no secret of
my amusement.
“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now
they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh
myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.
[…]
I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my
ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my
blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-
toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-
ships […]. (Fanon 1967, 112)
Fanon in this quote shows how the gaze of whiteness is laden with
stereotypes, discrimination and violence, and how the words of the child
are not ‘just’ words, but they actually subjectify the author, because of the
power of whiteness. What both Fanon’s and Butler’s work emphasises is
that the ‘racial frame’ shapes the way in which arbitrary acts, events and
interaction are perceived. At issue is the person and the (perceived) race
of the person, rather than the act: A white man ‘belongs to the race of
those who since the beginning of time have never known cannibalism.
What an idea, to eat one’s father! Simple enough, one has only not to be
a nigger [sic]’ (Fanon 1967, 115). Butler, writing about the trial of
Rodney King, shows how the racial gaze produces blackness and white-
ness imbued with meaning. For example, black people in this frame are
viewed ‘as the agent of violence, one whose agency is phantasmatically
implied as the narrative precedent […] …the police protect whiteness
[so] their own violence cannot be read as violence; because the black male
body […] is the site and source of danger’ (Butler 1993:16–18). She
argues that some bodies will be ‘recognised’ as not having the same enti-
tlement to rights as others. She applies this framework to analyse the
counter terrorism agenda of the US, arguing that racial frames mean
non-white people are ‘recognised’ as threatening, which is seen to justify
an automatic suspicion: ‘If a person is simply deemed dangerous, then it
is no longer a matter of deciding whether criminal acts occurred’ (Butler
2004a, 76), whilst at the same time, protecting those considered white
from suspicion. This notion of subjectivation through the racial gaze is an
extension of the more common notion of racial stereotyping. For Fanon
and Butler, race is not ‘just’ a stereotype, it is a subjectifying force (Bhaba
1983).
52 C. Chadderton
Race as a Performative
Butler’s tools also allow for an understanding of race as a performative.
Butler argues that the constitution of identities, or subjectivation, func-
tions on a day to day basis through a practice she calls performativity. By
this she means that identities are something we do, not that we are, and
we act these out, perform them, often unwittingly, in different ways in
different situations. The word ‘performativity’ should suggest neither
insincere nor necessarily conscious actions: No identity is considered
more ‘real’ than another; they are shifting, multiple, sometimes contra-
dictory. They are not fixed, static or unitary.
…performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate “act”,

but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse
produces the effects that it names. (Butler 2011, xiii)
Individuals perform certain norms, and behave in certain ways within

normative frameworks, and it is these repeat performances, these con-
stant imitations, which construct and confirm the norms, ‘I am not
formed once and definitively, but continuously or repeatedly’ (Butler
2015, 6). Individuals do not only perform their own identities, they per-
form identities onto others and they negotiate (possibly contradictory)
identities that are performed onto them. Individuals perform different
aspects of their identities in different situations, and are continually
developing these. The various identities are linked to discourses, which
communicate what is normal and not normal, for people from a given
class, ethnic group or gender in any given society. In this way, norms
produce and regulate identities as an ongoing process.
Butler suggests that through continual, repeated naming, which begins
at birth and continues throughout the lives of individuals, an individual’s
identity is performed onto them by language and the attitudes of others.
It is this repetition which makes it seem as though characteristics are
naturally linked to gender, race, class or community. For Butler all identi-
ties are performed, created in citation. Even those we consider natural or
innate, including gender and race, are ‘inherently unstable’ (Bell 1999c,
137). For Butler, this is how an individual is taught the norms of society,
and how these norms tend to be perpetuated.
Consider the medical interpellation…which shifts an infant from an ‘it’ to

a ‘she’ or a ‘he’, and in that naming, the girl is ‘girled’, brought into the
domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender. But
that ‘girling’ of the girl does not end there; on the contrary, that founding
interpellation is reiterated by various authorities and throughout various
intervals of time to reinforce or contest this naturalised effect. The naming
is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a
norm. (Butler 2011, xvii)
‘Performativity’ should not be confused with ‘performance’. As Butler

points out, (2011), the notion of a performance ‘presumes a subject’,
who is consciously acting, while performativity ‘contests the very notion
of a subject’ (p. 33).
…performance as bounded ‘act’ is distinguished from performativity inso-

far as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain
and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrica-
tion of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’. […] The reduction of performativ-
ity to performance would be a mistake. (Butler 2011, 178)
Butler argues that the speech act, and by implication, practices and
utterances of all kinds, ‘is […] inserted in a citational chain, and that
means that the temporal conditions for making the speech act precede
and exceed the momentary occasion of its enunciation.’ (Butler 2015,
176). The idea of the ‘citational chain’ refers to the way in which identi-
ties and structures are formed continually by the ongoing social referenc-
ing of preceding discourses and norms, and they themselves also feed into
the continuation of identities, structures and norms. It also refers to the
notion that all identities are formed in relations of power and often in
dichotomies: woman is constituted in relation to man and vice-versa, and
black in relation to white, and vice-versa, where the dichotomy maintains
the hierarchy (Youdell 2004). This is discussed further below.
Not every utterance, nor every citation of a discourse, can have perfor-
mative force. ‘Performative acts are forms of authoritative speech: most per-
formatives, for instance, are statements that, in the uttering, also perform a
certain action and exercise a binding power’ (Butler 2011, 171). There are
indeed utterances which do not carry authority, which do not appeal to an
individual’s psyche, or which will not propel an individual to act.
54 C. Chadderton
Indeed, performativity can be understood as the way in which norms

are made into (perceived) realities. Like gender, race can be understood as
a performative: it is both performatively produced and a constituting
norm. For Butler, ‘race is performatively produced through the re-
enactment of a range of perceptual as well as discursive practices.’ (Byrne
2011, 5). Scholars have employed an understanding of race as performa-
tive to theorise racial expression such as dress, accent, manner of walking
or political stance—on the basis of which discrimination is frequent—as
neither linked to phenotype, nor necessarily voluntary (for example Rich
2004; Nayak 2006). Whiteness can be said to function as a performative
in that it entails a series of acts which ensures the continued privilege of
white people. Butler also views racism as a performative, as it is repro-
duced through various actions which disadvantage minority ethnic
people,
…racism is also reproduced in the present, in the prison system, new forms
of population control, increasing economic inequality that affects people
of color disproportionately. These forms of institutionalized destitution
and inequality are reproduced through these daily encounters—the dispro-
portionate numbers of minorities stopped and detained by the police, and
the rising number of those who fall victim to police violence. The figure of
the black person as threat, as criminal, as someone who is, no matter where
he is going, already-on-the-way-to-prison… (Butler in Yancy and Butler
2015, n/p)
Racial micro-aggressions, performed mostly by the racially privileged,

which accumulate in the experience of those who are racially oppressed
and reproduce their marginalisation, can be considered to be performa-
tives: often unspoken, and yet subjectify the subject on racial terms.
Discussing the work of Critical Race Theorist Kendall Thomas, Butler
explains,
His idea of what it is to be ‘raced’ is very much about the accumulation of

speech acts. Speech acts don’t have to be explicit, verbal statements- it’s not
that one becomes raced as it were by being addressed explicitly. There are
all sorts of implicit modes of address that structure institutions. (Butler,
cited in interview with Bell 1999a, 168).
The notion of performativity challenges many common assumptions

around race. Firstly, it challenges widespread assumptions that identities
are biological or innate, or that any characteristics are inherently linked
to bodies or, indeed, communities or population groups. Butler’s under-
standing of performativity has been employed by scholars to argue explic-
itly that there is no essential racial identity behind expressions of identity
(Kondo 1997; Rich 2004; Nayak 2006). It challenges the notion that
identity can be linked in any essential way to any way of identifying.
Indeed, it challenges the notion of naturalness itself: Often individuals
and populations are stereotyped and marginalised on the grounds that
there is a natural and therefore innate connection between their pheno-
type and behaviour. For Butler, not only can we not access ‘the natural’;
‘the natural’ does not exist. There is no ‘original’ culture, body or identity,
which is untouched by shifting social conditions. The notion that identi-
ties are performatively constituted ‘implicitly problematises the black-
white binary and essentialist notions of racial hierarchy, which create
separate, bounded racial groups’ (Kondo 1997, 6). Many would consider
controversial Fanon’s words, ‘…what is often the black soul is a white
man’s artifact’ (Fanon 1967, 14). Controversial as this indeed is, this
notion of identities as constituted through powerful norms, it firstly
debunks any notion of an original, essential identity, and secondly illus-
trates a notion important to the work of many postcolonial thinkers,
which is that blackness does not exist without whiteness, and vice versa.
Such notions are also indebted to the thinking of black feminists, includ-
ing and perhaps especially Sojourner Truth in 1851, who as mentioned in
Chap. 2, questioned the fixidity and homogeneous nature of the category
of woman, as well as arguing that identities are constructed through
power relations: the notion of woman constructed in relation to man,
and the notion of black in relation to white (see Brah and Phoenix 2004).
For Butler, it is not possible to access an original identity untouched by
power and discourse, and outside of history:
Of course, Homi Bhaba’s work on the mimetic splitting of the postcolonial

subject is close to my own in several ways: not only the appropriation of
the colonial ‘voice’ by the colonised, but the split condition of identifica-
tion are crucial to a notion of performativity that emphasises the way
56 C. Chadderton
minority identities are produced and riven at the same time under condi-
tions of domination. (Butler 1999, 206)
Secondly, performativity presents a challenge to notions of ‘authentic’

identities, as discourses are interpreted and situated in varied and contra-
dictory ways (Noble 2005). There cannot be an ‘authentic’ identity which
lies beyond social norms, or which pre-exists cultural frameworks of
understanding. Thirdly, and also controversially, but often under-
theorised in emancipatory work, Butler’s understanding of performativ-
ity allows a consideration of the way in which the self is complicit in its
own oppression, due to the repeated citation of norms,
…those who are oppressed by certain operations of power also come to be

invested in that oppression, and how, in fact, their very self-definition
becomes bound up with the terms by which they are regulated, margin-
alised or erased from the sphere of cultural life. (Butler et al. 2000, 149)
The norms which we cite might not always benefit us; in fact, they may
marginalise and oppress us.
Intelligibility and Desubjectivation
The implications of Butler’s thinking on intelligibility and the creation of
viable and unviable subjects for studies of racial oppression and margin-
alisation have not really been widely picked up by scholars and are worth
considering in detail. For Butler, the norms which individuals perform
form the boundaries of what is possible and not possible in a given soci-
ety. Norms regulate which subjects are on the inside and which are on the
outside of the boundary, or, what is considered within the bounds of
normality, and what is not normal.
‘sex’ [or race] not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory prac-
tice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is
made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce – demar-
cate, circulate, differentiate – the bodies it controls. (Butler 2011, xii)
This regulation serves the purpose of legitimating dominant social

norms (Butler 1993, 2), such as heterosexuality, masculinity or white-
ness. In this way, subjects are intelligible to each other, when they fit in
with dominant social norms. Race thus functions as one norm by which
one becomes intelligible as a subject (Byrne 2011). Intelligibility, the sub-
ject’s recognition as a full subject, is governed by the normative gaze, or
the ‘frame’, the collection of discourses which shapes the norm, as Butler
(2005) argues
If some can ‘read’ me when others cannot, is it only because those who can
read me have internal talents that others lack? Or is it that a certain practice
of reading becomes possible in relation to certain frames and images that
over time produce what we call ‘capacity’. (p. 29)
However, subjects who do not fit with dominant norms are often
unintelligible as subjects, or are perceived as unviable subjects.
Importantly, unintelligible or unviable subjects are not ‘just’ socially
unacceptable, their status as a full subject comes into question and this
tends to have material consequences. Subjectivation is the formation of
the subject in relation to social norms. Butler views subjectivation as a
question of existence and survival, which explains how societal norms are
internalised: the subject has little choice but to accept and act its position
if it wants to survive in society.
As the condition of becoming a subject, subordination implies being in a

mandatory submission. Moreover the desire to survive, ‘to be’, is a
pervasively exploitable desire. The one who holds out the promise of con-
tinued existence plays to the desire to survive. ‘I would rather exist in sub-
ordination than not exist’ is one formulation of this predicament (where
the risk of ‘death’ is also possible). (Butler 1997b, 7)
Indeed, for Butler, we are only recognised as human in relation to these

social norms
…we are not deterministically decided by norms, although they do provide

the framework and the point of reference for any set of decisions we subse-
quently make. This does not mean that a given regime of truth sets an
58 C. Chadderton
invariable framework for recognition; it means only that it is in relation to

this framework that recognition takes place or the norms that govern rec-
ognition are challenged and transformed. (Butler 2005, 22)
Butler argues that the sexualising and racialising of bodies regulates

which identities are viable and which are unviable. By viable, she means
those identities which are considered normal and acceptable in society,
those which are considered culturally intelligible, which are viewed as
part of the imagined community and are constituted as fully human.
Identities which are positioned as unviable are constituted as beyond or
outside the imagined community, culturally unintelligible or even beyond
the human, and are therefore considered unacceptable and tend to be
marginalised and oppressed. Cultural intelligibility dictates who is recog-
nised as a legitimate subject.
The terms by which we are recognised as human are socially articulated and
changeable. And sometimes the very terms that confer ‘humanness’ on
some individuals are those that deprive certain other individuals of the pos-
sibility of achieving that status, producing a differential between the human
and the less-than-human. These norms have far-reaching consequences for
how we understand the model of the human entitled to rights or included
in the participatory sphere of political deliberation… Certain humans are
recognised as less than human, and that form of qualified recognition does
not lead to a viable life. (Butler 2004b, 2)
Although the notion of being beyond the human may sound extreme,
for Butler this is the way in which oppression works: through the creation
of unviable or unintelligible subjects, or abjects. ‘Normative schemes of
intelligibility establish what will and will not be human, what will be a
livable life, what will be a grievable death’ (Butler 2004b, 146). This pro-
cess can be both explicit and implicit, overt or covert, officially or legally
regulated or not:
Oppression works not merely through acts of overt prohibition, but

covertly, through the constitution of viable subjects and through the corol-
lary constitution of a domain of unviable (un)subjects – abjects we might
call them – who are neither named nor prohibited within the economy of
the law. (Butler 1991, 20)
Those subjects with unintelligible, unviable identities serve to validate

those which are intelligible and viable, those which legitimate the domi-
nant norms.
(t)o be called unreal and to have that call, as it were, institutionalised as a

form of differential treatment, is to become the other against whom (or
against which) the human is made. It is the inhuman, the beyond the
human, the less than human, the border that secures the human in its
ostensible reality. (Butler 2004b, 30)
Race functions as a norm by which one becomes intelligible as a sub-

ject, but also by which one becomes unintelligible, ‘there are racial and
ethnic frames by which the recognisably human is currently constituted’
(Butler 2004a, 90). Unlike much other work on race then, Butler’s focus
is not on discrimination, rather her focus is the formation of the subject,
and the study of the creation of the unviable subject. Indeed, Butler
argues that full subjecthood can be, and is, removed from an individual
or group through, for example, a lack of rights which would afford them
full subjecthood, extending work which ‘merely’ argues that race is
socially constructed:
The limits of constructivism are exposed at those boundaries of bodily life

where abjected or delegitimated bodies fail to count as ‘bodies’. (Butler
2011, xxiv)
For Butler, the lack of rights accorded to non-white populations

becomes an issue of de-subjectification: the status of minority popula-
tions is not just socially constructed, rather they are denied full subject-
hood. Initially in her work, Butler refers to the case of the prisoners
incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay to exemplify this notion of desubjecti-
fication on ethnic grounds.
…the humans who are imprisoned in Guantanamo do not count as human;

they are not subjects protected by international law. They are not subjects
in any legal or normative sense. The dehumanisation effected by ‘indefinite
detention’ makes use of an ethnic frame for conceiving who will be human,
and who will not. (Butler 2004a, xvi)
60 C. Chadderton
Many would argue this is an extreme example, and thus desubjectifica-

tion only takes place under extreme circumstances. However, more
recently, Butler has considered the more mundane and everyday function-
ing of white supremacy in the US, including the effects of the killing of
mostly unarmed black people, including children such as the teenager
Travyon Martin, on US streets at the hands of while police officers. The
police, of course, are supposed to uphold the law of the land. The danger
of police violence for black people on the streets on an every day basis, as
well as the lack of consequences for the perpetrators, has created a situa-
tion where the law is very clearly applied differently on grounds of race.
Black people do not have the same rights as white people. Butler, like
Fanon, argues that white supremacy functions through a process of desub-
jectification of racially minoritised groups. Although not all black people
are directly experiencing this violence, it is the threat of violence and the
differential powers of the law which desubjectifies, creating a culture in
which black people are ‘considered disposable and fundamentally ungriev-
able’ (Butler in Yancy and Butler 2015, n/p) on racial grounds.
The figure of the black person as threat, as criminal, as someone who is, no
matter where he is going, already-on-the-way-to-prison, conditions these
pre-emptive strikes, attributing lethal aggression to the very figure who suf-
fers it most. The lives taken in this way are not lives worth grieving; they
belong to the increasing number of those who are understood as ungriev-
able, whose lives are thought not to be worth preserving. (Butler in Yancy
and Butler 2015, n/p)
While the idea that people of colour in the US, or ethnic minorities in
the UK are treated as less-than-human is of course, not new, where
Butler’s work differs from much other work is that it focuses upon the
desubjectivation of the individual via their social positioning.
Butler and the Politics of Race

For many readers, Butler’s work is very political, indeed, it is viewed as
promoting a different kind of politics. However, others have argued that
Butler’s work is unpolitical, and even removes the basis for political action
(Haber 1994; see also Butler 2011),
the critiques of poststructuralism within the cultural left have expressed

strong scepticism toward the claim that anything politically progressive can
come out of its premises. (Butler 2008, ix)
In this section I address some of these critiques, consider the political

force of her work, and the implications this has for employing her work
to study race.
The most common critique of Butler’s work is of her challenging of the
notion of the very possibility of a unified subject. This is sometimes
regarded as an attempt to deny marginalised groups their common iden-
tities and voices (Pillow 2007), which are often promoted by oppressed
groups as a tool of empowerment and to counter ‘othering’ discourses
(for example Delgado Bernal 2002)—particularly relevant for race schol-
ars and activists. However, as Butler herself writes, ‘[o]bviously the politi-
cal task is not to refuse representational politics’ (Butler 2008, 7). Indeed,
she explicitly accepts that the construction of a ‘we’ around a category has
its purpose when it comes to political activity. However, her anti-
foundational work rejects the notion of common or unified identities as
the foundation for political action (Chambers and Carver 2008). There
are several reasons for this. Firstly, she argues, the notion of the existence
of a unified subject assumes an identity which potentially pre-exists its
subjectivation, which she has argued is not possible. Indeed for Butler, an
identity is performed via the involvement in political action.
The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an

identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elabo-
rated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. My argument is that
there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed’, but that the ‘doer’ is variably
constructed in and through the deed. (Butler 2008, 195)
Secondly, she objects to the assumption of sameness, which, she argues,

denies the various power relations within a given group:
the insistence in advance on coalitional ‘unity’ as a goal assumes that soli-

darity, whatever its price, is a prerequisite for political action. But what sort
of politics demands that kind of advance purchase on unity? Perhaps a
coalition needs to acknowledge its contradictions and take action with
62 C. Chadderton
those contradictions intact. Perhaps also part of what dialogic understand-

ing entails is the acceptance of divergence, breakage, splinter, and fragmen-
tation as part of the often tortuous process of democratisation. The very
notion of ‘dialogue’ is culturally specific and historically bound, and while
one speaker may feel secure that a conversation is happening, another may
be sure it is not. The power relations that condition and limit dialogic pos-
sibilities need first to be interrogated. Otherwise the model of dialogue
risks lapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy
equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about
what constitutes ‘agreement’ and ‘unity’ and, indeed, that those are the
goals to be sought. (Butler 2008, 20)
Butler also argues that politics based on identity assumes a commonal-

ity among a group of individuals where there might be very little com-
monality, where differences may be denied, where a fixed identity is
assumed which has little to do with actual experience, and where the actual
indeterminacy and contestability of the category is denied. She argues that
calls for unity which often disregard real differences between people are
ultimately exclusionary and subordinating. Indeed, she explicitly critiques
movements which exclude people on the basis of race or sexuality, criticis-
ing ‘a unity wrought through exclusions’ (Butler 1998, 37),
…there is the political problem that feminism encounters in the assump-

tion that the term women denotes a common identity […] gender is not
always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical con-
texts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and
regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. (Butler 2008, 4)
Moreover, for Butler, and perhaps most controversially, the possibili-

ties for social transformation lie in exposing all categories and social
norms as performatives, rather than a description of reality, which chal-
lenges the notion that there is an original or natural identity or way to be.
For Butler, the key to social transformation is the challenging of the
whole notion of the ‘naturalness’ of categories. In agreement with other
social theorists, such as Stuart Hall (1998), Butler further problematises
the expectation that emancipation of any marginalised group will be pos-
sible within the structures which subjectivate, shape, constrain and
oppress them:
…the feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the very

political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation. This becomes
politically problematic if that system can be shown to produce gendered
subjects who are presumed to be masculine. In such cases, an uncritical
appeal to such a system for the emancipation of ‘women’ will clearly be
self-defeating. (Butler 2008, 3)
Rather than focussing on the extension of rights to oppressed minori-

ties within current structures, Butler’s focus is the formation of the
subject.
The question of ‘the subject’ is crucial for politics […] The deconstruction
of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as
political the very terms through which identity is articulated. (Butler 2008,
3 and 203).
Her theory that the subject is discursively and performatively consti-

tuted is a deeply political notion, in that all identities are already politi-
cally invested, in ways which both benefit and disadvantage the subject.
In response to those who criticise her work on the limitations of
identity-based politics and the impossibility of a unified subject as repre-
senting the death of the subject, Butler has argued,
This is not the death of the subject […] but an inquiry into the modes by
which the subject is instituted and maintained, how it institutes and main-
tains itself, and how the norms that govern ethical principles must be
understood as operating not only to guide conduct but to decide the ques-
tion of who and what will be a human subject. (Butler 2005, 110)
For Butler, the way oppressive practices should be challenged is by

problematising and ultimately completely deconstructing categories.
This is because for Butler, categories are inevitably normalising and coer-
cive, restrictive and exclusionary (Lloyd 2007). In her work, she mostly
focuses on the way in which the category of women often excludes les-
bian and transsexual women. This argument can be extended to race—
who is included and excluded, for example, by the categories black and
white? Some would argue that the deconstruction of categories has sig-
nificant negative implications for those who have found solace, protec-
64 C. Chadderton
tion, security and political representation through categories, communities

whose lives are structures by shared resistance to oppression (see, for
example Cohen 2005; Johnson and Henderson 2005). It could certainly
be argued that Butler pays little attention to the reality that the decon-
struction of categories as a way of living tends currently only to be open
to those with class privilege (Cohen 2005). However, as others have
argued, this problematisation of categories is not a dismissal of the impor-
tance of such communities and social movements, rather an understand-
ing that social movements are diverse but can be exclusionary, and a
recognition of the importance of not dismissing the political meaning of
this (Giroux 2000).
The feminist ‘we’ is always and only a phantasmatic construction, one that
has its purposes, but which denies the complexity and indeterminacy of the
term and constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the
constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent. (Butler 2008, 194)
For Butler, it is the social position assigned by identity categories which

is responsible for the oppression of marginalised groups, because these
categories are used to order the social hierarchies. It is the creation of
categories and closed systems of characteristics that makes totalitarian
systems possible and the public can become cogs in the network of
oppression. By refusing fixed categories of identity, the basis of systems of
oppression that can lead to the collapse of democracy, such as fascism, is
denied (Koch 2007, 15). The reality is exclusion and violence towards
women, racialised minorities and LGBTI people on the basis of these
categories. This may of course be a difficult notion to accept, as Hall
(1998) argues,
when that rigid binary, racial logic, is being used against us, we certainly
know what’s wrong with it. But when it seems to be working for us, we find
that it’s extremely difficult to give it up […] How would you mobilise,
what would you say to people, on what basis would you appeal to them,
under what banner would you get them together? (p. 292)
Butler encourages us to view categories as incomplete and unstable,

arguing that there cannot be universal or inclusive categories. But beyond
this, it is this assumption of incomplete and instability which for Butler

provides the route to social transformation
The radical instability of the category sets into question the foundational
restrictions on feminist political theorising and opens up other configura-
tions, not only of genders and bodies, but of politics itself. (Butler 2008, 194)
For Butler (2004a), this points forward to the possibility of a ‘more

culturally complex and hybrid world’ (p. 231), which involves extending
‘the norms that sustain viable life to previously disenfranchised commu-
nities’ (p. 225), the implications of which are as important for oppression
on racial grounds, as they are for oppression on gender or sexual grounds.
I discuss Butler’s approach to social and political transformation in more
detail below.
Linked to these debates around identity formation, a common misun-
derstanding of performativity is that it suggests that identities are a mat-
ter of choice (see for example Probyn 1995), a critique often levelled at
work considered to be poststructural. However, for identities to be a mat-
ter of choice, a sovereign subject is assumed, which Butler explicitly
rejects: identity is discursively and performatively constituted via hege-
monic norms and discourses. For Butler, there is no original choosing
subject, external to the self.
A further reason that Butler’s work is considered unpolitical by some is
its focus on discourse and representation. This is seen by some critics to
be a privileging of language over materiality. Indeed some scholars in the
field of education have turned to the work of Deleuze and Guattari
(1983), who argue that there should be no separation between discourse
and embodiment, factors which should be seen as inseparable:
An arrangement in its multiplicity necessarily works at once on semiotic,

material, and social flows […] There is longer a tripartite division between
afield of reality (the world), a field of representation ( a book), and a field
of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an arrangement connects together cer-
tain multiplicities caught up in each of these orders. (Deleuze and Guattari
1983, 52)
66 C. Chadderton
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘assemblage’ has been employed

in education research to consider all these different factors and also how
they interact (see e.g. Tamboukou 2008). This approach allows scholars
to focus on actual flows of political, economic, social, representational
and affective power, rather than, they argue, focusing only on discourse.
Butler’s work is not in fact ‘merely’ about language, although language
is important. It is more than this. It is about the way in which materiality,
in the form of identities, politics, culture, is produced through discourse.
This becomes really clear in her later work where she refers to a ‘frame’,
that is, the normative frame, the way in which things are understood in a
given culture, which define what is acceptable and unacceptable.
We are not simply the effects of discourses, but […] any discourse, any
regime of intelligibility, constitutes us at a cost. Our capacity to reflect
upon ourselves, is correspondingly limited by what the discourse, the
regime, cannot allow into speakability. (Butler 2005, 121)
Discourse does not just mean language, speech or text. As Youdell

(2006) argues
[t]ext and speech are practices of discourse in that they repeat and so
inscribe these systems of meaning and, in so doing, contribute to the ongo-
ing constitution and bounding of what makes sense. (p. 35)
This argument also assumes that language and materiality are uncon-
nected opposites. Butler encourages us to think that although they are
not irreducible to each other, they are not distinct, rather they shape and
produce each other.
Moreover Butler’s focus on the sphere of cultural representation has
been criticised by those who argue that this focus neglects politics and the
political (see Butler 1998). However, this critique assumes that culture
and politics are separate spheres. In all of Butler’s work, politics and politi-
cal resistance are located within culture. Indeed, she has provided signifi-
cant critiques of the work of those, such as Julia Kristeva for example, who
position politics outside of culture. For Butler, this separation masks the
way in which politics and power operate culturally (Butler 2008; Lloyd
2007). As feminists and race theorists have long argued, the political is
lived out in cultural spaces, intimate relations, social formations. As others
have argued, culture legitimates and produces practices, politics, social
relations and identities. Representations are linked to power, social and
political struggles and the cultural field produces narratives which shape
and constitute identities, and also policies, they cannot be separated from
the narrow field of political (Giroux 2000). Cultural and media represen-
tations shape political realities (Tyler 2013). It is
possible to distinguish, even analytically, between a lack of cultural recog-

nition and a material oppression, when the very definition of legal ‘person-
hood’ is rigorously circumscribed by cultural norms that are indissociable
from their material effects […]. (Butler 1998, 41)
This is about how we have been represented and how we might repre-
sent ourselves and thus what we become (Giroux 2000). Cultural sites
constitute spaces for the production of identities. As Hall (1998) argues,
subjects
are unable to speak, or to act in one way or another, until they have been
positioned by the work that culture does, and in that way, as subjects they
function by taking up discourses of the past and present. (p. 291)
Identities are not a natural given, rather they are formed discursively,
the discourses being social and political. Highly political notions of, for
example, the ideal citizen, the good student are raced, gendered and
classed. Citizens’ and students’ recognition as intelligible subjects, with a
viable personhood, depends to an extent on their compliance with raced,
gendered and classed norms. As Giroux (2004) argues, cultural politics is
also about the distribution of resources, which enable different social
groups and individuals to choose and desire.
Closely linked to this argument, a further critique of Butler’s work is
that it does not address structural issues, and would thus be an unsuitable
framework for considering race. However, Butler’s work deals with norms,
the normalising, privileging and oppressive forces of power, not individual
prejudice. In this way, it fits it very well with structural understandings of
68 C. Chadderton
society and by implication, understandings of racism as structural, rather

than individual and aberrant. It also addresses that area where social struc-
tures and cultural representation meet, which is key for race (as for gender)
(Omi and Winant 2015). Her work examines the norms and structures
which enable and shape marginalisation. There are no subjects or bodies
beyond structures of power, which are embodied in social and cultural
norms and institutions (Thiem 2008). Her critics perhaps misunderstand
her focus on shifting and plural norms as a rejection of structures. As
Butler herself argues,
…what I don’t like are structural accounts of racialisation that refuse to

understand the temporality of the structure, the fact that the structure
must be reiterated again and again, and that it has a kind of ritual dimen-
sion and that its very temporal dimension is the condition of its subver-
sion. […] What is poststructural in my work is the fact that I want those
subjectivating norms to be temporalised and open rather than fixed and
determinate. (Butler, interview with Bell 1999, 168)
Butler’s argument that the body is also discursively and performatively

constituted has also aroused critique. Some have assumed she is arguing
against bodily autonomy, because of the ongoing struggle which margin-
alised people, in particular, women and black and minority ethnic peo-
ple, are fighting against the very real physical violence meted out to their
bodies in the forms of misogynistic and racist attacks to establish and
reclaim control over their own bodies. Indeed, again, Butler does not
deny this and explicitly supports this struggle, arguing explicitly that we
should continue to claim the right to autonomy over our bodies: to sex-
ual freedom, self-determination, reproductive freedom, freedom from
racist attacks. However, her work deals with the way in which bodies are
constituted and the way in which the body is produced by power.
Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for
which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invari-
ably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public
sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world
of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life.
(Butler 2004a, 26)
Like many other feminists as well as postcolonial and race theorists,

Butler recognises that individuals tend to be constituted in bodily terms.
Different bodies are widely believed to be linked to specific, essential
characteristics. Butler builds on Foucault’s notion of the body as a surface
of cultural inscription. For Butler, however, there is no original body
which is not inscribed, a body prior to the inscription, implicit in the
work of Foucault and others.
…acts, gestures and desire produce the effect of an internal core or sub-
stance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of
signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organising principle
of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed,
are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise
purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through
corporeal signs and other discursive means. […] acts and gestures, articu-
lated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organising
gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the
regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive hetero-
sexuality. (Butler 2008, 186, author’s italics)
This view of the body has equally been widely criticised, seen to sug-
gest that if there is no original body, the category of, for example, woman,
black person, or white person does not exist (Chambers and Carver
2008). Critics have assumed firstly that Butler’s theory of the social con-
struction of the body means that she resists its materiality at all (Butler
2011). Secondly some have argued that her work neglects embodiment
and affect, that is, flows of feeling, understood from a Deleuzian point of
view as ‘eruptions and flows of bodily sensation and intensities, and the
encounters between these eruptions and flows, between bodies, as being
beyond or before subjectivation.’ (Youdell 2011, 48).
However, what Butler means by the discursive and performative con-
stitution of the body is that we cannot even perceive the body except
through others, like any aspect of our identities. The body is an effect of
social power, and we do not have access to what a body would be outside
of the effects of social and cultural norms.
70 C. Chadderton
To claim that the discourse is formative is not to claim that it originates,

causes, or exhaustedly composes that which it concedes; rather, it is to
claim that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time
a further formation of that body. (Butler 2011, xix)
She is therefore arguing for an understanding of the lack of fixidity of

the material, and for an understanding of materiality as not independent
from social construction.
Equally Butler would argue Deleuzian understanding of affect—a feel-
ing which is felt before we can think it—is simply not possible. Notions
of affect, embodiment or materiality for Butler are simply not accessible
before or beyond discourse and subjectivation.
Butler challenges scholars with their work to explore how our fixed
notions of bodies become fixed, and how the way we perceive different
bodies has become assumed to be natural, and how differences between
bodies become reified as boundaries between people,
What I would propose […] is a return to the notion of matter, not as site
or surface, but as a process of materialisation that stabilises over time to
produce the effect of the boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter.
(Butler 2011, xviii)
This approach has been employed by race theorists using her work to
interrupt the fixidity of racial meaning to bodies (for example Kondo
1997). Such work also challenges notions of bodily ‘authenticity’, the
idea that a given dress, perspective, political stance or accent is more
authentically linked to one body than another—notions which tend to
reify, fix and exclude.
A further, related criticism is that Butler’s work does not give enough
attention to the role of the state (see Loizidou 2007). Although Butler is
supportive of political and social movements which demand more justice
from the state, at the same time she troubles and problematises their reli-
ance on the state for more equality. In fact, she sees the state as racial and
upholding of white hegemony, and her work focuses on the ways that the
population has ‘internalised’ the state through the process of governmen-
tality. Indeed, Butler’s work deals directly with the construction of state-
sanctioned normalisation of racism, white, heterosexual male hegemony,
surveillance and violence (Omi and Winant 2015). A key focus of her
work includes a critique of the power of the state to de-subjectivate sub-
jects. One of the main examples she employs is the invocation of a state
of emergency through which the rights of citizenship of a given group are
suspended and they are placed beyond the protection of the law.
Employing the work of Agamben, who argues that the threat of this sus-
pension of rights is present for all subjects, Butler argues that Agamben
does not address inequalities in vulnerability, such as the way in which
gender, sexuality or race impact on our vulnerability and exposure, nor
‘how sovereignty […] works by differentiating populations on the basis
of ethnicity and race’ (Butler 2004a, 68). Butler argues that governments
use such tactics to manage populations, sanctioning the reduction of the
lives of a given group to the less-than-human through political means.
Butler points out that in the case of the current so-called ‘war on terror’,
it is the racial constitution of the subject as ‘threat’ which leads to this
desubjectification: ‘there [is] a racial and ethnic frame through which
these […] lives are viewed and judged such that they are deemed less than
human, or as having departed from the recognisable human community
[…]’ (Butler 2004a, 57). This is then one overt way in which the state
sanctions and normalises white hegemony and violence against racialised
subjects.
Some have argued that Butler’s work does not provide a comprehen-
sive and satisfying politics of social transformation and resistance
(Johnson 2005). Unlike much other literature on race and emancipation,
as well as many other feminist scholars and also Foucault, Butler’s theory
of agency does not rely on the notion of some autonomous aspect of the
individual which escapes being subjectivated (Lloyd 2007). This is some-
times understood as a lack of agency and seen as an understanding of the
subject as unable to resist, unable to develop a politics of social transfor-
mation (Johnson 2005). However, from a Butlerian point of view, whilst
the subject is constituted and constrained by subjectivation, she is not
wholly determined. Although she is dependent on others for her subjec-
tivity, she also has a certain agency created at the moment of subjectiva-
tion. However, she does not always act as expected, and does not always
act the same in similar circumstances. This is not a sovereign agency,
rather the subject has discursive agency: agency within the limits of her
72 C. Chadderton
subjection. This agency cannot ever be considered free choice or free will,
because it is conditioned by the individual’s subjectivation. Agency does
not come from an ‘I who acts’ (Chambers and Carver 2008, 87), an actor
outside discourse.
…the question of agency is not to be answered through recourse to an ‘I’

that pre-exists signification. In other words, the enabling conditions for an
assertion of ‘I’ are provided by the structure of signification, the rules that
regulate the legitimate and illegitimate invocation of that pronoun, the
practices that establish the terms of intelligibility by which that pronoun
can circulate. […] There is no possibility of agency or reality outside of the
discursive practices that give those terms the intelligibility that they have.
(Butler 2008, 196–202)
In this notion is contained the potential for social and political change
because every new act reconstitutes both the subject and the understand-
ing of social interaction.
If in acting the subject retains the conditions of its emergence, this does not
imply that all of its agency remains tethered to those conditions and that
those conditions remain the same in every operation of agency. (Butler
1997b, 13)
Resistance and opposition, as conceived by Butler, is therefore ‘..not

supposed to be a simple dialectical opposition, one that is absorbed back
into the terms that it opposes’ (Butler 1999, 15). Butler develops Foucault’s
idea that power not only constrains, but also enables. Agency is therefore
based on the citationality of performativity—the opportunity to reconsti-
tute. Performativity is thus constitutive: the repetition creates the possibil-
ity for action, and opens up the space for possible change, resistance and
agency. Through this repetition of performed norms, there is always the
possibility of destablising the effects by which a category is stabilised.
…the social performative is a crucial part not only of subject formation, but
of the ongoing political contestation and reformulation of the subject as
well. The performative is not only a ritual practice: it is one of the influen-
tial rituals by which subjects are formed and reformulated. (Butler 1997a,
160, author’s italics)
This allows for a complex understanding of resistance, and the condi-

tions under which resistance is possible, and in addition enables an
understanding that resistance may not necessarily be conscious or explicit,
a notion which tends to be under-explored in much literature on race.
Others have argued that while the notions of discursive agency and
performative politics are useful, as they do not assume a rational self-
knowing subject, and imagine discourses taking on new meaning and
unsettling normative meanings, they are too risky because the subject
risks not being intelligible as a subject, in which case the resignification
will fail (Youdell 2011). A politics of ‘anti-subjectivation’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983) has been suggested as an alternative way of conceptualis-
ing resistance.
The idea of ‘lines of flight’, or energetic forces, is used by Deleuze and
Guattari to explain how we can imagine escaping from current oppressive
conditions, becoming otherwise, and in doing so, disrupt hierarchies and
move in a new direction from normative regimes (for example, Ringrose
2013). Deleuzian scholars argue that this is not just about intellectual
resistance, but about passion and feeling, or affect as a source of resis-
tance, flows of energy which are anti-subjectivation. Zemblyas (2007),
for example, has developed the notion of a ‘pedagogy of desire’ as a form
of resistance: ‘through mobilization and release of desiring production,
teachers and students make available to themselves the powerful flows of
desire, thereby turning themselves into subjects who subvert normalized
representations and significations and find access to a radical self ’ (xxix).
Butler, however, would argue that it is not possible to see all our desires
as challenging the system, since they are formed within the system and
thus also cannot be seen as beyond subjectivation.
An important form of resistance and subversion for Butler is parody.
She argues that parody exposes the non-originality of all identities, which
allows us to challenge the (assumed) naturalness of any identity. For
Butler, in fact, all notions of ‘natural’ or ‘authentic’ identity are parody, or
imitation, as there is no original identity untouched by cultural influ-
ence. As she argues about gender,
Just as bodily surfaces are enacted as the natural, so these surfaces can
become the site of a dissonant and denaturalised performance that reveals
the performative status of the natural itself. Practices of parody can serve to
74 C. Chadderton
reengage and reconsolidate the very distinction between a privileged and

naturalised gender configuration and one that appears as derived, phantas-
mic, and mimetic – a failed copy, as it were. (Butler 2008, 200)
However, there has also been a good deal of controversy and misunder-
standing around this aspect of her work, and in particular about her use
of the practice of drag to illustrate her argument. Some have taken her
writings on parody to mean that she advocates ‘a politics of dressing up’
(Lloyd 2007, 3), or a politics in which subjects can simply switch gender
by dressing differently. In fact, Butler used the example of drag to argue
that not only is drag a parody of a gender identity, the gender identity
itself is never ‘natural’.
Clearly, however, it can quite rightly be argued that parody can only
function in a subversive or socially transformative way if it challenges
dominant and oppressive power relations. The history of drag (men dress-
ing up as women) has different historical connotations to that of, for
example, blackface (white people dressing up as black people), which is
widely recognised as racist due to the racist practice of white people paint-
ing their faces black as a form of entertainment which has contributed to
the dehumanising of African people. Butler (2008) therefore argues
Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand

what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly
troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as
instruments of cultural hegemony. (p. 189)
Blackface then, would constitute an example of a repetition which has

been recirculated as an instrument of cultural hegemony. Indeed, Butler
goes on to emphasise ‘parodic displacement […] depends on a context
and reception in which subversive confusions can be fostered’ (p. 189).
For Butler, the kind of subversive parody which could be socially trans-
formatory has to be both one which destablises naturalised categories
rather than reifying them, and it would have to have the effect of reveal-
ing that the original identity, or what is perceived as the original identity
‘itself is an imitation without origin’ (p. 188).
Butler’s work, although supportive of equal rights, does not focus on
this. In fact, she argues that working towards equal rights is not enough.
Instead, her work is about queering all relations. It is about understand-

ing how categories are produced and then ‘restrained by the very struc-
tures of power through which emancipation is sought’ (Butler 2008, 3).
She describes her political aims as ‘to find post-national forms of political
opposition’ (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007, 41); to achieve a ‘more
democratic and more inclusive life’ (Butler 2008, vii); to contribute to an
‘anti-foundationalist approach to coalitional politics [which] assumes
neither that “identity” is a premise nor that the shape or meaning of
coalitional assemblage can be known prior to its achievement’ (Butler
2008, 21); and to render culturally legitimate, and to create a liveable life,
for those who are currently unintelligible subjects.
The task here is not to celebrate each and every new possibility qua possi-
bility, but to redescribe those possibilities that already exist, but which exist
within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impos-
sible. If identities were no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllo-
gism, and politics no longer understood as a set of practices derived from
the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready-made subjects, a new
configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old.
(Butler 2008, 203)
Her more recent work considers the possibilities for new political ‘con-
vergences’, ‘alliances’ or ‘collectivities’ (Butler 2007, 2008). Such alli-
ances, she argues, may be somewhat antagonistic but should provide a
critique of the state and ‘solidarity among minorities’. Antagonistic alli-
ances would avoid the reification of fixed identities and struggles over
identity-based claims, and be what Cohen (2005) calls ‘a movement
based on one’s politics and not exclusively on one’s identity’ (p. 44).
Conclusion
In this chapter I have argued that following Butler, it is possible to under-
stand race as a hegemonic norm and performative, which both subjecti-
vates and desubjectivates, and shapes notions of intelligibility. Butler’s
work provides us with a critique of power, and the way in which power
constitutes subjects. Whilst there is much work on marginalisation in
76 C. Chadderton
education, the notions of subjectivation and performativity offer an alter-

native understanding of how discourses and social norms are internalised,
which much work on marginalisation does not cover. Butler provides an
anti-foundationalist framework in which identities are not ‘real’, or
authentic or natural or stable. Rather they are made real through our own
practices, acts and citations.
there is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is

performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its
results. (Butler 2008, 25)
The production of subjects thus takes place through the production of

knowledge which has material implications. Discourses and norms are
not just spoken, they work upon subjects and bodies, and are then acti-
vated by the subject (Thiem 2008).
I have also considered the political implications of Butler’s work,
although some aspects of this politics may be perceived as controversial
and even challenging to a more traditional understanding of emancipatory
politics. In particular her view of social transformation as contained in the
notion of performativity and the possibilities for cultural reconstitution
has a somewhat different focus to work which focuses on routes to politi-
cal transformation as enabled by the state and by sovereign subjects.
A Butlerian view of race then, potentially provides a lens which both
builds on, extends, complements, overlaps and at times contradicts other
frameworks employed to analyse race. Butler’s work does not provide a
comprehensive framework for studying race, nor does it claim to do so,
rather it perhaps allows us to address race in ways that other frameworks
may not, whilst sharing with other frameworks the aim of deepening our
understanding of marginalisation and privilege and how inequality and
oppression can be challenged.
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4
Race as a Hegemonic Norm: Citizenship
Education and the Production of Raced
British Subjects
Introduction
Butler’s work calls into question the notion that race is a fixed or innate
aspect of identity, problematising its oft assumed ontological status. In
Butlerian terms race can be understood as a hegemonic norm, which
subjectivates, shapes and constrains subjects. It upholds certain privileges
for groups and individuals designated as white, and disadvantages those
classified as ethnic or racial minorities. Race is therefore maintained, pro-
duced and reproduced through a series of discourses, acts and practices
which cite racial norms, either explicitly or implicitly. In this chapter I
explore the idea that citizenship and the notion of good British citizen
functions as a constituting norm, a discourse which shapes realities and
identities, which is a performative such as race and gender (Butler 2004a;
see also Pool 2006). The norm of citizenship constitutes subjects: ‘When
the United States acts, it establishes a conception of what it means to act
as an American, establishes a norm by which that subject might be known
(Butler 2004a, 41). As with all norms, citizenship is socially constructed
and historically specific, and thus not neutral. Thus citizenship is a raced,
gendered and classed discourse, which produces raced, gendered and

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73365-4_4
82 C. Chadderton
classed subjects. Like all norms, it also produces unintelligible and unvi-
able subjects.
The state signifies the legal and institutional structures that delimit a cer-
tain territory (although not all of those institutional structures belong to
the apparatus of the state.) Hence the state is supposed to service the matrix
for the obligations and prerogatives of citizenship. We might expect that
the state presupposes modes of juridical belonging, at least minimally, but
since the state can be precisely what expels and suspends modes of legal
protection and obligation, the state can put us, some of us, in quite a state.
It can signify the source of non-belonging, even produce that non-
belonging as a quasi-permanent state (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007, 4)
In this chapter I explore how both race and racialised subjects are con-
stituted through education via such discourses, by examining data col-
lected from classrooms where Citizenship Education was being taught.
Employing a Butlerian lens enables us to see that rather than being a fixed
or natural aspect of identity, race is produced and reproduced via raced
discourses such as citizenship. I also examine how students employ parody,
which challenges those discourses which exclude them from citizenship.
Butler, Citizenship and Race

Much of Butler’s work critiques the nation state and its role in the promo-
tion of violence and surveillance, and the definition of insiders and out-
siders to the nation. Since the end of the 19th century, one of the main
functions of formal schooling in a nation state has been the production of
national identities, including the constitution of insiders and outsiders
and containment of threats to the nation (Davies et al. 2005; Ross 2007;
Kitching 2014). The state is therefore ‘a direct agent of educational provi-
sion’ (Kitching 2014: 22) and schooling is linked to nation-building and
citizenship. Although in some ways it could be argued we are now wit-
nessing the decline of the nation state through globalisation, Butler and
Spivak (2007) argue that the nation state continues to matter, ‘[i]n spite
of the postnational character of global capital, the abstract political struc-
ture is still located in the state’ (Spivak in Butler and Spivak 2007, 76).
Race as a Hegemonic Norm: Citizenship Education… 83
Citizenship is both formal and legal, involving a passport and nation-

ality, and also cultural (Kitching 2014). These two notions of citizenship
are connected yet do not always directly overlap. As Kitching (2014)
argues, both these kinds of citizenship shift over time, and are constituted
in ongoing performative processes and in spaces which are not boundar-
ied and culturally, politically and economically shaped and also negoti-
ated and contested. For example, citizens can be formally citizens in a
legal space, however, they can equally be culturally constituted as non-
citizens, with fewer rights and inequality of outcomes, in other spaces.
The cultural intelligibility of a subject as a citizen is discursively consti-
tuted by wider political and cultural regimes.
The power of the nation state relies on the production of subjects who
do not belong, subjects who are external to the borders it draws, in order
to draw these borders in the first place. The state therefore produces both
insiders and also outsiders: unviable, unintelligible or abject subjects
(Tyler 2013). Drawing on the work of Fanon, Butler argues that the state
both subjectivates and desubjectifies. Those who are desubjectified by the
state are those who are positioned as being beyond its boundaries at any
given time, depending on the regime. They are positioned as threats to
the nation, or as incompatible with the character or goals of the nation
(Goldberg 2009). However Butler (2004a) argues that these outsiders,
unintelligible and unviable subjects, may be beyond-the-state, but they
are not unpolitical nor beyond power.
As I and others have argued, Britishness tends to be considered to be
white, and minority ethnic people positioned as outside of, incompatible
to, or threatening to Britishness. Therefore those who are white are
regarded as intelligible and viable citizens, whilst those of minority ethnic
heritage are constituted in some spaces as unviable citizens. These unin-
telligible subjects are constituted through discourses of both formal and
cultural citizenship that call up longstanding postcolonial discourses,
which still carry weight. The ‘postcolonial situation is neither mere his-
torical residue nor simple replication of colonialism in the metropole. It
refers to the selective transformation and re-inscription of colonial forms’
(Kipfer 2011 cited in Tyler 2013, 41).
One of the spaces in which citizens are culturally constituted is educa-
tion. Kitching (2014) speaks of learner-citizens, subjects of education
produced in educational spaces and subject to citational chains: male/
84 C. Chadderton
female, working class/middle class, racially minoritised/white. The ‘good’

and ‘bad’ subjects of education are always inevitably culturally and politi-
cally produced, raced, classed and gendered, designated by current struc-
tures of power and knowledge which renders some students ‘good’
students: intelligible and legitimate learners and full educational citizens,
and others ‘bad’: unintelligible as learner-citizens.
itizenship Education as a School Subject:

C
A Butlerian Analysis
Butler argues that discourse forms the subject. The production of subjects
does not happen at once, it is a complex and ongoing process as different
discourses regulate, constrain, shape and define. As there are inevitably
several different, often contradictory discourses at work, individuals have
to navigate these. In the following section I explore the subjectifying dis-
courses which operate in Citizenship Education policy. I identify in par-
ticular the raced discourse of British citizen as a constituting norm,
allocating cultural and political roles to teachers and students, white and
minority ethnic people in the nation and the shaping of the nation and
the nation’s subjects, and reproducing fixed notions of racial difference
and racialised subjects.
Citizenship Education (CE) was a statutory subject on the National
Curriculum in England since 2002. It is now at the time of writing
(2016) no longer statutory for primary children, only at secondary
schools, or KS 3 and 4. It is available as a GCSE (compulsory state exams
taken at KS4), although from 2017 it will no longer be available as an
A-Level (Thornton 2014).
The introduction of CE as a subject in its own right in 2002 was
believed by many social commentators to contain the potential to c ombat
racism as part of a wider goal to address issues of social justice. This was
for two main reasons: Firstly CE is considered by many to be inextricably
linked to notions of social justice and anti-racism. Many social commen-
tators feel that in theory, CE which focuses on broad notions of the politi-
cal and is underpinned by a commitment to social justice has the potential
to address social cohesion and issues of equality and racism, and provides
‘a unique opportunity to promote education for racial equality’ (Osler

and Starkey 2000, 5). As different people will experience being a British
citizen and life in Britain in different ways (Osler and Starkey 2000), it
was assumed that a critical understanding of identity development and
plural identities would also form an integral part of citizenship education
(Ross 2007; Osler and Starkey 2005). Secondly, CE was seen as having
connections to anti-racism due to the Crick Report1 being released in the
same year as, and paraded by the government as a response to, the
MacPherson Inquiry (1999) into the racially motivated murder of
Stephen Lawrence (Gillborn 2006). The MacPherson Inquiry gave offi-
cial credence to the existence of institutional racism in UK society
(Wilkins 2001; Gillborn 2006), a notion of structural racism which chal-
lenged the more widely accepted notion of racism as individual, unrelated
acts. Institutional racism was defined in the MacPherson Report as the
collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and profes-

sional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It
can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount
to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness
and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people. It per-
sists because of the failure of the organisation openly and adequately to
recognise and address its existence and causes by policy, example and lead-
ership. (Macpherson 1999, 28, quoted in Gillborn 2006, 85)
However, it seems that the actual intended function of CE, and there-
fore also of CE teachers, was to contain threats to the nation. The intro-
duction of CE as a discrete subject seems to have been intended to address
non-participation in party politics among the young (which will threaten
British democracy in its present form) and what is referred to as ‘cultural’
diversity which is seen to be linked to social unrest. Whilst I examine the
implications of the first reason elsewhere (Chadderton 2009), here I
focus on the second.
In the Citizenship Education guidelines, cultural diversity is consti-
tuted as problematic (for example QCA 1998, 17), and linked with a loss
of value consensus and conflict (for example ‘the nature of diversity, dis-
sent and social conflict’ p. 44). Diversity is presented in ethnic and cul-
tural terms. This links ethnic background to values and implies that
86 C. Chadderton
ethnic minorities will automatically have ‘different’ values to the white

majority, who are implicitly positioned as having similar values to each
other. Indeed, where culture and religion are mentioned in the report, the
emphasis is on difference rather than similarity, and difference is only
mentioned where culture and religion are mentioned. For example:
Pupils should … know about differences and similarities between people in

terms of their needs, rights, responsibilities, wants, likes, values and beliefs;
also understand that many of these differences are linked with cultural and
religious diversity. (QCA 1998, 46–7)
The link between diversity and negative conflict calls up well-

established discourses of a perceived essential link between ethnic diver-
sity, social disorder and violence, which is incompatible with the notion
of orderly, lawful Britishness. Thus the Crick Report reinscribes ethnic
minorities as a threat to Britishness and reinforces their exclusion from
notions of Britishness, constituting ethnic minorities as outsiders to the
nation, and the white population as insiders.
Other statements in the Crick Report equally position ethnic minori-
ties ‘outside’ Britishness, for example, ‘due regard being given to the
homelands of our minority communities and to the main countries of
British emigration’ (QCA 1998, 18, emphasis added). Firstly, the posses-
sive ‘our’ used to describe minority communities calls up colonial stereo-
types (Osler and Starkey 2000, 18). Secondly, it also implies ‘that such
groups are not the anticipated audience for the report’ (Gillborn 2006,
93), further reinforcing minorities’ outsider status. Thirdly, this state-
ment sees the countries of minorities’ families’ migration as home rather
than Britain.
The report constitutes Britishness as implicitly homogenous, tolerant
and non-racist, which officially denies the ‘othering’ of ethnic minorities
and the racial inequalities such discourses produce. Indeed if CE is
intended to address the problem of social unrest, it ignores the wealth of
research which has shown that such protests tend to be a reaction to mar-
ginalisation, inequalities and discrimination and lack of political power.
There is no mention of inequalities or power differences at all in the Crick
Report (Osler and Starkey 2000; Gillborn 2006). The Race Relations
(Amendment) Act (2000) places a positive duty on schools to promote

race equality, they are required to review their provision, and introduce
policies and practices that actively promote racial equality (Osler and
Starkey 2005, 74). However, despite this, race and racism receive very
little explicit mention in the Crick Report.
In order to address the perceived problem of diversity, the Crick Report
promotes an (imagined) cultural homogeneity and sense of common,
British identity, without specifically defining what this identity should be
(Piper and Garratt 2004). The focus on British homogeneity implicitly
further excludes ethnic minorities, because as discussed, the report defines
minorities by their difference from the majority. The constitution of
minorities as ‘different’, renders them automatically threatening to any
agenda of homogeneity.
For example, the report states that minorities ‘must learn to respect the
laws, codes and conventions as much as the majority’ (QCA 1998,
17–18). Firstly, this statement suggests that minorities are viewed as more
likely to break the law than the majority (Osler and Starkey 2000), which
is a long standing discourse which reproduces the perceived, essential
links between ethnic minorities, criminality and social disorder. Secondly,
it implies that minorities are required to become more like the majority,
constituted as law-abiding in a binary relation to minorities. Thirdly, and
paradoxically, as the report draws on assumptions of inherent ethnic
minority difference, the implication of the statement is that respect for
the law is something minorities will never be able to achieve. It could be
argued therefore that by reiterating the discourses which position ethnic
minorities outside Britishness, the identity British ethnic minority is con-
stituted as unviable or unintelligible by the report (Butler 2004b).
Moreover, the analysis homogenises both ethnic minorities and white
people, which serves to essentialise identities and distinguishes ethnic
minorities by their alleged difference from majority culture. The report,
by citing these discourses, thus constitutes ethnic minorities as inherently
‘different’ to, and threatening to Britishness, a homogenous, monocul-
tural identity which must therefore, be white. The raced discourse of citi-
zenship actually produces racial difference and racialised subjects in the
Citizenship Education guidelines.
88 C. Chadderton
sing Butler to Understand the Constitution

U
of Citizenship via Education
In the following section I explore some moments from CE classrooms in
which the British citizen is both constituted and resisted. The data I use
was gathered in 2006–8, whilst New Labour was in government, shortly
before the financial crash and not long after the terrorist attacks of July
7th 2005 on the London transport system which prompted media dis-
cussions around the meaning of Britishness as the attacks were perpe-
trated by British citizens, individuals with British nationality who had
been educated in Britain. Butler’s theories of subjectivation and perfor-
mativity help us understand the constitution of cultural citizenship
through the discourses and micro-politics of schooling and examine how
citizenship operates as a norm that allows a person to be intelligible or
recognizable as humans to others within society (Kitching 2014).
Employing a Butlerian framework enables us to see how subjects are
interpellated and social norms are constituted through the calling up of
different discourses of citizenship. The discourses of citizenship are shift-
ing and often not straightforward, and also mingle with other discourses
in education such as professionalism, authority, the good student and
whiteness (Youdell 2006a, b). They also mingle with broader discourses
of belonging, class, gender, and discourses around terror, crime and vio-
lence as threats to Britishness and community cohesion, which along
with CE policy guidelines constitute teachers as occupying a key role in
policing the ‘threat’.
I therefore identify moments where the viable citizen is constituted,
and also moments where students are desubjectified through the raced
discourse of citizen as constituting norm. Importantly, the discourses I
identify are both intentional and unintentional—both for those who
deploy them and those who understand them (Youdell 2006a, b).
Discourses such as Britishness are deeply ingrained in structures and atti-
tudes and tend to be invisible. Many discourses may seem benign, but do
not need to be cited explicitly in order to deploy them. In this chapter,
secondary school Citizenship Education classes are seen as a site for the
performing of Britishness.
The data presented in this chapter was collected in two schools in a

large urban conurbation in the north of England. School 1 is a mixed
comprehensive school for pupils aged 11–16 with approximately 925
young people on role. Approximately 55% receive free school meals and
the pupil population is mainly white British, with between 2% and 3%
of pupils coming from a minority ethnic background. The school serves
one of the most socially and economically deprived areas in England.
School 2 in a mixed comprehensive school for pupils aged 11–16 with
approximately 870 pupils on role. Above 50% are eligible for free school
meals. It is an ethnically mixed school, with the largest group described
as white British, and others from varying ethnic backgrounds, described
as Asian, Black African, Black Caribbean, white Irish and Chinese. There
is a small but significant group of recently arrived refugees. The data is
observation data.
CE had been part of the taught curriculum in each school for approxi-
mately two years when I started researching there, and in both schools
was still in its development stages and timetabling was quite chaotic:
School 1 had no specifically trained Citizenship teachers, rather the pro-
gramme was taught on a rota basis by members of senior staff from vari-
ous disciplines. The pupils were supposed to receive one lesson of CE a
week, although due to staffing problems, this was not always the case.
School 2 had brought in two newly qualified Citizenship teachers within
the last year as I started going there and had established a Citizenship
department. This was officially part of the English department and all CE
teachers taught some English as well. The third member of staff in the
department, the CE coordinator who designed the schemes of work, was
a trained English teacher and taught only one lesson of CE a week. At
school 5, pupils in years 7 and 8 received one lesson of CE a week, and
years 9, 10 and 11 received CE once a fortnight.
British as ‘Tolerant’
(M)ultiple forms of containment effectively deny, manage, and order rac-
ism in such a way as to provide a minimum amount of disruption to the
grand redemptive narrative of (…) nationalism. (Montgomery 2005, 438)
90 C. Chadderton
One of the main discourses which circulated in CE classrooms was

‘British is tolerant’. Observation and interview data which I collected sug-
gests that racism was rendered invisible through several different mecha-
nisms: it was variously portrayed as either natural (i.e. common sense), an
individual aberration, extreme and horrific, (thus implicitly not ‘normal’),
it was denied, or it was not taken seriously. This maintenance of the invis-
ibility of racism through the perpetuation of various assumptions is one
of the main features of white supremacy (Solorzano and Yosso 2002;
Gillborn 2005). If CE lessons are, at least in part, understood as teaching
Britishness, despite the fact that Britishness is not mentioned explicitly,
the invisibility of (the importance of ) race and racism means that cultur-
ally Britishness is constituted as implicitly tolerant and non-racist.
The first two episodes which illustrate the way in which Britishness is
constituted as tolerant in the classroom are from a series of lessons at
School 1, (approximately 95% white), focussing on prejudice with year
10. The objective of the lessons, as given by the teacher, was: ‘To examine
the causes of prejudice and persecution’. In my analysis of the episode I
suggest that prejudice and persecution in this lesson are presented as dis-
tant from, or even external to mainstream Britain, which implicitly con-
stitutes mainstream Britishness as unprejudiced and tolerant. The
following is an extract from my fieldnotes:
The class is preparing a table on the board together with the teacher. She is guid-
ing them and eliciting the answers from them.
Whiteboard data:
Factors How prejudice is caused Example
Norms/values -fear of the unknown -someone who is HIV
positive
-lack of understanding may be shunned
The students are prevented from identifying with prejudice for many reasons.
Firstly, because the example given, HIV sufferers, is unlikely to be within their
sphere of experience. This is then confirmed when the teacher asks if anyone
actually knows a sufferer, to which only one person answers, maintaining it is a
family friend she has known for a long time and feels no prejudice towards.
Secondly, by giving only the above reasons for the cause of prejudice, the teacher
takes the responsibility away from society by locating it with the individual.
The possibility of prejudice being learnt or structural is not mentioned. Thus

despite efforts to bring the students into a discussion about their experiences, the
teacher creates a distance between these students and prejudice. It is portrayed
as someone else’s problem.
They then go on to read from the textbook about the HIV example. Page 142
People “mistakenly believe and fear that any contact can lead to catching the
disease themselves”. Many would disagree with this description. Ostracising
HIV sufferers very often is connected to a stigma in society towards sick people
in general, or promiscuous people, dirty people, or homosexuals, all of which are
supported by common discourses.
Whiteboard data:
Political ideologies -propaganda -Nazism
-British National
Party
These are very extreme examples, which upset the children, who started get-
ting angry and criticising the views of such groups as murderous. Because of
this, they are again distanced from racist politics. More moderate examples
might have brought it much closer to home. But Nazism is from another place
and time, and criticised by the British anyway, and the BNP are also frequently
regarded as extremists. Thus racial prejudice becomes part of another world,
and students have not been taught to recognise it in themselves.
Whiteboard data:
Religious differences -lack of understanding -9/11
-London
Bombings
The examples given are both of Muslim extremist groups against ‘the West’.
There are no examples of white Christian prejudice.
The first example of prejudice given in the lesson, norms/values, locates

prejudice in the individual, rather than in the structures of society. It also
portrays prejudice as natural and understandable, and based on acceptable
fears of the unknown and lack of understanding, rather than learned and
reproduced socially. Locating prejudice in the individual silences the pos-
sibility of a discussion of prejudice stemming from discriminatory social
92 C. Chadderton
structures and embedded in society. The second example, which deals with
political ideologies, offers the British National Party and Nazism as exam-
ples of racist ideologies. While these examples are valid, they also serve to
distance prejudice from the pupils because instead of being portrayed as
part of everyday structures, it is implied that racist ideologies are only asso-
ciated with militant, extremist groups, bygone times, different countries
and as irrational and horrifying. There is an implicit contrast that such
horrors do not exist in ‘normal’ UK lives (Montgomery 2005, 431). The
third example suggests that religious prejudice comes from outside the
students’ immediate world. Implicitly, the examples given of racial and
religious prejudice have nothing to do with ‘us’, ‘here’, ‘now’, rather they
are associated with ‘them’, ‘there’ and ‘then,’ and students are not invited
to identify or engage with prejudice. Again the cause is given as ‘lack of
understanding’ which suggests that if only people of different religions
knew more about each other’s religions, there would be no violence. This
is not only not true, but it masks the differential power relations and hege-
monies which shape discrimination and oppression and violence. In addi-
tion, this example reinscribes dominant discourses which essentialise Islam
and link Muslims to terrorism, as the only two examples of religious preju-
dice given are Islamist, reproducing frequently made connections between
Islam and terrorism. Prejudice, in this lesson, is constituted as individual,
foreign, extreme and perhaps understandable. Although it is not explicitly
mentioned, Britishness is implicitly constituted as non-prejudiced.
In the second episode from the same set of lessons on prejudice, racism
is denied by the teacher and the pupils. In my analysis which follows, this
is a moment where British is constituted as non-racist and colour-blind.
Jay, the pupil who starts this discussion, is the only person from a visible
ethnic minority in the room—the teacher and the other pupils are white.
Jay: It’s weird though because when white people are talking
about black people, they say “There was this big black guy”,
but when black people are talking about white people, they
don’t say, “That white girl” or anything like that.
Teacher: I know what you mean but when you look at our society
most people in this country are still white, aren’t they? And
therefore the majority. To call somebody white to me is
exactly the same as calling somebody black.
Ben: I wouldn’t find it offensive if someone called me white.

(White) voices: No, neither would I.
In this episode, Jay points out that a person’s ethnicity tends only to be
mentioned when they are from an ethnic minority, whether it is relevant
to the discussion or not. Although he does not say so explicitly, he identi-
fies an important aspect of whiteness: that white is the norm and there-
fore has the privilege of going unmentioned. The teacher then says two
different things which contradict each other. First, she says that mention-
ing a person’s race when talking about a minoritised individual is just
that, simply mentioning that they are in the minority. Then, she says, ‘To
call somebody white to me is exactly the same as calling somebody black’,
which contradicts her first point. As others have argued, a person’s race
tends to be mentioned when they are minoritised, which serves to mark
them out as different or ‘other’. Equally calling someone white tends not
to be the same as calling someone black, as black has connotations of
threat of violence, crime, and the outsider, which white does not. With
this statement, the teacher calls up the discourse of colour blindness.
There is also a lack of recognition from the teacher and other pupils of
the way in which discourses ‘other’. Ben who is white, says that he would
not be offended if someone called him white. This is particularly interest-
ing because it suggests that he is aware that calling people black might
cause offence in some circumstances. It is worth noting that of course
calling a person white would not cause offence. However, he and the
other students seem to be agreeing with the teacher, citing discourses of
colour blindness, and suggesting that calling a person white or black is
the same, and should not cause offence. However, by saying that he him-
self would not be offended, he is suggesting that Jay is wrong to be
offended, thus placing the blame for the offence at the feet of the minori-
tised individual, rather than at the namer.
Britishness as a cultural positioning in this class then is constituted as
tolerant and colour blind. The only student implicitly excluded from this
is Jay, the only person from a visible minority ethnic background in the
class. Implicitly, he is constituted as unBritish, the person who ‘sees’ race
and gets offended, and therefore is implicitly intolerant.
94 C. Chadderton
Britishness as White
In this section I explore how the classes I observed constituted the British
citizen as white. As argued above, the role assigned to teachers by CE
(explicitly) and by schooling in general is to contain threats to (imagined)
Britishness. As also discussed, wider discourses constitute minority ethnic
Britons as a threat. In my analyses which follow, I argue that the ways in
which teachers call up discourses of racial others fixes the boundaries of
Britishness. This is done in various ways: Cultural/ethnic/religious diver-
sity is presented as a problem; some teachers assume that (minoritised)
pupils identify with one culture or ethnicity; racial identities are con-
structed as static and essentialist, or minorities are assumed to have con-
fused or fragmented identities. Several of these discourses reproduce the
discourses which inform, and are reproduced in the Citizenship Education
teaching guidelines.
While ‘othering’ can be very subtle and references are often implicit
rather than explicit, in citing the familiar discourses, these references are
powerful because they draw on systems of existing ‘knowledge’ about the
‘other’. Seemingly paradoxically then, while on the one hand, Britishness
is constituted as tolerant and non-racist in CE classes, on the other hand,
British ethnic minorities and non-Europeans are frequently ‘othered’
(Said 1978; Hall 1997). Since Britishness is constituted as non-racist,
this ‘othering’ is implicitly denied. Indeed, its unacknowledged status
renders it ‘common sense’ and normalises it. In this analysis, the ‘other-
ing’ of ethnic minorities becomes part of ‘normal’ Britishness, deeply
engrained and invisible to some. In this section I discuss how Britishness
is constituted as white and monocultural by CE teachers. As Britishness
is only intelligible as white, British ethnic minorities are therefore implic-
itly constituted as unintelligible (Butler 1993, 2004b).
The first illustration of these processes I offer is concerned with defin-
ing and constituting the ‘other’, and implicitly, the self. My analysis of
the episode which follows suggests that plural identities are presented as
problematic, and ‘other’. The following discussion at school 1 (mainly
white British pupils) ensued after the teacher showed part of the film,
“Yasmin” (2004, directed by Kenneth Glenaan). The class watched the
film up to the point where the Twin Towers are bombed on the 11th
September, 2001, which is part way through.
Teacher: Very, very difficult, isn’t it. She’s trying to come to terms with
being both Muslim and living in this country. What sort of
expectations did her father have of her?
G1: High
G2: Muslim
T: Yeah, wants her to stick to Muslim traditions
G3: Marry a man he chose
G4: He doesn’t approve of the car she’s got
T: Yeah, when she talks about it not being a TP car, a typical Paki
car, in other words, it’s not a great, big van that’s got room for
loads and loads of people in it. Muslims are labelled as having big
families. She’s trying to not be Pakistani, isn’t she? It’s very hard
because her father has expectations of her. She’s been made to
marry that guy who she has nothing in common with whatsoever.
Now as that goes on she obviously fancies that other bloke…but
she can’t have a drink, cos you’re not allowed to have a drink, she’s
not supposed to be smoking a cigarette, but she does…Now I just
wanted to show that to get you to think about the difficulties that
people have when they’ve got completely different cultures conflict-
ing on their lives.
Rather than problematising the film, which appears to reinforce ste-

reotypes about Muslims in the UK, the teacher presents it as value-free
and uses it to demonstrate an alleged cultural conflict experienced by
British Muslims of Asian origin. The teacher displays a ‘common sense’
attitude to cultural difference: the misperception that ethnic minorities
are ‘caught between two cultures’ and experiencing an identity crisis (Mac
an Ghaill 1988). Britishness is not mentioned specifically, although a
definition is implicit from the ways in which the ‘other’ is presented.
British Muslims are reinscribed in the discourse of being caught up in a
strict, oppressive culture, and the non-Muslim (represented by the teacher
and implicitly, the rest of the class), on the other side of the binary, as
liberated and culturally balanced and thus as culturally superior. White
Britishness is the presumed norm from which difference is measured and
in this way promotes a view of Britishness which is implicitly monocul-
tural and fixed, and constructs Muslims as ‘other’, suggesting that British
96 C. Chadderton
and Muslim are a dichotomy. This discourse reiterates the perceived

impossibility of being both British and Muslim and the unviability of
such an identity (Butler 2004a and b). It also reflects the assumptions
underpinning CE guidelines: that ‘difference’ is threatening to Britishness,
and that an emphasis on sameness, on a homogenous, British identity
will erase ‘difference’. However, it merely constitutes ethnic minorities as
‘different’ from the (white) norm, rather than furthering the social cohe-
sion goal of CE at the time.
In this way, the boundaries of Britishness are both defined and rein-
scribed. Multiple, complex and fluid identities and a possible forum to
debate the diversity of British identities are denied and silenced as a myth
of white Britishness is fixed and normalised. It could be argued that rather
than teaching students to recognise and explore different types of preju-
dice, this is an example of students being taught prejudice, taught to
‘misrecognise’ the ‘Other’ (Ahmed 2000, 23) as inherently ‘different’ to
themselves.
Similar processes can be seen operating in the following discussion.
This episode is an example of the subtle way in which ‘othering’ functions
and the teacher, possibly unintentionally, positions the pupil as the racial
‘other’. In my analysis this is a moment where Britishness is constituted
as lawful and ‘civilised’. It is taken from a CE lesson at school 2 (ethnically
mixed school) on Rights and Responsibilities. Stephen, the student who
is asking the question, is of mixed heritage: white British and African
Caribbean, and the teacher is a white, middle class male.
Teacher: Stephen has asked a good question: Why should somebody be able
to sue you if you are making a lot of noise in your own home,
which is your property?
Stephen: But you’re doing what you want in your own home?
T: Isn’t that civilisation taken to its zenith! You haven’t a clue, have
you? Your way is the way that wars start. This is the way that
civilised society deals with it. I rang the local city council, and they
have a department to deal with noise, and they sent a guy out with
a machine to measure the noise and the City Council prosecuted
this other neighbour for making noise which was unreasonable.
And that’s the way to do it in civilised society. That it is the way…

people…deal with each other. Not your way!
S: What do you mean, my way? How is it my way?
T: Your way is the way wars start.
S: why is it? (Distressed, offended, raises voice)
T: That’s enough!
The teacher seems to set up a binary between himself, and Stephen, the
pupil. He may not intend this binary to have racial overtones, and
Stephen may also not recognise any. Of course it could be argued that the
teacher might have spoken this way to any pupil, regardless of ethnic
background. However, the teacher’s use of the words ‘civilisation’ and
‘wars’ calls up discourses of imperialism and colonisation and the destruc-
tion of peoples across the world by white people in the name of civilisa-
tion, on the grounds that they were biologically or culturally inferior,
which is further emphasised by the teacher’s use of the words, ‘your way’
and ‘you haven’t got a clue, have you?’ which position Stephen as intel-
lectually and culturally inferior to himself. The binary is further rein-
forced by the implication that Stephen’s behaviour would threaten
‘civilised society’ as the teacher suggests, his behaviour would start wars.
This invokes the spectre of ethnic minorities as a threat to Britishness and
social order. It could thus be argued, that the racial aspect is implicit, but
has performative force because of the way it appears to confirm
longstanding discourses (Youdell 2006b). Considering the function of
CE to teach Britishness, in this incident the boundaries of Britishness are
implicitly drawn: Stephen, a student of mixed heritage, is positioned as
having values incompatible with Britishness and as threatening ‘civilised
society’, represented by the white, middle class teacher. Stephen appears
upset by the teacher’s response. These discourses are not just linguistic,
and the teacher is not ‘just’ calling up stereotypes, rather they are a sub-
jectifying force. Stephen challenges the teacher’s construction of him, but
his voice is silenced. Stephen is constituted by the teacher as uncivilised,
which is incompatible with Britishness. As an uncivilised British citizen
is an unintelligible subject, he is desubjectified through this exchange.
The third episode also illustrates the ‘othering’ processes operating in
the CE classroom. Illustrated here is also a moment in which Britain is
98 C. Chadderton
implicitly, through comparison with some African countries, constituted

as lawful and orderly and uncorrupt. The episode is taken from a lesson
on Global Citizenship in school 1, which is looking at the reasons for
food poverty in Africa. The questions and answers come straight from a
Global Citizenship booklet of photocopied pages which each pupil has in
front of them.
Teacher: Now, Angola, capital Luanda, not Rwanda, that’s another coun-
try in Africa. You’ve probably heard that name on the news, as
some of these places can be pretty lawless at times. That means
there are people behaving above and beyond the law as if the law
doesn’t matter to them.
Child 1: Conflict,
T: Conflict. And how many at risk of starvation?
Child 2: 2 million
T: 2 million. Again you’ve got people passing over borders from one
country to another because they are at risk and their lives are
threatened in those 2 countries.
Next Ethiopia. How many at risk of starvation?
Child 4: 14 million.
T: That’s a huge amount. What are the causes?
Child 5: drought
T: drought again. Lack of rainfall.
Now the Gambia, I don’t know if anyone knows anyone who’s
been, it does have a tourist industry…But people do some pretty
horrific things there. These are countries which keep changing
their governments
In this extract the teacher reinforces discourses of whiteness: the teacher

takes the disasters out of their historical and economic context, and the
situation in Africa is portrayed as ‘natural’, unchanging, essentialised, an
inherent part of the nature of the continent . The role of European and
North American imperialism is not mentioned. Again, although Europe,
Britain or whiteness are not specifically mentioned, through the ‘other-
ing’ process which results as (black) Africa is portrayed as unstable, law-
less and poor, (white) Europe is implicitly portrayed by nature as stable,
orderly and wealthy. This portrayal also draws on long standing media
discourses of Africa as lawless and poverty-stricken, which again feed into
discourses of ethnic minorities in Britain as inherently lawless and thus
unbritish, if Britain is defined as stable and orderly. It also cites postcolo-
nial discourses of inherent, fixed difference between Africa and Europe.
The cumulative effect of the above examples is to fix the boundaries of
Britishness as white and monocultural. As in the CE policy guidelines,
difference is constructed as problematic and a cause of conflict, and eth-
nic minorities and non-Europeans are implicitly positioned outside
‘Britishness’ and are reinscribed into essentialising stereotypes, consti-
tuted as deficient or threatening to order or Britishness. A Butlerian
framework enables us to see that race and racial difference, rather than
being natural or ‘real’, are discursively produced via the hegemonic norm
of citizenship.
Parody as Resistance
In the CE classes I observed, there was little opportunity for discussion,
and the young people’s experiences rarely seemed to be valued by the
teacher. This is unsurprising, as such styles of pedagogy, which preclude
debate, are common in all school subjects (Hammersley 1974; Mehan
1979; Young 1984). Research suggests that in general teachers sidestep
controversial issues and anything contemporary (Ross 2007; Pykett
2007), because the material covered in formal schooling is frequently
viewed as neutral knowledge (Lynn 2002, 121). Schools in general are
anti-democratic institutions, and the patterns of classroom interaction
are deeply ingrained: teachers are dominant and pupils subservient, and
teachers are constituted as guardians of social control (Youdell 2006b). In
the classes I observed, materials and curriculum were presented as value-
free and apolitical, teachers’ voices were privileged and pupils’ silenced,
and silence and obedience to authority were most rewarded. These pat-
terns of interaction tend to mean that the norms and values of the class-
room are presented as ‘truths’, cultural arbitrariness is reproduced as a
legitimate culture (Bourdieu and Jean-Claude 1977/1990, 22), and chal-
lenges to the status quo are precluded. Young (1984) goes as far as to call
education a form of indoctrination,
100 C. Chadderton
This communication is indoctrinational because it is cognitively asymmet-

rical…The experience which is the touchstone of classroom truth is either
teacher experience or some experience entirely external to the classroom
rather than pupil experience. The pursuit of validity questions by pupils is
virtually prohibited….questions which challenge the validity of the infor-
mation being transmitted are actively discouraged by teachers. (p. 224).
I observed that, on average in CE classes, the teacher’s voice can be

heard for between 2/3 and 4/5 of teaching time (other research suggests
this is standard, for example Young 1984). Thus discussion time for each
pupil in classes of 25–35 students was very limited indeed, as was the
opportunity to listen to other pupils’ views. If a pupil wishes to speak at
all, she or he has to bid for this privilege. Most teachers have a system of
raising hands or bidding for the floor, which of course makes sense in
terms of maintaining order in (normally crowded) classrooms. However,
the pattern encourages conformity, complicity and obedience rather than
debate. When students simply reply instead of bidding, they tend to be
negatively evaluated and might even be ignored (Mehan 1979, 101),
whether or not they have made a valid point.
So are students able to resist at all, and if so how? A Butlerian analysis
of some of the students’ responses suggests that students in fact, were
frequently able to subvert the exclusive norms of Britishness using parody.
This is not a resistance which will lead directly to educational reform, or
a more widely accepted inclusive form of Britishness. In general, Butler
argues, only forms of authoritative speech have performative force, and
will appeal to others’ psyche.
However, the ongoing citing of the norms, and the parodying of these
norms, suggests that for these young people, the norms are not fixed or
unchangeable, they can potentially be subverted. Implicit within their
responses is a more inclusive citizenship. Butler would not argue that
these resistances can change anything on their own, rather she would
argue that such subversion exposes the assumed fixedness, truth and nat-
uralness of discourses such as Britishness as non-original and constructed.
‘As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they
imitate the myth of originality itself ’ (Butler 2008, 188). Indeed, by par-
odying Britishness, these students show that Britishness, as a subjectivat-
ing discourse, can be performed differently, and made to mean something

different—if only for a moment. It could also be argued that the students
might emerge, to other students or perhaps to themselves, as learner-
citizens (Kitching 2014), ‘whose learning aligns with, contradicts or
opposes the prevailing terms of good studenthood’ (p. 17). Although the
students in the following examples are not good students as designated
politically or culturally: they are not white, they are working class, they
attempt to challenge race and class stereotypes, if their resistances are seen
as acts of learner-citizenship, (Kitching 2014, Kitching’s italics) potentially
they produce subjects ‘implicated in unforeseen ways of disassembling
racialised education relations’ (Kitching 2014, 17).
The following example comes from a CE lesson at school 5, where the
theme of the lesson was unclear. The context in which this extract took
place, was the teacher saying that he felt that no one was allowed to men-
tion colonialism anymore. When people talk about not being allowed to
mention colonialism anymore, in fact a not infrequent statement, they
tend to mean that when colonialism is spoken about, in their opinion it
tends to be in the context of a critique of the wrongs of colonialism and a
recognition of the damage it caused, and of its racism. Indeed, it tends to
precede an argument in favour of colonialism, or at least certain aspects of
it. It tends to call up discourses of white British victimhood, to the tune of
‘the benefits which we (civilised) British brought these primitive peoples
are forgotten’. It is likely that the students are aware of these discourses.
Thus the context here is the interpretation of Britain’s role in colonialism,
whether this was beneficial or damaging, and the constitution of different
populations as civilised and uncivilised/needing of civilisation.
Teacher: Before the US and Russia, who was the previous superpower?
Irum: Great Britain
T: Nearly 100 years ago, Britain said…
Asif: (in a mock posh southern accent) …Hello, would you like a cup of
tea? (laughter)
T: This is not a cabaret (not laughing)
If we view Asif ’s remark and the way in which he said it as a parody—

in fact, just as the teacher does, interpreting it as cabaret—it can be seen
102 C. Chadderton
as a challenge to the notion of Britishness as civilising and benevolent in

its relationships with the countries it colonised. The way in which Asif
puts on a mock southern accent suggests that Asif associates colonialism
with London and its power, rather than perhaps, his own northern
accent—thus distancing himself from this colonial form of Britishness.
Accents in Britain tend to be associated with social class, and whilst a
southern accent is understood as upper class, the accents from the north-
ern cities tend to be understood as working class—and therefore exploited
by London. Asif ’s comment exposes the notion of Britishness espoused
by the teacher as contestable. The form of Britishness which the teacher
seems to represent is also one that might implicitly exclude Asif, who is
of Asian heritage. He is therefore also contesting a form of Britishness
which excludes him, constituting him as unBritish and implicitly as in
need of Britain’s civilising influences. In so doing, he is potentially rein-
scribing plural, non-white Britishness as intelligible and legitimate. Asif ’s
‘place as a good or bad student is always already bound up in dynamics of
sanctioning and subjugating learned, embodied histories. It is intimately
linked with the production of allowed and disallowed knowledge about
race, class, gender, immigration and citizenship’ (Kitching 2014, 12).
Briefly, in this example, his ‘potential to become a learner whose knowing is
legitimised emerges’ (ibid, author’s italics).
The teacher’s response could be understood in two ways—perhaps
both are relevant: Perhaps the pupil is just being reprimanded for his
disruptive behaviour. Alternatively, the teacher may be responding to
more than the immediate incident (Youdell 2006b). He may be respond-
ing to Asif ’s implicit challenge to his benevolent notion of Britishness,
and the fact that ethnic minorities, both historically and recently, have
been constituted as a threat to Britishness. Constituted himself as a pro-
tector of (white) Britishness, as well as discipline and order in the class-
room, the teacher performs this identity and blocks the opportunity for
discussion.
The next example, an exchange I observed at school 2, is about young
people challenging the way they feel they are being constituted. In fact,
they are deliberately impersonating their desubjectification in order to
challenge it (Tyler 2013). It began with the teacher asking the pupils if
they are going to come to after school Citizenship club, but they refuse.
Teacher: So what are you gonna do with your life?

Ben (white): Go on the dole.
Lewis (African Caribbean): Play for Chelsea.
Tam (black Nigerian Muslim): Be a suicide bomber, a terrorist.
Teacher: I don’t think that’s an appropriate com-
ment for someone like you, do you?
Whatever you do with your life, you’ll need
qualifications.
Tam: From high school, I’ll join Al Qaida.
Teacher: I’ll ignore that!
In my analysis, although the teacher does not specifically say so, his
reading of the boys’ refusal to attend the club, ‘What are you gonna do
with your life?’ implicitly seems to set up a binary between himself, as a
white, middle class male and a representative of the establishment and
authority, and the working class pupils. It seems the boys understand his
comment as constituting them as anti-intellectual/anti-education, thus as
bad students, which has the effect, in this setting, of desubjectifying
them. At this moment they are not constituted as good educational sub-
jects. In response, the boys seem to take up the subjecthood (Youdell
2006b, 522): the white, working class male says he will go on the dole,
the black, working class male says he will be a sportsman, and the black,
working class Muslim says he will become a terrorist. By focussing on the
raced, classed and gendered anti-educational, anti-establishment stereo-
types for young men, they are parodying their raced, gendered and classed
identities. They are parodying the way they have been constituted as bad
students, bad citizens, exposing these norms as a construction, exposing
the teacher’s essentialising assumptions of white working class unem-
ployed man, the African Caribbean sportsman and the Muslim terrorist
as a myth. They respond with ‘a fantasy of a fantasy’ (Butler 2008, 188)
which for those who are able to see it, reveals these assumptions as myths.
In so doing, they potentially destabilise the connection—the hegemonic
norms—between working class and unemployment, African Caribbean
male and sport, and Muslim and terrorist. They also potentially become
learner-citizens, and disrupt narrower and exclusionary notions of citi-
zenship (Kitching 2014).
104 C. Chadderton
Equally, it is important to note that the norms also constitute the

teacher. Thus when Tam invokes the spectre of terror, it could be argued
that the teacher is only responding to a threat, as being a CE teacher his
role is constituted as one of social control. Thus the teacher’s understand-
ing of the boys’ words as challenges to authority and a threat to be con-
tained, makes sense in the discursive context of young, working class
males. Therefore rather than viewing the boys’ comments as a political
and social criticism, the teacher responds to the perceived threat that they
represent, and the opportunity to debate these constructions and their
meaning for the boys’ life chances is lost and the boys’ political voice is
silenced.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have employed Butlerian analytical tools to understand
how, via educational practices, individuals are constituted as good and
bad students, and since these notions are linked to notions of legal, politi-
cal and cultural citizenship, constituted as inside or outside of Britishness.
Understanding citizenship as a constituting discourse and norm enables
us to see how it actually shapes interaction and identities. This is not
‘merely’ a discursive practice—the constituting power of discourses
shapes material reality.
I have argued that some students are constituted as unintelligible and
unviable citizens through discourses of race linked to who is imagined as
an ideal student and citizen (white, monocultural and orderly), and who
is not ideal, or even threatening (black or Asian, perceived plural identi-
ties). These same discourses constitute teachers as protectors of Britishness,
and implicitly of whiteness, who are allocated a role to contain threats to
the imagined community of the nation by creating loyal and compliant
citizens and identifying those who the state deems to be a threat.
Using Butler I have shown how we can examine the micro-processes of
how the nation state both produces its subjects and de-subjectifies
through schooling. It also produces identities of ‘difference’, which are
not inherent, rather they are made and remade through everyday educa-
tional practices. Britishness is re-produced as tolerant and white—straight
from the CE guidelines from the time. The discourses which exclude are
complex: while CE lessons tend to deny the existence of racism or render

it invisible, presenting an image of Britishness as tolerant and non-racist,
there is also a discourse which constructs the ‘other’, which is officially
denied by the discourse which silences racism. This means that the ‘other-
ing’ of ethnic minorities is made to seem like ‘common sense’ and thus
perhaps virtually impossible to challenge. Although Britishness is not
mentioned explicitly, an image of Britishness as white and monocultural
is created through the ‘othering’ of ethnic minorities, who are constituted
as unviable citizens because they are always positioned as dichotomous to
Britishness. The hegemonic norm of citizenship discursively constitutes
race, racial difference and racialised subjects.
There is little space for resistance. Located in patterns of interaction that
limit dialogue and pupil participation, teachers tend to block opportuni-
ties for debate and the challenging of dominant discourses. As others have
argued, non-conformity at school, especially from marginalised groups, is
almost always viewed with suspicion (hooks 1994, 28). However, the
young people use parody, which, seen through a Butlerian lens, exposes
the social constructedness of the norms, demonstrating that they can,
potentially, be re-made. But the resistance seems to have little immediate
impact on their situation, as it tends to be seen by teachers (constituted as
defenders of order and Britishness) as a confirmation of young people’s
identity as a threat to order, and thus crushed as a challenge to authority
rather than recognised as a political comment. ‘Dissent is quelled, in part,
through threatening the speaking subject with an uninhabitable identifi-
cation’ (Butler 2004a, xix). The question now for policy makers and teach-
ers who are seeking to challenge race privilege and oppression in education,
is to ask ‘…what makes for a non-nationalist or counter-nationalist mode
of belonging?’ (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007, 59).
Note
1. The Crick Report provides the basis of advice and principles for teaching
CE by the Labour government’s Advisory Group on the teaching of
Citizenship and Democracy under the chairmanship of Professor Bernard
Crick, who has been described as ‘a long time advocate of political educa-
tion and political literacy in schools’ (Gillborn 2006, 93).
106 C. Chadderton
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5
Making Whiteness and Acting White:
The Performativity of Race and Race
as a Performative
Introduction
In this chapter I consider how, through a Butlerian lens, race operates as
a performative: it is both performatively produced and as a performative,
also functions a norm which constitutes. As a performative then, race can
be understood as citations of discourses and norms. Performativity is the
process by which, for Butler, identities are produced. Less taken up by
Butlerian scholars, but nevertheless important, performativity is also the
process by which norms are (re)produced. Performatives, although often
referred to as ‘utterances’, are frequently unspoken, but can be recognised
as discourses and citations which subjectify individuals and groups.
A racial performative thus subjectivates the subject on racial terms. Like
other discourses, race can function as a performative not only in an indi-
vidual interaction, but also, for example, in shaping government policy
or cultural pedagogies. This chapter considers ‘how race gets performa-
tively accomplished’ (Warren 2001, 92) in educational spaces, an
approach which remains comparatively rare in the field of education
(Ehlers 2006; Warren 2001; Warren and Fassett 2004).

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73365-4_5
110 C. Chadderton
Like gender, through a Butlerian lens race—whiteness, blackness,

Asianness—function as a performative: race is produced and reproduced
through actions, practices and utterances which create a reality or per-
ceived reality. A performative is perceived to be, or even made to be ‘real’
in some sense, through the accumulation of both explicit and implicit
speech acts, or citations of norms. The continual citation of racial norms
renders these ‘real’, and creates the illusion of naturalness:
gender [or race] is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which
various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time –
an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender
instituted through the stylisation of the body and hence, must be under-
stood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements and enact-
ments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.
(Butler 1990, 519)
Race, like gender, is often treated in educational spaces as something

biological, immutable, ‘natural’, despite the fact it is increasingly con-
tested (Willie 2003). As Butler argues of gender,
because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of
gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all […] The
authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby con-
struction compels one’s belief in its necessity and naturalness. (Butler
1990, 522)
This notion of gender as a series of acts which serve to confirm a belief

in the naturalness of gender, can equally be applied to race. In fact, each
society requires that an individual displays a raced subjectivity, which
matches the conventions of that particular society and what is expected
of a given (perceived) racial, ethnic or cultural group. This challenges the
notion that racial subjectivities, or indeed any subjectivities, are innate.
For Butler, the notion of race as a performative is not a denial of the
materiality of the body, nor of racial oppression, neither does it preclude
an understanding of identities that are perceived as essential. Rather per-
formativity is the way in which racial norms and discourses are main-
Making Whiteness and Acting White: The Performativity… 111
tained, and therefore both privilege and oppression are sustained. Butler’s
work explicitly theorises how and why identities and norms which are
perceived as essential or fixed are produced or experienced (Ringrose
2002) via practices and institutions. It is precisely via these ongoing cita-
tions of norms and discourses that identities come to be perceived as fixed
and natural, as Butler writes,
the appearance of substance is precisely that. A constructed identity, a per-

formative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including
the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of
belief. (Butler 1990, 520)
Race functions as a performative, and is reproduced through various

actions, practices and institutional arrangements which disadvantage
minority ethnic people, and which ensure the continued privilege of
white people. It is through the repetition of socially constructed norms
which notions such as whiteness or blackness are in fact produced.
Inevitably, the meanings of black, white, Asian, are very different, and
occupy different statuses within a society where white hegemony prevails.
The way in which individuals and groups negotiate and contest racial
norms will be radically different depending on the social positioning of
the subject. It is also worth noting that the norm does need to be explic-
itly cited to have performative force, and equally, the explicit citing of the
norm does not necessarily have performative force.
There are different understandings of performativity in education
research, distinct from that of Butler. For example, performativity is
sometimes seen as a conscious act, of which the actor is aware (for exam-
ple Willie 2003). Equally, it is also understood as an insincere act, one
performed in order to appear to others to be compliant (for example Ball
2003, 2010). The term is often employed to describe the way in which
workers are required to regulate their selves and their behaviours to suit
the requirements of the neoliberal agenda which involves monitoring
through various measurement and management techniques. Like Butler’s
work on performativity, this understanding is based on Foucault’s work
and is about the regulation of subjectivities.
112 C. Chadderton
Performativity, it is argued, is a new mode of state regulation which makes

it possible to govern in an ‘advanced liberal’ way. It requires individual
practitioners to organize themselves as a response to targets, indicators and
evaluations. To set aside personal beliefs and commitments and live an
existence of calculation. The new performative worker is a promiscuous
self, an enterprising self, with a passion for excellence. For some, this is an
opportunity to make a success of themselves, for others it portends inner
conflicts, inauthenticity and resistance. (Ball 2003, 215)
However, the notion of performativity as Ball and others use it assumes

there is a sovereign subject behind the doing. For Butler, performativity
‘contests the very notion of a subject’ (Butler et al. 1994, 33). Ball also
argues that performativity can create ‘inauthentic selves’, in the sense that
individuals are forced to internalise values which they are not comfort-
able with, and are alienating. Whilst in way this is similar to Butler’s
notion of performativity, for her performativity is not about inauthentic-
ity, because there is no ‘authentic’ nor inauthentic for Butler, as there is
no ‘original’ self untouched by social relations such as those created by
neoliberalism.
Butler’s understanding of performativity is neither conscious—
although it can be—nor insincere. It is not about calculation and choice,
neither is it the conscious performance of an actor. Performativity for
Butler is the witting and unwitting repetition or citation of norms, which
serve to shape reality. Performatives such as race can be made meaningful
in interaction although there might be no specific intent of citing them.
Performativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-presentation; nor can

it be simply equated with performance. Moreover, constraint is not neces-
sarily that which sets a limit to performativity; constraint is, rather, that
which impels and sustains performativity. (Butler 1993, 95)
Butler’s notion of performativity opens up the possibility for resistance.

The lack of stability of norms and the fact they have to be repeated to be
effective means that there is the possibility for transformation in the rep-
etitions. As norms are constantly being remade, there is space for opposi-
tion, or of failing to constitute accurately. As, for Butler, there is no self
prior to being constituted, an individual can constitute or be constituted

differently. For Butler, at any moment, norms are only precariously
inhabited, and they can be reconstituted. The subject may for example
fail to successfully inhabit the norms by which she has been interpellated
as a racial subject, or she may be able to cite anti-hegemonic practices.
Considering gender, Butler argues,
If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through

time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender
transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts,
in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subver-
sive repetition of that style. (Butler 1990, 520)
he Implications of Butler’s Notion

T
of Performativity for Understanding Race
and Racism
The implications of understanding race as a performative are significant.
It has been argued that this understanding of race as a performative,
which allows us to explore in detail how racialised subjects are produced,
regulated and constrained, allows scholars to potentially go beyond the
notion of race as a social construct in that it provides us with tools to
deconstruct the practices which build, shape and reproduce race and rac-
ism (Byrne 2000, 5). One of the most important implications of consid-
ering race a performative is that it makes very clear that race has no
ontological reality, no true essence. This notion potentially separates
whiteness from white bodies, and blackness from black bodies. This of
course is not that same as saying that people are not interpellated by the
norms of blackness and whiteness. Rather it refutes attempts to define
behaviours or characteristics as inherent or innate to any particular group,
or perceived group (Stewart 2015, 4). In Willie’s (2003) research on HE
students in the US which drew on notions of performativity, she classi-
fied as ‘not Black’ (p. 127) individuals of African descent who did not
conform to the social expectations for black people. Indeed, the notion of
performativity provides a major challenge to the common belief that such
114 C. Chadderton
racial categories are descriptive, suggesting instead that they are constitu-
tive (Butler 2011).
A further implication of understanding identities which are perceived
as fixed and innate, such as gender and race, as performatives, is that this
implies that there is no ‘normal’, there is no authentic, original identity.
Identities are not actually fixed to bodies, they are just perceived to be
fixed to them. This provides a challenge to exclusionary notions of
authenticity and authentic identities because for Butler, there is no essen-
tial identity behind expressions of identity (Rich 2004; Nayak 2006), so
no identity can be more authentic than another:
…if gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or
produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexist-
ing identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be
no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true
gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction. (Butler 1990, 125)
As others have argued, there are often pressures to conform to narrow

definitions of perceived authentic racial identity, which in their turn
shape individuals’ perceptions of their own identities and the way they
behave and interpret the behavior of others (Stewart 2015, 4). Notions of
‘authentic’ identities: the idea, for example, that some characteristics
might be ‘more black’ or ‘more white’ than others, and therefore that
certain individuals are more authentically ‘black’ or ‘white’ than others
can function as exclusionary, as Leonardo (2009) for example has argued
‘people of color who side too close with whiteness have been labelled as
inauthentic and implicated with whiteness’ (p. 102). For Butler though,
the ‘original’, or at least what is perceived as original, is also a copy: just
as women might aspire to or act male by, for example, taking the name of
the male when they marry because the male name is higher status than
her female one, (not recognised as ‘acting male’ very frequently because it
is so deeply engrained in our culture), she is also mimicking femaleness
or femininity perhaps by dressing in clothes culturally sanctioned as fem-
inine, such as a dress. Equally it is not only non-white people who ‘act
white’, or non-black people who ‘act black’. Indeed, seen through a
Butlerian lens, people categorised as white also try to mimic forms of
whiteness, and people categorised as black might ‘act black’ by mimicking

stereotypes of blackness, in both cases because it is ‘acting black or white’,
or behaving as expected, which lends an identity intelligibility or recogni-
tion. ‘The enactment of identity is only ever an effort to resecure a phan-
tasy that is always insecure’ (Ehlers 2006, 154). A recognition of this is an
explicit challenge to hegemonic culture which conventionally positions
male above female and white above black (Butler 1990, 2008).
Finally, the notion of race as performative allows us to understand how
dominant norms shape our intelligibility as subjects, explaining why
individuals might internalise stereotypes in order to be recognised as a
fully viable subject.
…a “girl” […] who is compelled to “cite” the norm in order to qualify and
remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but
the forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indisso-
ciable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment. […] this cita-
tion of the gender norm is necessary in to qualify as a “one”, to become
viable as a “one”, where subject-formation is dependent on the prior opera-
tion of legitimating gender norms. (Butler 2011, 177)
In order to be intelligible as a subject, the subject must comply and

conform with conventions for that racial subject. Certain actions, atti-
tudes, patterns of behaviour, accents are sanctioned. ‘In order to be con-
sidered a viable racial subject, then, it is imperative that regularised norms
be recited to the degree that they are recognisable as reaffirming a certain
discursive designation […] a subject’s embodied performance(s) of race must
reference and repeat hegemonic and naturalised enunciations or norms of a
given racial site’ (Ehlers 2006, 155–6 author’s italics).
Whiteness as a Performative
Whiteness in Butlerian terms can be understood as a hegemonic norm
which upholds certain privileges for groups and individuals designated as
white. As a performative, whiteness is maintained through practices
which cite the norm. An understanding of whiteness as a performative
116 C. Chadderton
allows us to consider how the hegemony of whiteness is maintained, pro-

duced and reproduced through a series of everyday acts and practices:
whiteness as a systematic production of power—as a normative social pro-

cess based upon a history of domination, recreating itself through natural-
ized everyday acts—much like heteronormativity or misogyny. (Warren
and Fassett 2004, 411)
Whiteness when viewed through a Butlerian lens, is therefore perfor-

matively constituted: it becomes reified and normalised, whilst at the
same time remaining under-examined (Warren 2001). In this section I
examine the production of whiteness as hegemonic by the admissions
tutor at an elite boys’ school.
The school in the example is a grammar school for boys aged 11–18
with approximately 1400 pupils on role. It is a selective, fee-paying school
and approximately 15% of pupils receive bursaries, the others pay full
fees. The school does not ethnically monitor on principle, thus there is no
data available on the ethnic make-up of the school. Based on my own
observations, it seems to be an ethnically and religiously mixed school,
with a white majority and a significant number of Jewish pupils. There are
also high numbers of pupils from various Asian backgrounds, and a small
minority of pupils of Chinese, African and African Caribbean heritage.
The following is an extract from an interview I conducted with the admis-
sions tutor at the school. As part of a wider project, I had asked him why
there were so few pupils of African Caribbean heritage at the school, and
whether the school was actively undertaking anything to increase the
intake from this group (it was not). Without directly mentioning it, the
admissions tutor constitutes whiteness in several different ways: as absence,
as cultural oppression, and as privilege (Warren and Fassett 2004).
Admissions tutor: Now, they [African Caribbean pupils], in a sense have a

kind of worrying track record in that the disciplinary
track record and also the work ethic track record have
been poor. It’s a terrible sweeping statement and it is only
a small sample, but, erm, and then, that’s curious because
very often, we’ve got quite a lot of examples of single
mothers in that group, so you have to say, that is a mum,

who has the wit to think that this place might have some-
thing to offer them, and then put forward a – in the cases
I can think of straight away – a very able boy. Very able.
So in that sense, it’s the right school for them. And then
when they’ve got here, whether it’s the baggage, and […]
there is definitely a work ethic issue…er…and there
appears to be a baggage issue. Whether that is just a sin-
gle parent baggage issue? I suspect it isn’t, I suspect there
is more to it than that. I think there is an ethnic thing
about it. I can’t quite put my hand on it, but you know
it is, it’s enough of a pattern, you know, it’s not gonna
count against anybody, but it’s enough of a pattern that
you’ll look at it and say, is this going to be a good idea for
him. I don’t know, there’s almost an element of the school,
you know, all of these high achievers, all of these ambi-
tious young men, sort of forging on, and therefore, if
you’ve got any hint of a chip, there’s an element of having
your nose rubbed in it, or maybe that feels like it to them,
and they, they just don’t act well to it. So, we’ve got several
of them on bursaries, done quite well when assessed, but
it hasn’t then necessarily then worked out terribly well.
CC: I’d like to ask you a bit more about this work ethic. What
do you mean by that, if these students don’t have it, why
do you think that is?
AT: I haven’t got a clue why, I really don’t. This is gonna sound
ridiculous, I mean I spent a year sailing across the Atlantic
and round the Caribbean and whatever, and if I lived in
the Caribbean I’d be like it. Do you know what I mean?
It’s almost an environmental conditioning, I think. I’m a
geographer. One of my constant topics of debate with the
second formers is: why are some countries more developed
than others? And, you know, you can look at hundreds of
different reasons, and you know, one of them, in a sense,
is, why did people innovate in Europe? And I mean there
are other countries who’ve innovated, but it’s as if there’s a
118 C. Chadderton
sort of…I mean I feel like one is straying into very, very
dicey territory here, but it’s as if it is almost a physiological
thing. Whether it’s a physiological thing that is environ-
mentally conditioned…But that said, […] absolutely we
have the exception that proves the rule, you know they’re
driven and whatever, but I do wonder. While they often
seem to come from educated families, they still, in a sense
seem to come with a fundamental bit missing. […] Of
course, to us, he’s just “the boy”.
In this analysis, I argue that the admissions tutor can be understood as

constituting white privilege and constituting the school as a space which
privileges whiteness via his citations of dominant discourses and his prac-
tices as the member of staff responsible for admissions and a Geography
teacher. This is not necessarily because he is explicitly describing white-
ness in the conversation, rather because he performatively constitutes
whiteness implicitly through his citations of white hegemonic norms.
Whiteness as oppression becomes real through the practices of the insti-
tution and (some of? many of?) those who work at the institution. As
Butler argues about the performativity of identity, employing gender as
an example,
there is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is

performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its
results. (Butler 2008, 25)
Rather than responding to the question about why numbers of African

Caribbean students remain low, the tutor replies by explaining why, in
his opinion, African Caribbean students struggle once they arrive. He
puts their (alleged?) struggles down to ‘baggage’, ‘work ethic’ ‘an ethnic
thing’ ‘a single parent baggage issue’, ‘they […] come with a fundamental
bit missing’. The reasons he gives draw on deficit discourses of black chil-
dren which are long-standing in the English education system. He makes
no overt acknowledgement of the school’s potential role in maintaining a
space where it may be difficult to be a successful black learner, or that of
the overwhelming white staff. In this analysis, via the tutor’s citation of
these discourses, African Caribbean students are being constituted as

unintelligible students. The tutor is also implicitly comparing them to
white students, who presumably following the logic of this discourse
would be intact, without ‘bits missing’. Compared to the white norm,
African Caribbean students are regarded as lacking. In Butlerian terms,
the tutor is not recognising African Caribbean students as fully intelligi-
ble learners. As some of the few black students in a traditionally white
space, their subjecthood as learners becomes unviable.
Moreover, when explaining why in his opinion people of Caribbean
heritage lack a work ethic he also draws on discourses of cultural fixidity
and negative stereotypes: the notion that culture is fixed and monolithic
rather than plural and historically located, and that individuals are tied to
the essentialised cultures of their parents or grandparents. He constitutes
Europeans as developed and innovative, and implicitly Caribbeans as nei-
ther developed nor innovative.
It is likely that tutor’s citation of these discourses shapes the reality and
has material effects: As a senior member of staff and the admissions tutor,
he would potentially have some power, presumably, to undertake out-
reach activity to increase the number of black children accepted, and to
change school practices so that black children receive more support to do
well. Indeed, he does not argue that this is not undertaken for financial
or resource reasons. Rather he argues that there are not many African
Caribbean students because when they do attend, they are not successful
learners.
He makes excuses, ‘I feel like one is straying into very, very dicey territory
here,’ ‘Of course, to us, he’s just “the boy”’, constituting himself as colour-
blind and seemingly aware of potentially sounding racist. Also he says, ‘if I
lived in the Caribbean then I’d be like it’, constituting us all as humans and
fundamentally the same, just as he puts it, ‘environmentally conditioned’.
Ironically, it is likely he is referring to students who have spent little time, if
any, in the Caribbean themselves. He is not simply ‘playing a role’ here, he
is citing different discourses. Discourses of the ‘non-racist’, the ‘caring
teacher who sees as his pupils as equals’, ‘we are all humans and the
same’, are cited. However, this constitution of himself as non-racist, as
someone who sees all humans as equals is non-performative: ultimately it
has no force since his embodiment of whiteness and his citation of
120 C. Chadderton
discourses of white supremacy as well as the context of a legacy of racism

and white supremacy, mean that his own privileged position and the
privileged position of whiteness are reproduced.
Acting White/Black in Educational Spaces

The concept of race as a shifting and notion which is constructed differ-
ently in different settings and times has of course been explored exten-
sively in academic work on race. Frantz Fanon (1967) for example
explored the ways in which financial status, a relationship with a white
person, or language allow some black people to become ‘white’. It is clear
that who is categorized as ‘black’ or ‘white’ changes over time and in dif-
ferent contexts. There have recently been several books, such as Noel
Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White, which explore historically the con-
tested and changing racial positioning, and allied visual reinscription of,
certain ethnic or national groups. Bhattacharyya, Gabriel, and Small
(2002) investigate the way in which national and global racial categories
shift, changing the way in which people of different phenotypes are posi-
tioned and can position themselves.
Others have explored how race shifts at a micro-level, and depending
on the situation. In education and the work spaces, scholars have identi-
fied practices referred to as ‘acting white’ and ‘acting black’ as coping
strategies among black people. Fordham and Ogbu (1986) argued three
decades ago that schools in the US are perceived by many black students
‘as an agent of assimilation into the white American or Anglo cultural
frame of reference’ (p. 200), and achieving academic success is therefore
regarded by many as ‘acting white’, which is negatively sanctioned by
other black people. This is a response to white Americans having defined
success as white. Fear of being accused of ‘acting white’ means that many
black students refuse to make an effort academically. Fordham and Ogbu
argue that black students ‘may have transformed white assumptions of
black homogeneity into a collective identity system and a coping strategy’
(p. 184). Their study suggested that black students develop what the
authors refer to as a ‘Fictive kinship’—a sense of collective identity which
is an ‘oppositional identity’ and an ‘oppositional cultural frame of refer-
ence’. Others have also done work on these practices, for example, in
Willie’s (2003) study of former college students ‘black alumni described
the ways they consciously acted white in certain settings and acted black in
others.’ (Willie 2003: 5) in order to deal with the institutional racism
they faced at college. Equally Carbado and Gulati (2013) explore the way
race is negotiated, presented, projected and interpreted in the work place
on a daily basis. Their work explores how the way in which an individual
‘works’ a racial identity affects the extent to which she suffers or avoids
discrimination. Carbado and Gulati write that ‘Working Identity’ func-
tions ‘as a set of racial criteria people can employ to ascertain not simply
whether a person is black in terms of how she looks but whether that
person is black in terms of how she is perceived to act. In this case
Working Identity refers both to the perceived choices people make about
their self-presentation (the racially associated ways of being […]) and to
the perceived identity that emerges from those choices (how black we
determine a person to be)’ (p. 1).
In this work, notions of blackness and whiteness begin to be detached
from black and white bodies, rather than the fixed and ‘natural’ identities
and behaviours of black and white individuals. However, acting black or
white, or performing blackness or whiteness is seen as conscious act—
although not a ‘free’ choice. Butler on the other hand would view acting
black or white as both a conscious act as well as an everyday unconscious
utterance. The idea that race itself is ‘a stylized repetition of acts’ (Butler
1990, 270), its meaning maintained through the repetition of utter-
ances—spoken and unspoken acts, is uncommon in the study of educa-
tional identities and roles.
The following excerpt is taken from a conversation I had with three
Year 10 girls from a single-sex girls’ secondary school, who are all of
African-Caribbean heritage. The school is a state comprehensive situated
in large, northern city and is in relatively deprived area. The school draws
its pupils from two local areas, both undergoing demographic change.
The first is an area of high disadvantage which has for the last few genera-
tions been home to a significant population of African Caribbean people
and has had a reputation for gang crime, but had recently begun to
gentrify and attract a more ethnically mixed population with a higher
income. The second area was traditionally ethnically mixed and working
122 C. Chadderton
class, and had recently started to attract a young, white, middle class
population. About a third of the school’s 1400 pupils receive Free School
Meals.
In the following conversation about friendships between pupils and
relationships with staff, and the role of race in these, I analyse race as a
performative, rather than, as is more common, as a descriptor. As a per-
formative it therefore functions as a constituting norm. However, the
constitution is not always successful, it depends on the context and the
other discourses. In this conversation there are multiple ways in which
race is talked about. The meanings of ‘black’ and ‘white’ shift throughout
the conversations as the participants, including myself, negotiate and
judge racial performances.
Sam: You wouldn’t expect them to be friends, because Laura’s white and
Raquelle’s black. But it’s not about race, between friends.
Jaya: Sonya’s black on the outside and white on the in. She chills with
white girls and she’s got a white boyfriend. Her features, black. She
comes from Jamaica. But….to her, I act too ghetto. She will continue
her long sentences and long words and we just cut it down short.
S: I’m not one of them. I like who I am. I’m not trying to be nobody else.
I ain’t racial against nobody. I like everybody cos we’re all equal. But
I do not go on like I’m trying to be posh. I go on normal.
CC: What does this mean, being black and acting white?
S: Basically trying to keep up standards. It’s like being ashamed of who
you are… like hiding your identity
J: The way she goes on, it’s like, my skin colour shows that I’m black,
but I won’t act like I’m black.
CC: What’s acting like you’re black?
S&J: Just being normal!
CC: Can I not do it?
S: Anybody can do it!
CC: So it’s not to do with your skin colour?
All: No!
J: Like how you’re acting now, Charlotte, yeah, you’re acting perfectly
normal, like us, that’s black!
Ilona: It’s probably stereotypes
S: if you’re black, you’re ghetto. They don’t expect you to wear nice
clothes… those jeans look expensive—bet she’s thieved them
J: ….they talk to most of the black people in [this school] like they’re
nothing.
I: They think that people with black in them, mixed race as well, are
nuisances—come on, most black people are loud! But they pick on
people that have a loud personality…Even if you’re not talking …
and send them out of class
J: A couple of Fridays ago [at] the big fight, the majority of the people
that was there, were black people.
S: but they were just watching, they weren’t doing anything
J: But, all the names that got called, every one black. And they’re telling
the police, and having police phoning people’s houses.
In my analysis, informed by Butler’s tools, several, often seemingly

contradictory discourses of race circulate at once. It can be argued that the
participants are in fact identifying the performing of whiteness in the way
they describe how black students are constituted as challenging and
threatening by teachers. The police are called to deal with a fight at the
school, perhaps because it was so serious the teachers were unable to deal
with it without police assistance, ‘They talk to most of the black people at
this school like they’re nothing’. In linking black students with challeng-
ing behaviour—‘All the names that got called, every one black’—it could
be argued that the teachers are citing dominant norms of black as threat-
ening and in need of discipline and control and in doing so, reproducing
blackness as challenging. Through a Butlerian lens of analysis, the notion
that black students are spoken to as though they are ‘nothing’ can be
understood as the constitution of unviable and unintelligible learners: as
others have argued, the ideal learner is white and middle class. These
black, mostly working class students, it can be argued, as unintelligible as
good learners, and are thus constituted by the teachers’ repeated actions
and utterances as non-students, as Butler argues, ‘…it is their very human-
ness that comes into question’ (Butler 2011, xvii). Jaya’s statement here
can be read as potentially referring to the way the black students are con-
stituted as non-student, or even, non-human, in that they are interpel-
lated as ‘nothing’, they are delegitimated, failing to count as learner-subjects
124 C. Chadderton
(Butler 2011). Through a Butlerian lens then, the participants are refer-
ring to the performing of whiteness
whiteness as a systematic production of power—as a normative social pro-

cess based upon a history of domination, recreating itself through natural-
ized everyday acts—much like heteronormativity or misogyny. (Warren
and Fassett 2004, 411)
Indeed, while there might be no specific intent of citing whiteness on

the part of the teachers—whiteness is not mentioned by the students,
and we assume not explicitly by the teachers either—whiteness is implic-
itly constituted through the constitution of blackness (Warren 2001).
The conversation in fact begins with the constituting of a post-racial
world in which race no longer matters, in which, as Sam says, ‘it’s not
about race between friends’. At times the girls’ talk seems to reflect the
hopeful character of some post-racial writing (for example Gilroy 2000).
They seem to explicitly challenge the very notion of racial categories:
Ilona repeats that they are probably talking about stereotypes only, and
Sam especially emphasises similarity between different ethnic groups,
challenging notions of essential difference.
At the same time, the participants evoke notions of essentialised black-
ness and whiteness. For example, Ilona says, ‘most black people are loud!’
and Jaya says that her friend chills with the white girls and therefore is
‘black on the outside and white on the in’. ‘Black’ and ‘white’ at these
moments are constituted as separate, polarised groups and discourses of
binary racial difference are cited. These statements seem to contradict the
post-racial world they mention, in which race does not shape interaction
or relationships.
This is how identity is experienced – on the streets, on the bus, in the class-
room, at home. That is how young black women talk, think and walk. […]
such essentialising is not a ‘fiction’, an imagining, a misinformed unsound,
politically incorrect, false consciousness. It is these young [people]’s reality.
If it is ugly then it is only as ugly as the racial discourse from which it is
honed. (Mirza 1997, 14)
Thus talk which uses essentialised notions of blackness and whiteness

does not refer to a true, fixed, authentic black or white identity, based on
skin colour or culture. Rather the perception of oneself as having an
essential identity is a result of the pervasiveness of deeply engrained dis-
courses of racial difference.
Because subjects cannot escape the terms through which they are consti-
tuted, what remains are possibilities opened up or presented within the
very relations of power in which the subject is formed. (Ehlers 2006, 155)
However although the girls use fixed notions of black and white, these
are sometimes defined as political attitudes rather than ethnic groups.
Indeed, Jaya says her friend, who has dark skin, is ‘acting white’. They talk
about a girl who is black on the outside (has a dark skin colour), but acts
like a white person (according to their description of how white people
act), and they tell me (a white interviewer judged on skin colour) that if
I just act normal, that’s acting black. At one level, these can be seen to be
references to a notion of racial duplicity or a betrayal of blackness (less so
whiteness in this case), which reinforce the idea that there is a racial
authenticity (Phiri 2011). As Butler argues about gender, this is about
identity regulation
In effect, gender [or race] is made to comply with a model of truth and
falsity which not only contradicts its own performative fluidity, but serves
a social policy of gender regulation and control. Performing one’s gender
wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and per-
forming it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of
gender identity after all. (Butler 1990, 528)
The girls could also be identifying what they might regard as a case of
Carbado and Gulati’s (2013) ‘Working Identity’: ‘not being “too black”’
(p. 5) to achieve a higher status among white people. Equally, as Alexander
(2004) argues, these notions of acting black or white suggest the students are
drawing on a limited performative range of what it means to be black or
white. However, if we understand race as performative, it could also be
argued that the students’ narrative implies that an individual could shift from
126 C. Chadderton
black to white and white to black, and separates understandings of black-

ness and whiteness from phenotypes. Indeed, following Butler, if we
assume that identity categories are inevitably incomplete, aspects of this
conversation can be viewed as potentially challenging of dominant and
exclusionary discourses,
The assumption of its essential incompleteness permits that category to serve

as a permanently available site of contested meanings. (Butler 2008, 21)
For example, Jaya says that I am acting black, and that ‘black is nor-
mal’. In a white hegemony, white is normal rather than black. This there-
fore can be read as a challenge to white hegemony. Further, if social
transformation for Butler lies in exposing social norms as performatives,
in exposing that there is no original, authentic, fixed identities or norms,
then this statement does go some way towards calling the fixidity of hege-
monic racial identities and norms into question (Butler 1990). In this
analysis then, paradoxically perhaps, fixed notions of black and white
behaviour are employed to illustrate the fluid nature of identities. The
girls adopt essential notions of blackness to present a radical, political
challenge to the notion of blackness as ‘different’, as they say, ‘(Black is)
just being normal.’ This has wide-reaching implications: by suggesting
that black is normal, the girls directly resist the way society constitutes
black as ‘other’, ‘bad’ or ‘threatening’. As Ehlers argues, whilst this may
not result in wide-ranging social change, it does potentially challenge
dominant discourses
While such acts might not actually achieve a destabilisation of the black/
white binarism, what they can hope for is to exploit the weaknesses within
or boundaries around the norms. (Ehlers 2006, 162)
On the one hand, the girls demonstrate agency in the way they invert
dominant society’s racial norms, such as resisting the construction of
black as outside the boundaries of the norm. However, this agency is
‘radically conditioned’ (Butler 1997, 14)—they are only shifting their
identities within discourses which are available to them, their identities
are still shaped by society’s norms. There is a limit to the performative
force of their words. For example, ‘[i]n a discursive frame of normative

Whiteness, the claim that [black is normal] cannot have performative
force’ (Youdell 2006, 523). In school and the wider social context of the
UK, black is not viewed as normal. Self-definition and resistance is only
possible within certain boundaries.
On one level the girls challenge biological notions of race, at another
fixed categories of black and white are strategically employed to challenge
notions of authentic blackness or mobilised in order to challenge ‘other-
ing.’ Despite notions of race being a social construction, the reality of the
pervasiveness of deeply engrained discourses of racial difference means an
individual’s sense of self can remain very essentialised. Equally, perceived
deviations are policed, ‘culture so readily punishes or marginalises those
who fail to perform the illusion of gender [and race] essentialism’ (Butler
1990, 528). Although the young people demonstrate agency in the way
they invert dominant society’s racial norms, resisting the construction of
black as outside the boundaries of the norm, their talk at times demon-
strates how limited agency can be in the face of the strength of the dis-
courses which constitute them in essentialised ways.
Race in this discussion then functions as a performative on the one
hand in the sense that it is experienced as an ontological certainty, and
thus subjects are policed and regulated in order to ensure they ‘embod[y]
and represent racial truth’ (Ehlers 2006, 150), in order to reaffirm a per-
ceived truth around race. In fact, in order to maintain blackness and
whiteness, it requires constant labour. On the other hand, the very fact
that it does require ongoing work ‘to consolidate definitive parameters
around “blackness” and “whiteness”’ (Ehlers 2006, 150) suggests that
race is not an ontological truth. In this case then, on the one hand, the
girls are policing the boundaries of race. However on the other, the notion
of acting white/black itself denies there is any ‘racial truth’ (Ehlers 2006).
Conclusion
Notions of Butlerian performativity can potentially open up new spaces
for considering the ways in which discourses with a racist subtext shape
the subjectivities, perceptions, interaction and realities of students and
128 C. Chadderton
teachers, without the analysis essentialising or fixing identity or culture.

As Rich (2004) argues, the notion of race as a performative takes into
account differences within categories, explains variations in behaviours,
explores varying reasons for different racial identifications. More than
this though ‘performativity denies, in some fundamental ways, the stabil-
ity of identity’ (Warren 2001, 95) and interrupts the ontological status
race is often given.
A Butlerian framework theorises the way in which individuals are con-
stituted as different kinds of beings: black or white, troublemaker or good
student; at once both exploring and challenging these categories. It allows
us to understand the way in which shifting policy and media discourses
are performed onto teachers and students, and can be used to explore the
way in which individuals negotiate their identities in relation to these
discourses, without underestimating the strength and impact of racial
oppression. It allows us to theorise the different ways in which race is
understood, and the different ways in which is it made real: it gains power
through repeated authoritative citations, not all of which are conscious,
not all of which are direct and explicit. The examples in this chapter show
how whiteness is held up as a norm and implicitly—and explicitly—
something to aspire to. As Butler has argued, the utterances of teachers
‘seek[…] to teach children how to aspire to whiteness’ (Butler 2014,
178). The hegemony of whiteness is maintained, in many ways, by the
teachers’ utterances and acts in relation to black students, as in these
examples, positioned as varyingly challenging or culturally deficient.
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6
Aspirations and Intelligible Subjects
Introduction
In this chapter I explore the constitution of intelligible and unintelligible
subjects via careers education and educational discourses around student
aspirations in a neoliberal context. From a Butlerian point of view, these
discourses can be seen as hegemonic norms which are raced, gendered
and classed and have a subjectifying force. They allocate roles to both
students and teachers, creating both intelligible and unintelligible sub-
jects. Butler argues that in order to be intelligible as a subject, the subject
must conform with conventions for that racial subject. Certain actions,
attitudes, patterns of behaviour, accents are sanctioned. If the subject
does not conform, it is likely they will be unintelligible.
Programmes which aim to raise pupil aspirations have become institu-
tionalised in secondary education in England (Allen 2014). These pro-
grammes provide an appropriate canvas for investigating the role schools
play in (re)producing neoliberal subjects. The programmes tend to be
conceived as a part of careers education, connected to issues of identifica-
tion, vocation and learning, however, I am going to argue that this glosses
over the fact that students are also being taught to be a neoliberal

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73365-4_6
132 C. Chadderton
subject. I take up the notion of individual aspiration, viewing it as a

hegemonic norm which is operating explicitly and implicitly in educa-
tion and is shaping subjects, both teachers and students, and allocating
them roles in neoliberal social arrangements.
[…] pedagogy both within and outside of schools increasingly becomes a

powerful force for creating the ideological and affective regimes central to
reproducing neo-liberalism. (Giroux 2004, 494)
I provide an analysis of a political focus on aspirations from a Butlerian

point of view, arguing that this focus is problematic on a number of lev-
els, not least because there is an assumption implicit in the discourses
around aspirations that learners are rational, self-sufficient, autonomous
and agentic subjects who make individual choices which they fully under-
stand, whilst Butler argues that subjects are discursively and performa-
tively constituted and the conditions of subjectivation are not chosen by
individuals. Employing the example of the careers work and aspirations
programme of a school in the south-east of England, I argue that the
programme is used to create neoliberal subjects. However, I also reveal
moments where it is constituting unintelligible subjects: some students
are caught in a paradoxical identity trap in which they are constituted as
failed neoliberal subjects. Female students, mainly Muslims, are intelli-
gible to their (mostly white, non-Muslim) teachers only through a raced
lens as passive and subservient to their families by teachers, and thus the
opposite of the neoliberal ideal of agentic and individualistic. Students’
displays of collective agency and decision-making serve only to confirm
their unintelligibility as successful neoliberal subjects because agency is
defined as individual in neoliberal discourses.
Neoliberalism and the Creation
of Neoliberal Subjects
Neoliberalism is the name for the form of governance which accompanies
the new capitalism, with a focus on market deregulation, private property
rights, the reduction of government spending on welfare and competi-
Aspirations and Intelligible Subjects 133
tion. It is crucial for the success of the neoliberal agenda that the
population are kept on-message, developing neoliberal attitudes and even
neoliberal subjectivities. Thus a lot of work is done on populations to
develop neoliberal subjects. This is done via a variety of public pedagogies
in the fields of popular culture, media, politics and education, which aim
to ‘train’ the population to be good neoliberal subjects.
Within neo-liberalism’s market-driven discourse, corporate power marks

the space of a new kind of public pedagogy, and one in which the produc-
tion, dissemination, and circulation of ideas emerge from the educational
force of the larger culture. Public pedagogy in this sense refers to a powerful
ensemble of ideological and institutional forces whose aim is to produce
competitive, self-interested individuals vying for their own material and
ideological gain. Corporate public pedagogy culture largely cancels out or
devalues gender, class-specific, and racial injustices of the existing social
order by absorbing the democratic impulses and practices of civil society
within narrow economic relations. (Giroux 2004, 497)
Characteristics which are valued in neoliberal regimes include compe-

tiveness, an entrepreurial attitude, individualism, flexibility, self-interest,
aspiration, resilience and political apathy (Giroux 2004; Tyler 2013;
Chandler and Reid 2016; Gilbert 2016). It is these characteristics which
fully developed and successful neoliberal subjects are expected to possess.
Such characteristics go hand in hand with the notion that the world in
neoliberal times is an insecure and precarious place, and individuals and
communities need to accept these conditions and adapt to them to be
successful subjects. Disadvantage is seen to be the result of bad choices
and decisions. Many have argued that this is problematic as it places the
emphasis on the individual or community to adapt, rather than on the
possibilities of a change of conditions (for example Chandler and Reid
2016). Neoliberal regimes focus on changing behaviour in face of insecu-
rity, precarity and risk, rather than changing wider conditions. Pedagogies
in neoliberal regimes focus therefore on individual or community capa-
bilities, on capacity-building and empowerment of the subject to make
better decisions, on teaching people to make better lifestyle choices, and
on resilience-building (Chandler 2016b).
134 C. Chadderton
The result of this is that the role of social structures such as race, gender
and class are completely masked, because differential outcomes are seen as
based on subjective choices rather than structures. Equally, although ‘free-
dom’ and ‘choice’ are words employed very commonly in neoliberal sys-
tems, actual freedom and choice are denied ‘entirely degraded once the
world is reduced to the inner life of the individual’ (Chandler 2016b, 47).
The resilient subject is a subject that must permanently struggle to accom-

modate itself to the world, not a subject that can conceive of changing the
world, its structure and conditions of possibility, but a subject that accepts
the disastrousness of the world it lives in as a condition of partaking of that
world and which accepts the necessity of injunction to change itself in cor-
respondence with the threats and dangers now presupposed as endemic.
(Reid 2016, 57)
The solution to disadvantage, marginalisation or vulnerability is seen

to be behaviour change, and indeed, politics and political change is
reduced to work on the subject itself (Chandler 2016a, 14). Those who
cannot become successful neoliberal subjects, in effect become failed sub-
jects. ‘Neoliberal citizenship is a productive category which actively con-
stitutes “failed people” marginalised by, excluded or disqualified from,
the social body’ (Tyler 2013, 198). Educational institutions, and public
and cultural pedagogies, offer ideal discursive and material spaces to
change behaviour, and teach qualities such as individualism and resil-
ience. Equally, they function as sites of exclusion for those who do not
prove themselves to be good neoliberal learners. In this chapter, I focus
on the creation of cultural citizens (as opposed to formal, legal citizens)
in education (Kitching 2014) via the raced, gendered and classed dis-
course of aspiration.
Aspiration, Citizenship and Education

In English education policy, and in schools, there is currently a focus on
raising the aspirations of young people. This is based on the discourse
that young people’s aspirations are too low, and that this lack of aspira-
tion is responsible for disadvantage and poverty. The then Secretary of
State for Education, Michael Gove, called in the 2010 Schools White
Paper for the creation of an ‘aspiration nation’ (Department for Education
2010). In the quote below, by former Prime Minister David Cameron,
‘low expectations’ and a ‘lack of ambition’ are portrayed as holding the
country back. This then, is a classic neoliberal discourse, with structural
issues presented as being dependent on individual attitudes.
Isn’t the great disadvantage of all being written off by those so in hock to a
culture of low expectations that they have forgotten what it is like to be
ambitious, to want to transcend your background to overcome circum-
stance and succeed on your own terms? […]It’s the toxic culture of low
expectations – the lack of ambition for every child – which has held this
country back. (David Cameron cited in Wintour 2012a)
This notion that raising individual aspiration and ambition is all it takes
to overcome disadvantage was already an important feature of the gover-
nance approach of New Labour. It could be argued that New Labour’s
Social Exclusion Unit’s (SEU) report, Bridging the Gap: new opportuni-
ties for 16–18 year olds not in education, training or employment (SEU
1999), and the ensuing policy approaches, laid out what was necessary to
become a successful neoliberal citizen. Inclusion in (neoliberal) citizen-
ship for New Labour was connected to participation in what they referred
to as economic activity. Being economically active was defined as what the
government referred to as social inclusion (in the nation)
The best defence against social exclusion is having a job, and the best way
to get a job is to have a good education, with the right training and experi-
ence. Tony Blair, Foreword to Bridging The Gap. (SEU 1999, 6)
For New Labour then, the poor needed to be supported, or coerced, to

become included, ‘[o]nly through work could class abjects find a route
back to citizenship and into the bosom of the body politic’ (Tyler 2013,
161). The alternative, if they did not make an economic contribution, is
‘failed citizenship’. The assumption is that employment is even possible,
and if so, will lead people out of poverty. However, as we know, neoliberal
economics has transformed the labour market, rendering much of what
is on offer, even for the educated middle classes, low paid and precarious.
136 C. Chadderton
Full employment is not a possibility in a neoliberal economy. Equally,

pay is now so low for many roles that people remain trapped in poverty
while working rather than work lifting them out of it.
As Colley and Hodkinson (2001) argue, ‘[o]ne of the attractions to
policy makers of the term ‘social exclusion’, is that it minimises the sig-
nificance of poverty and social inequality’ (p. 8). The structural dimen-
sions of ‘social exclusion’ are masked by this discourse, and factors such as
cultural and racial exclusion and discrimination don’t get a mention. In
the report, young people who do not participate in education, employ-
ment or training, and their families and communities are portrayed as
deficient and lacking in aspiration (Colley and Hodkinson 2001, 5).
Attitudes, values and beliefs are presented as key factors in young people’s
non-participation. Thus the myth was established that it was a poverty of
aspiration, bad choices, a lack of entrepreneurial spirit which was to
blame for poverty and worklessness (Tyler 2013).
More recently, in the language of the Coalition government (2010–15)
and now the Conservative government, a ‘poverty of aspiration’ is pre-
sented as being to blame for disadvantage and worklessness. ‘The mission
for this government is to build an aspiration nation’ (David Cameron,
cited in Wintour 2012b). As Tyler (2013) argues, ‘…the entire percep-
tual framework which legitimised the punishment of the poor relied
upon the culturalization of poverty and disadvantage’ (p. 162 author’s
italics). A common narrative is that worklessness is caused by receiving
welfare benefits, rather than the lack of a job. In fact, most people on
benefits actually have jobs, but cannot earn enough to make ends meet
and therefore rely on the state to survive.
Lack of success in neoliberal terms then, is regarded as a lack of an
aspiration, resilience, individualism, entrepreneurship, capacity to adapt
or to make the ‘right’ choices (Chandler 2016c). The poor and underedu-
cated are portrayed as damaging to the economy, because they are ‘eco-
nomically inactive’. They are therefore seen as a blockage to progress.
Thus, in order to improve economic productivity, so the logic goes, they
need to be taught to make better choices and improve their lifestyles. The
rhetoric of aspiration, so important to the neoliberal agenda, has been
institutionalised in schools (Allen 2014, 760).
Butler and the Focus on Aspirations

From a Butlerian point of view, the focus on aspirations is problematic on
several levels. There is an assumption in the discourses around aspirations
that learners are rational, self-sufficient, autonomous and agentic subjects
who make individual choices which they fully understand. However,
Butler argues that subjects are discursively and performatively constituted
and furthermore, the conditions of subjectivation are not chosen by
individuals,
Foucault reminds us that: ‘these practices are nevertheless not something

invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his
culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his
society, his social group’. (Butler 1997a, 291)
A Butlerian understanding of the subject does not abolish the notion of

agency, but conceives it as discursive and constrained. Agency does not
come from autonomous individual will. Agency comes from the condi-
tions of subjectivation. Equally, no one is making decisions alone. Making
decisions requires responding to a host of influences, including competing
social and cultural norms, as well as educational and familial norms (see
Thiem 2008). More than this though, Butler does not understand of the
subject as independent and stable and only having to respond to external
others later, ‘Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency
on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sus-
tains our agency’ (Butler 1997b, 2). Further, subjects do not have a prior
existence, a place before socialisation and normalisation, to which they
could return to make decisions not based on social structures. ‘The subject
does not […] construct its own conditions of possibility separate from its
performance of itself within those conditions’ (Davies 2006, 426).
Finally, from a Butlerian point of view, subjects are never fully aware of
their own desires and how they are culturally, socially and discursively
shaped.
…desires and passionate attachments are not retrievable outside or beyond

normalisation, while at the same time not being therefore fully reducible to
social norms. (Thiem 2008, 22)
138 C. Chadderton
As Thiem has emphasised, for Butler, motivations and attachments are

formed by the subject consciously and unconsciously.
The analysis of psychic life becomes crucial here, because the social norms
that work on the subject to produce its desires and restrict its operation do
not operate unilaterally. They are not simply imposed and internalised in a
given form. Indeed, no norm can operate on a subject without the activa-
tion of fantasy and, more specifically, the phantasmatic attachment to ide-
als that are at once social and psychic. (Butler et al. 2000, 151)
Thus desires should be seen as an investment. They are socially formed

in relation to social norms, even if these are not consciously understood.
It is not that social norms press on an individual subject until they accom-
modate them, rather those norms have formed them in the first place.
Thus any programme aiming to ‘amend’ young people’s aspirations may
be more difficult than previously thought if we take this into account.
Aspirations then, from a Butlerian point of view, are discursively, polit-
ically and socially constituted, they are not truths beyond the social
(Thiem 2008). For many students, aspirations are not just ‘ideas’, they
form part of their sense of identity (Archer et al. 2014).
…a regime of truth offers the terms that make self-recognition possible.

These terms are outside the subject to some degree, but they are also
presented as the available norms through which self-recognition can take
place, so that what I can ‘be’ quite literally, is constrained in advance by a
regime of truth that decides what will and will not be a recognizable form
of being. Although the regime of truth decides in advance what form rec-
ognition can take, it does not fully constrain this form. (Butler 2005, 22)
The Production of Neoliberal Subjects

In this section I explore some moments in schooling when the neoliberal
subject is constituted. In this case, the neoliberal subject is aspirational
and individualistic in their educational decisions.
The data presented here was collected between 2013 and 2016, in the
south-east of England. It was collected for several different funded proj-
ects, which I was working on at the time. The school is a single-sex com-
prehensive school for girls. A high proportion of the pupils receive free
school meals and are of minority ethnic heritage, mostly from the local
Bangladeshi population, but also of Somali and mixed heritage. The
school is located in an area of high deprivation, but also fast-paced gen-
trification, with rents and property prices very high.
This school has made careers work and student aspirations a strategic
priority.
In response to the shift of responsibility for careers guidance from the
Connexions service to schools, the school has created a new ‘Student
Aspirations Programme’. Careers work and the Student Aspirations
Programme is coordinated by a member of the Senior Leadership Team.
A Student Aspirations Officer has been appointed, who is a fully trained
former Careers Advisor with several years’ experience. A Students
Aspirations staff working party has been formed, to help progress the
careers agenda. It is notable that the school has chosen to follow the gov-
ernment agenda and have named the careers programme ‘Student
Aspirations’, rather than something like ‘Our Future’. The school has
significantly improved its careers offer, which now focuses on the younger
years as well, rather than only on the Year 11s and above, like so many
schools do. Careers lessons take place in Personal Social and Health
Education KS 3 and 4, which are written by the SA officer. Various
activities are being introduced, including a ‘Careers in STEM day’ for Y7,
‘Careers in the Arts and Humanities day’ for Y8, and ‘Careers in the City
day’ for Y9. Other activities include an interview practice programme
and a business mentoring scheme with a national accountancy firm.
Many of the activities and interventions as part of the Student
Aspirations Programme encourage the students to aspire to individualism.
The following example is taken from a full-day so-called pathways event
which aimed to present different students with different options for their
future. There were representatives from Higher Education Institutions
and Further Education, as well as local apprenticeship providers and
speakers from different sectors in the labour market, including engineer-
ing, pharmaceuticals and media. The day started with a presentation from
140 C. Chadderton
a ‘motivational speaker’, Ben, an actor from London, to set the scene and
focus the students on thinking about their futures. In my analysis of the
speaker’s presentation, I suggest that aspirations, life choices and educa-
tional decisions are constituted as individual activities and processes, key
to neoliberal discourse. The following is an extract from my fieldnotes:
Once he has introduced himself, Ben is beginning by explaining to the audience

how to be successful. He says it’s about choosing the right options. ‘But how do
you choose the right options? ‘It’s your choice, not your friends’, not your mum’s,’
he emphasises, over and again. He then moves on, ‘Who knows exactly what
they want to do when they leave school?’ Only about 10% of the audience raise
their hands. Ben says this isn’t a problem. He then goes on to tell a story about
an acquaintance of his, who became homeless because of various mistakes he
made, including trying to copy a friend. This story ends with, ‘He created that
life for himself ’; ‘No one’s fault but his own’. The session seems to be a roaring
success, with pupils responding, clapping, laughing.
In my analysis of this presentation, a ‘successful’ individual is consti-

tuted as autonomous agent. Life choices and educational decisions are
presented as something individual, and the students are warned away
from turning this into a collaborative process. Although no one would
argue that young people should necessarily select subjects or pathways
just because their friends are doing so, there is a focus on individualism as
something to which young people should be aspiring. There is also an
assumption that an individual is only responsible for themselves, and
responsible for becoming employable. If we view this through a Butlerian
lens, the discourse of the successful individual as agentic, employable, and
acting on an individual basis can be viewed as subjectifying. Neoliberalism
is functioning as a performative, hegemonic norm which students and
teachers are required to negotiate. The narratives of autonomy and indi-
vidualism mask the discursive and social constitution of the subject and
since aspiration is considered to be located within the individual stu-
dents, they are then inevitably implicitly responsible for any perceived
lack of success due to a lack of aspiration. Equally, the homelessness story
and narratives of individual responsibility mask the impact of wider
structures of disadvantage, marginalisation, and also neoliberal economic
policies themselves, which can cause homelessness or unemployment.

The session is also underpinned by the assumption that adults do eventu-
ally know what they want, again problematic because as explained above,
we do not always understand our desires, nor are we always consciously
aware of them.
Unintelligible Neoliberal Subjects

Whilst it is important that young people are seen to be developing as
neoliberal subjects in education, it is also the case that some students are
perceived to be, and even constituted as failed neoliberal subjects. In this
case, this failure is linked to these students’ lack of intelligibility as agentic
and aspirational subjects by their teachers, who regard them primarily
through a raced lens, ‘a racially saturated field of visibility’ (Butler 1993,
15). In this interview with the lead teacher on student aspirations, she
and I are discussing the aims of the new Student Aspirations programme.
In my analysis of this conversation, I suggest that Asian females are ste-
reotypically viewed by the teacher through a postcolonial lens as passive
and subservient to their families by teachers, and thus the opposite of the
neoliberal ideal of agentic and individualistic. Postcolonialism and racism
‘structures what can and cannot appear within white perception’ which
affects ‘what is seen’ (Butler 1993, 16) and thus defines the intelligibility
of Asian students for their white teacher.
CC: So what’s the main aim of the SA programme?

Teacher: The girls all want to go down the road to [the local university].
They never think about going outside [this city]. We need to
encourage them to go further afield. But many of their families
don’t want them to.
CC: Is that right?
Teacher: It’s like coming to work in a different country working here. I
worked in a school where there were lots of black children before.
But these are quieter and don’t give their opinion so much.
142 C. Chadderton
In this conversation, the head of SA explains that the school is aiming

to encourage students to go outside of their own city to study. It is viewed
as problematic by the staff that their students in the main study at very
local universities. The teacher interprets this as due to family pressure,
rather than, for example, potentially, a choice made in conjunction with
their families, a positive decision to study in the city, a common working
class choice to stay closer to home, or financially informed decision. Her
comment about the families calls up longstanding stereotypes of Asian
females being subservient to family, linked to wider narratives which
position the West as modern, and Muslims, as inherently non-Western,
non-progressive and in need of education to ‘modernise’ and ‘liberate’
them (Butler 2008). When I question that, she emphasises that these
students are different from herself, me, and presumably the mainstream,
by characterising the school as ‘like…in a different country’. We are both
females (like the students) and both from working class backgrounds
(like most of the students), however, rather than focussing on potential
similarities which characterise the experiences of women or working class
individuals in education, she emphasises instead our racial/ethnic/reli-
gious backgrounds, thus reproducing a dichotomy between white British
staff and a mainly Bangladeshi student population. She goes on to seem-
ingly attempt to modify or justify this emphasis on difference by appear-
ing to argue that this is not about race: suggesting that working with
black children is perhaps less different. However, her implicit argument
that this is about cultural difference rather than racial difference, still
serves to reify longstanding stereotypes, this time of Asian females as sub-
servient to family.
In this analysis, I argue that the teacher’s own subjectivity and her
assumptions about the students are created through the racial episteme, or
frame (Butler 1993, 2004, 2010). The teacher’s perception is shaped by
discourses of whiteness, and postcolonial power relations. Her students,
mostly Asian females, are constituted as not having agency, and being
subservient to family. The potency of the racial frame is such that Asian
females are unintelligible to their teachers as agentic and aspirational sub-
jects. In a neoliberal context this (perceived) subservience and lack of
individual aspiration is problematic because ideal neoliberal subjects are
agentic, aspire highly and become employable by being flexible and
responsible for their own decisions— something they would presumably

not be if they are not prepared to move around the country and are sub-
servient to their families. Deficit discourses around Asian, in particular,
Bangladeshi, women, positions them as inevitably failed neoliberal sub-
jects. In this neoliberal context teachers are allocated a role to teach these
students to aspire, to be agentic. This role is inflected by the postcolonial
context, in which Muslims are constituted in the West as traditional, and
not aspirational. Further, postcolonial discourses of whiteness allocate the
white educator a role in ‘liberating’ minority women, women regarded as
subservient. The white teacher’s allocated role in a neoliberal educational
context focusing on student aspirations is therefore to encourage the stu-
dents to develop resilience against what they see as traditional cultural
influences and their families which are seen as holding them back. Thus
through the racial frame, the teacher ‘recognises’ her Muslim female stu-
dents as passive and subservient, unable to escape families without the
help of the white educational establishment. This aim to liberate is equally
problematic on another level, indeed, impossible, as Thiem (2008) argues,
If we understand the subject and its desires as formed in and depending on

subjection, then to ‘liberate’ subjects and desires from subjection would
mean to abolish them. (p. 40)
ollaborative Decisions: Failing to Aspire

C
to Individualism
In neoliberal regimes, agency and aspiration are seen as individual (Giroux
2004). However, conversations with young people suggest that they dis-
cuss their aspirations and educational decisions with their families, whose
advice and experiences they value. They do not see aspirations and deci-
sions as individual. In the following conversation, I am discussing a
careers intervention for Year 9 (students aged 14–15), ‘Careers in the
City Day’. The day involved a visit from external speakers who work in
the world of business, law, finance and IT in the City of London and
Canary Wharf. The students are giving me their impressions of the day:
144 C. Chadderton
Student 1: And they made it seem like we have to make our own choices.
CC What do you mean?
Student 1: Like there’s no one who can help us make the choice we want to
make
Student 2: They were like, ‘Don’t do what your family do, just because they
did, don’t do what your friends did’. That’s the only advice they
gave
Student 3: My older sister and my older brother they’re twins, they’ve just
done their GCSE’s. Cos our choices are coming up, so I told
them I wanted to choose Drama, and my sister was saying how
hard it is, stuff like that.
Student 1: My cousin brother, I asked him what he found easy and what he
found hard, he liked Business, and I was thinking, well I should
take Business. And my sister, well I wanted to do Dance and
Drama, and I asked my sister, and she said, ‘Go ahead, do what
you want.’
In this conversation, the students were not comfortable with the idea
of making choices alone. They gave me examples of how helpful it is for
them to get the perspectives of older siblings and cousins. Viewed through
a Butlerian lens, in which agency and decision-making are collaborative
and collective, it could certainly be argued that the students are
demonstrating agency by seeking help and advice from family and

informing themselves through the experiences of others.
However, read alongside the previous example, in which the teacher
understood the students as subservient to family, we can assume that such
collective agency may be unintelligible to teachers. Through the racial
frame which constitutes Asian women as unagentic, and the neoliberal
framing of careers education, which constitutes aspiration and decision-
making as individual, collective agency cannot be recognised. Indeed,
according to this racialised, neoliberal narrative, these Muslim students can
be viewed as demonstrating their lack of freedom and thus their lack of
modernity. Thus, they remain unintelligible as agentic students. As failed
neoliberal citizens, the students appear to confirm their position ‘beyond
learner citizenship’ for their perceived lack of aspiration and agency.
Conclusion
Whilst education policy and the school’s Student Aspirations programme
are aiming at one level to encourage students to aspire ‘differently’ (more
realistically? higher?) and to improve students’ educational and work
opportunities, the way in which the racial frame and neoliberal frames
operate in schools provide insight into why such policies or curricular
interventions may not have as much impact as assumed. Such policies
and initiatives do not take into account the role of the school and school
staff themselves are allocated which perpetuate unequal postcolonial rela-
tions nor the way in which students’ identities are constituted by the
racial frame operating in education (see also Youdell 2005 on the hetero-
sexual matrix in schools).
The narratives operating within such programmes promote an assump-
tion of culture as a fixed, unmoving entity, rather than as shifting, con-
tested, hybrid and plural (Butler 2008). It also assumes that the parents
are the unique cultural site for the communication and reproduction of
cultural norms, ignoring the role of wider society and schooling itself
(Butler 2008). Stereotypes of Asian and Muslim females as passive and
submissive are not compatible with discourses of the individualistic
entrepreneurial neoliberal learner and therefore these students’ agency
and educational decisions are rendered unintelligible. Butler’s notion of
intelligibility via the racial frame enables us to see how race functions as
a hegemonic norm, shaping teachers’ perceptions of their pupils, making
race and culture appear ‘natural’ and masking the teachers’ own role in
maintaining and reproducing race and racialised structures.
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7
The ‘Prevent’ Agenda in Higher
Education: Sovereignty and State Power
to Desubjectivate
Introduction
In this chapter I draw on Butler’s work on state power and sovereignty to
examine the notion that state power both constitutes subjects and equally,
desubjectivates, to provide ‘a critique of state violence and the power it
wields to construct the subject of cultural difference’ (Butler 2008, 21).
Butler (2004) has claimed that we are currently experiencing an incipient
return towards sovereignty and instances of overt exercising of state
power, whilst still within what Foucault termed ‘governmentality’, a sys-
tem in which power is de-centred and exerted by shaping the behaviour,
attitudes and subjectivities of the citizens in order to promote self-
regulation. This shift is justified by the introduction of a ‘state of emer-
gency’ across the western world in response to the (perceived) threat from
Islamist fundamentalists. I take the example of the British government’s
counter-terrorism agenda, ‘Prevent’, focussing on its role in Higher
Education, and argue that this can be considered an example of the shift
towards sovereignty. Indeed, viewed through a Butlerian lens, the dis-
course of ‘state of emergency’ functions as a performative which is cited
repeatedly and functions to actually produce the state of emergency as a

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73365-4_7
150 C. Chadderton
‘reality’. Employing Butler’s work on subjectivation and the potency of

the racial frame which shapes discourses and materialities, I argue that
the way in which the counter-terrorism agenda and surrounding dis-
courses constitute the threat of terror as Muslim, actually serves to desub-
ectivate Muslims by removing them from the realm of citizenship
protected by law. I also argue that the agenda actually serves to construct
the terrorist, radicalised subject. Equally, ‘Prevent’ can be seen as a tool
for the British government to construct itself as progressive, white, non-
terrorist, as part of it casting itself in the civilising mission in the ‘war on
terror’ (Butler 2008). This functions to mask the state’s own dominating
role and its own imperial violence.
Sovereignty and the State of Exception

Butler argues that sovereignty had never in fact been completely replaced
by governmentality, but can be deployed by those in positions of power
whenever they feel it necessary. She takes up Agamben’s (1998, 2005)
notion of the ‘state of exception’ to argue that the current ‘war on terror’
and related threats has been used by western democracies to justify the
introduction of a permanent ‘state of emergency’. The state of exception
is characterised by the so-called democratic state engaging in increased
sovereignty: a more overtly controlling style of government; large groups
of ‘suspect’ people are positioned outside the law. For Butler, sovereignty
and governmentality coexist in the current state of emergency—where
rule of law is suspended. Normally a state of emergency is introduced for
a short period by leaders in order to address a national emergency.
However, Butler argues that these new regimes of control are becoming
permanent and permeating ever more aspects of our lives.
...the problem of terrorism is no longer a historically or geographically

limed problem: it is limitless and without end, and this means that the
state of emergency is potentially limitless and without end, and that the
prospect of an exercise in state power in its lawlessness structures the future
indefinitely. The future becomes a lawless future, not anarchical, but given
over to the discretionary decisions of a set of designated sovereigns – a
perfect paradox that shows how sovereigns emerge within governmentality.
(Butler 2004, 65)
The ‘Prevent’ Agenda in Higher Education… 151
For Butler, sovereignty occurs within governmentality, and in fact is

enabled by govermentality. In her examples of the mechanisms of the
‘war on terror’ in the US, there is no single sovereign, rather discourse
and practices which create this overt control: Butler identifies plural and
dispersed techniques of power, policies created by civil servants who are
allocated a role in the war and allocate roles to others, as she argues, ‘[p]
etty sovereigns abound’ (Butler 2004, 56). For Butler, sovereignty is a
banal, anonymous and bureaucratic norm, practice and discourse and the
state of exception/emergency is constituted via the performativity (repeti-
tion of spoken and unspoken citations) of these norms (Neal 2008, 51).
Butler illustrates the state of emergency with the examples of extreme
phenomena such as the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, and ‘rendi-
tions’ of terror suspects for torture in third countries. This does raise
questions about the extent to which these developments may be relevant
to wider society; and whether they are simply exceptional, rather than
indicating a state of exception. However, as my colleague and I argue
elsewhere (Chadderton and Colley 2012), the practice of sovereignty
through the state of exception may be advancing. Butler, like other social
theorists such as Arendt (1963), suggests that the ongoing use of extreme
measures are ‘the means by which the exceptional becomes established as
a naturalised norm’ (Butler 2004, 67): extreme abuses of power are not
established on a widespread scale overnight: they become possible through
a lengthy process in which evil becomes commonplace and is ‘banalised’
in everyday life.
For Butler, the ‘war on terror’ has contributed to the creation of the
conditions for the reintroduction of sovereignty, and the extension of the
domain of the state. Although proponents of neoliberal governance typi-
cally claim they support the idea of a small state, the retreat on welfare
and public services is actually coupled with an increase in security and
control—thus in reality a ‘big state’, but big in security terms rather than
welfare. This combination of market liberalisation and security, sum-
marised by Gamble (1994) as the politics of ‘the free economy and the
strong state’ has been a key element of ‘New Right’ thinking in the US
and UK since the 1970s, and was exemplified by the Regan and Thatcher
governments in the 1980s. The focus of state expenditure is shifting away
from care and towards control (Harvey 2003), that is, away from meeting
152 C. Chadderton
human need, and increasingly towards the surveillance and control of

suspect populations. Indeed, this return to force and so-called paternal-
ism can be considered integral to the neoliberal project (Dean 2008, 35).
For Butler, this can be seen as a return to sovereignty, and characterised
by the (potential and real) suspension of the law for certain sections of
the population under certain conditions,
The law is suspended in the name of the ‘sovereignty’ of the nation, where
‘sovereignty’ denotes the task of any state to preserve and protect its own
territoriality. (Butler 2004, 55)
Desubjectivation and Bare Life

Governmentality is understood by Butler as not only the management
and control of populations and bodies, but also the production of these,
via both state and non-state discourses. Thus governmentality involves
the constitution of subjects in relation to explicit and hidden policy aims
(Butler 2004, 52). Equally, the introduction of sovereignty also functions
to manage populations, and constitute subjects. Butler argues that the
state has the power not only to subjectivate, but also desubjectivate, by
which she means the state constitutes certain subjects as unintelligible
and unviable according to given norms. It is important to recognise that
for Butler, it is not that social norms press on an individual subject until
they accommodate them, rather they are constituted through these norms
in the first place. In their subjectivation then, such subjects are already
unviable, and as such, Butler argues that this can be considered a desub-
jectivation, which she refers to as being constituted as less than human:
it seems important to recognise that one way of ‘managing’ a population

is to constitute them as the less than human without entitlement to
rights, as the humanly unrecognisable. This is different from producing a
subject who is compliant with the law; and it is different from the pro-
duction of the subject who takes the norm of humanness to be its consti-
tutive principle. […] ‘Managing’ a population is thus not only a process
through which regulatory power produces a set of subjects. It is also the
process of their de-subjectivation, one with enormous political and legal
consequences. (Butler 2004, 98)
This process of desubjectivation Butler likens to the position of bare

life: the reduction of certain groups of citizens to mere physical existence.
This involves the exercising of sovereignty and removing from these
groups the protection of law. Agamben (1998) equates these dispossessed
groups to the homo sacer, a paradoxical figure from Roman Law, who may
not be used for sacrifice, but may be killed by anyone without this being
considered a crime. This paradox illustrates the dual nature of the homo
sacer: this is a figure, who does not enjoy the rights of a citizen, and there-
fore may not live a political life, yet s/he leads a life defined by politics.
Agamben uses the situation of the Jewish people under the Nazis to
exemplify the state of exception, suggesting that the Nazi terror was not
necessarily exceptional, rather, an extreme form of sovereignty which can
be reintroduced in a democracy by the powerful at any time. Whenever
they choose, he argues, the powerful can reduce groups of citizens to
what he refers to as bare life. Butler conceives bare life as the ‘...the jetti-
soned life, the one both expelled and contained, as saturated with power
precisely at the moment in which it is deprived of citizenship’ (Butler in
Butler and Spivak 2007, 40). For Butler, bare life and desubjectivation is
not just actual violence, but is achieved for certain subjects through a
deprivation of citizenship rights. Thus deprivation of citizenship rights
can equal deprivation of subjecthood. Potentially, she argues, any human
could be desubjectivated:
Agamben has elaborated upon how certain subjects undergo a suspension

of their ontological status as subjects when states of emergency are invoked.
He argues that a subject deprived of rights of citizenship enters a suspended
zone, neither living in the sense that a political animal lives, in community
and bound by law, nor dead and, therefore outside the constituting condi-
tion of the rule of law. These socially conditioned states of suspended life
and suspended death exemplify the distinction Agamben offers between
‘bare life’ and the life of the political being (bios politikon), where this
second sense of ‘being’ is established only in the context of political com-
munity. If bare life, life conceived as biological minimum, becomes a con-
dition to which we are all reducible, then we might find a certain universality
in this condition. (Butler 2004, 67)
154 C. Chadderton
Although all humans are potentially exposed to desubjectivation and

bare life, Butler points out that Agamben does not explain the inequali-
ties in vulnerability, nor the way in which race, for example, would
impact on our vulnerability and exposure, ‘how sovereignty […] works
by differentiating populations on the basis of ethnicity and race’ (Butler
2004, 68). In later work she provides further examples of populations
living under the conditions of bare life, including Gastarbeiter in
Germany without citizenship rights, and the Palestinians under occupa-
tion, and argues that it is necessary to differentiate between different
types of dispossession, ‘[t]hese are not undifferentiated instances of ‘bare
life’ but highly juridified states of dispossession’ (Butler in Butler and
Spivak 2007, 42).
The state of emergency has specific implications for race, and for the
subjectivation of those who are positioned as racial ‘others’. Butler argues
that there is a racial frame through which certain groups are viewed such
that they are deemed less-than-human (Butler 2004). A ‘frame’ in
Butlerian terms, is a collection of discourses which shapes perception.
Whilst discursive, these frames are not ‘merely’ perceptual or cultural:
they have material effects on real lives and interaction (see for example,
Butler 1998). In the ‘war on terror’, those individuals and groups who are
regarded as threatening are those of (perceived) Arab, North African,
Middle Eastern or south Asian heritage. Some might argue that Butler’s
notion of less-than-human is extreme, however, it is individuals from
these groups whose citizenship rights are most likely to be suspended
both under English (Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005; Civil
Contingencies Act 2004) and US law (USA Patriot Act 2001).
I am suggesting that the rigorous exclusion of norms of Islamic community

pose a threat to culture, even to prevailing norms of humanization. And
when some group of people comes to represent a threat to the cultural
conditions of humanization and of citizenship, then the rationale for their
torture and their death is secured. (Butler 2008, 18)
In being beyond the law, the position of people who are (perceived to
be) from these ethnic groups as (perceived) non-human is reified—with-
out the rights of a citizen, it could be argued they are rendered a non-
human subject, indeed, desubjectivated.
he Racial Frame to Justify War

T
and the Production of Terrorists
Cultural and media discourses play an important part in converting pub-
lic discourse and opinion to public consent for political agendas. These
media discourses send strong messages about who ‘we’ are as a nation,
who is included and who is excluded. Collections of discourses provide a
frame through which perceptions are formed, which political judgements
are made. Butler’s notion of the racial frame is very important here. This
is a power-laden frame, or gaze, which produces subjects and equally,
desubjectivates. This notion of subjectivation through the racial gaze is an
extension of the more common notion of racial stereotyping. For Butler,
as for Fanon, race is not ‘just’ a stereotype, it is a subjectifying force
(Bhabha 1983).
...a frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with the experi-
ence, and […] the frame works both to preclude certain types of questions,
certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification
for retaliation. It seems crucial to attend to this frame, since it decides, in a
forceful way, what we can hear. (Butler 2004, 4, Butler’s italics)
In the ‘war on terror’, existing racial frames are fuelled by hegemonic

discourses of security. Security therefore also functions as a norm which
constitutes realities, identities and policy, and has the power to both
subjectivate and desubjectivate. ‘[S]ecurity must be understood as par-
tial and conditional, which means it may embrace security for some at
the expense of the security of others.’ (Zarabadi and Ringrose in press,
8). The discourse of security functions both at policy level and at cul-
tural level, subjectivating some citizens as fully human and to be pro-
tected, and others, in this case Muslims, as threatening to the security of
the nation. The discourse of security is justifying the introduction of the
state of exception (Agamben 2005). Both the war abroad, and the intro-
duction of increased surveillance and control at home are justified via
security narratives which draw on conventional orientalist stereotypes in
politics, the media and policy which desubjectivate Muslims (see also
Miah 2017).
156 C. Chadderton
Butler’s work has especially focussed on how racialised discourses of

grief serve to ensure public consent for the ‘war on terror’,
...how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is

publicly distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to
become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the
means by which a life becomes noteworthy. As a result, we have to consider
the obituary as an act of nation-building. (Butler 2004, 34)
These media narratives constitute who belongs to the nation, and who
threatens it along the lines of race and religion by constituting those who
are fully human, and those who are not, ‘… a cultural order that figures
Islam as abject, backward, foreboding ruination and, as a consequence,
requiring subordination within and exclusion from the culture of the
human itself ’ (Butler 2008, 18).
The constant interpellation of subjects, as threat and threatened, and
the constant performativity of racialised norms around narratives of secu-
rity, both shape notions of the terrorist and allocate a role to the state to
protect the nation from terrorism. The implications of the subjectifying
force of the racial frame is that not only does it function to justify an
automatic suspicion—in this case, of Muslims. It is the repeated citation
of notion of terrorism and links to ‘Muslimness’, in Butlerian terms the
performativity of terrorist, which actually produces the terrorist itself.
a heightened surveillance of Arab peoples and anyone who looks vaguely

Arab in the dominant racial imagery, anyone who looks like someone you
once knew who was of Arab descent, or who you thought was […] Various
terror alerts that go out over the media authorise and heighten racial hyste-
ria in which fear is directed anywhere and nowhere […] The result is that
an amorphous racism abounds, rationalised by the claim of self-defence
[…] Indeed, when the alert goes out, every member of the population is
asked to become a ‘foot soldier’ in Bush’s army. (Butler 2004, 39)
The racial frame is imbued with longstanding, existing narratives of

essentalising orientalism, which connects Muslims and Islam itself to vio-
lence and barbarism, ‘their violence is somehow constitutive, groundless,
and infinite, if not innate’ (Butler 2004, 88). As others have argued, (for
example Hall et al. 1978; Tyler 2013), this is how public opinion hardens
into consent. This is how power is secured and legitimated, and structures
of power, domination and oppression are veiled. Indeed, what are per-
ceived as ontological ‘truths’ about Muslims are constituted, and Muslims
come to embody the threat of violence and terrorism (Miah 2017). The
racial frame, imbued by hegemonic racialising norms, constitutes the ter-
rorist as Muslim.
If a person is deemed simply dangerous, then it is no longer a matter of

deciding whether criminal acts occurred […] The licence to brand and
categorise and detain on the basis of suspicion alone, expressed in this
operation of ‘deeming’, is potentially enormous. (Butler 2004, 77)
‘Prevent’ in Higher Education

Racial frames of security and threat ‘work in the service of Prevent’
(Zarabadi and Ringrose in press, 13), the UK counter-terrorism policy in
schools, colleges and universities which aims to identify and stop radicali-
sation and extremism. Within the political and cultural landscape of the
nation under threat constituted by the proliferation of security discourses,
this counter-terrorism policy makes sense. As Miah (2017) argues, the
Prevent policy ‘can be seen as a form of racial governmentality’ (p. 5,
author’s italics). Through a Butlerian lens, current security discourses
serve as a rationale employed by the state to increase and consolidate its
power in as many levels of life as possible (Butler 2008). Security is
employed as a frame by the state itself to introduce what would previ-
ously have been assumed to be exceptional measures to protect the nation,
but which become normalised and routine by the performativity—the
continued and repeated citation—of security discourses.
The Prevent strategy is a strand of the UK government’s counter-
terrorism strategy known as CONTEST. The initiative was first intro-
duced in in 2003 following 9/11 although it has been refocused and
restructured a number of times since then. It contains four components:
158 C. Chadderton
• Pursue: the investigation and disruption of terrorist attacks;

• Prevent: work to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting
terrorism;
• Protect: improving our protective security to stop a terrorist attack;
and
• Prepare: working to minimise the impact of an attack and to recover
as quickly as possible. (HMG 2016, 9)
The ‘Prevent’ strand, originally called ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’,

aims to stop terrorism, in particular by preventing the radicalisation of
young people. It relates to education, policing, health and community ser-
vices. Teachers, police, youth workers, health workers and now Further and
Higher Education employees are required to do ‘Prevent’ training in recog-
nising the signs of radicalisation. In this chapter I focus on ‘Prevent’ in
Higher Education. The new Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015
introduced a new statutory duty for Higher Education Institutions (HEI’s)
to have ‘due regard to the need to prevent individuals from being drawn
into terrorism’. This means that institutions now have a statutory duty to
engage with the government’s ‘Prevent’ agenda. Although HEIs’ inclusion
in ‘Prevent’ is not new, the 2015 act now ties HEIs in more actively to the
counter-terrorism agenda than previously. Research published in 2011
already showed a minority of universities had developed systems, policies
or procedures for ‘preventing violent extremism’, while a significant num-
ber had developed close cooperation and collaboration with state counter-
terrorism policies which the authors argue, raises potential issues of
academic freedom (Miller et al. 2011, 405).
The ‘Prevent’ approach promotes the belief that radicalisation can be
identified, and prevented via a series of interventions,
We would expect appropriate members of staff to have an understanding of

the factors that make people support terrorist ideologies or engage in
terrorist-related activity. Such staff should have sufficient training to be
able to recognise vulnerability to being drawn into terrorism, and be aware
of what action to take in response. (HMG 2015, 5)
As others have argued however, there is no clear evidence for why indi-
viduals might support extreme ideologies, nor why they night engage in
terrorist-related activity (Brown and Saeed 2015, 1953). ‘Prevent’s’ focus

on HE is due to the fact that a majority of those involved in terrorist
attacks in the West have a university degree, from which it has been
assumed that universities are spaces of radicalisation (Brown and Saeed
2015). The rationale given by the UK government for an increased focus
on HE institutions is that young people make up the majority of indi-
viduals who have travelled to Syria or Iraq to join terrorist organisations,
and that an important function of HEI’s is the challenging of extremism
and radicalism (HMG 2015).
[HEIs’] commitment to freedom of speech and the rationality underpin-

ning the advancement of knowledge means that they represent one of our
most important arenas for challenging extremist views and ideologies. But
young people continue to make up a disproportionately high number of
those arrested in this country for terrorist-related offences and of those who
are travelling to join terrorist organisations in Syria and Iraq. [HEIs] must
be vigilant and aware of the risks this poses. (HMG 2015, 3)
Previous iterations of ‘Prevent’ had already focussed on placing the

responsibility on staff to monitor students’ behaviour changes: For exam-
ple, Protective security advice for higher and further education (2009), pro-
duced to protect HEI’s and Further Education colleges from terrorist
attack by the National Counter Terrorism Security Office Counter terror-
ism (NaCTSO 2009) placed a large amount of responsibility on staff for
being aware and suspicious, focussed on the identification of threat and
security awareness, and contained very detailed information on staff and
physical premises, for example advice on large gatherings and websites.
The new act of 2015 requires an increased focus from HEIs in two
main areas: firstly staff are required monitor student behaviour and com-
plete ‘Prevent’ training which is intended to equip them to recognise
signs of radicalisation in students,1 and secondly, universities are required
to monitor the views of external speakers invited to speak at events at
universities, and where these ‘extremist views’ are required to ‘not allow
the event to proceed’2 (HMG 2015, 4).
Following Butler, the state of exception has not been overtly declared
in a single utterance, rather discourses and practices at different state and
media levels are creating the reality of the state of exception. In a state of
160 C. Chadderton
exception, the law can be transcended or ignored to protect the public

good. As Kapoor (2013) argues, in the case of the UK, race equality leg-
islation is being ignored due to the potency of the discourses of security:
Playing on the threat to national and indeed global security, it is the ‘War
on Terror’ that has provided a means by which the state has been able to
justify the implementation of a whole range of racially structured measures
that would otherwise have appeared to go against the grain of race equality
legislation. (Kapoor 2013, 1040)
The state of exception is thus created by the performativity of these

discourses, which have subjectifying force—they are dominant enough to
constitute reality (Butler 2011). Thus the state of exception has no struc-
tural ontology except for the practices, acts and discourses (Neal 2008,
48). These practices are not exceptions in themselves, but rather repeated
acts which ‘performatively constitute exceptionalism as a legitimate and
normalised form of government’ (Neal 2008, 49). The practices will also
not be understood as a suspension of the legislation because they are part
of normality. It is the repeated citation which produces reality. The struc-
tural ontology of ‘security’ is thus constructed via these discourses and
practices (see also Miah 2017).
That it is Islamic extremism or terrorism simply means that the dehuman-

isation that Orientalism already performs is heightened to an extreme, so
that the uniqueness and exceptionalism of this kind of war makes it exempt
from the presumptions and protections of universality and civilisation.
(Butler 2004, 89)
Although the government states that ‘CONTEST deals with all forms
of terrorism’ (2015, 9), it does focus primarily, and in some documents
exclusively on Islamist terrorism. There is an explicit focus on Islamist
terrorism in all ‘Prevent’ documents. Although other types of extremism
are mentioned as well, in particular right-wing extremism, Islamism is
always mentioned first and presented as the greater and more serious
threat. In this way, the agenda actually serves to construct the terrorist,
radicalised subject. In previous ‘Prevent’ documents, there has been an
explicit focus on ‘Asian students’, ‘Muslim students’ and on the dangers

of ‘racial heterogeneity’ which, it has been argued, contrasts white homo-
geneity with a racialised ‘other’ (Preston 2008). The ‘Prevent’ strategy
review (2011) claimed to be a refocus away from Muslims and commu-
nity cohesion. However, it actually continued to focus on Muslims and
Al-Qaida:
it is clear that Prevent work must be targeted against those forms of terror-
ism that pose the greatest risk to our national security. Currently, the great-
est threat comes from Al Qa’ida, its affiliates and like-minded groups.
(HMG 2011)
There are other references which call up longstanding stereotypes

around Muslims and Islam and create a ‘them’ and ‘us’ binary: There is a
focus on those ‘who see a conflict between being British and their own
cultural identity’ (p. 18) which suggests that terrorism is not British and
those who believe ‘the West is perpetually at war with Islam’ (HMG
2011, 24). The Prevent Duty guidance for HEI’s 2015, although not
mentioning Muslims very much directly, does focus on gender segrega-
tion and ‘issues arising from the use of prayer facilities’, (HMG 2015)
both referencing aspects of life which tend to be associated with Muslims.
The annual report of CONTEST mentions Islamist terrorism as the
principal threat (HMG 2016). It also mentions Northern Ireland Related
Terrorism and terrorists associated with the extreme right, although
devotes only a line or two to each. During 2015 however, it reports that
around 15% of the referrals under the programme were linked to far
right extremism, and around 70% linked to Islamist-related extremism
(HMG 2016). Indeed, initially the focus was on ‘70 local authorities who
had a population of 5% or more of Muslims, as well as communities who
were seen most susceptible to the “risk” of recruitment or “grooming” by
“extremists”’ (Sian 2015).
Butler conceives bare life as the casting of a population out of the polis
into ‘...an unprotected exposure to state violence’ (Butler in Butler and
Spivak 2007, 37), Following this argument, in counter-terrorism dis-
courses, (perceived) racial groups who are likely to be Muslims are consti-
tuted (in Butlerian terms) as non-human. In the case of the ‘war on
162 C. Chadderton
terror’, the frame through which the less than human are viewed is Islam.
Islam is regarded as beyond the hegemonic norms of the West, which
positions Muslims as suspicious or threatening. It is the fact that all
Muslims, or those taken to be Muslim, Arabs, or Middle Eastern are
viewed through a racial frame defining them as threatening and non-
western, which means that these citizens are considered to embody the
threat of terror, which they are seen to carry as an essential part of their
subjectivity, and which therefore allows them to be constituted as non-
citizens. As non-citizens, they do not enjoy the same entitlement to rights
as citizens, and deprived of legal protection, Muslims become desubjecti-
vated, constituted as
[p]opulations that are not regarded as subjects, humans who are not con-
ceptualised within the frame of a political culture in which human lives are
underwritten by legal entitlements, law, and so humans who are not
humans. (Butler 2004, 77)
This inevitable connection of Islam to terrorism, reiterated by ‘Prevent’

and repetition of security narratives in other political and cultural spaces
means that Muslims embody the threat, and the (Muslim) terrorist is a
performative, shaped and reified by the counter-terrorism policy itself.
The security discourse also allocates non-Muslim citizens a role in the
‘war on terror’, translating into
a virtual mandate to heighten racialised ways of looking and judging in the

name of national security. A population of Islamic peoples, or those taken
to be Islamic, has become targeted by this government mandate to be on
heightened alert, with the effect that the Arab population in the US
becomes visually rounded up, stared down, watched, hounded and moni-
tored by a group of citizens who understand themselves as foot soldiers in
the war against terrorism. (Butler 2004, 77)
This is because, as Youdell (2004) argues, the silent partner in the

dichotomy is constituted via what can be referred to as a ‘citational chain’.
A range of professionals such as lecturers, police, teachers, social workers,
youth workers and community groups are allocated a role to identify
individuals who are potentially ‘at risk of violent radicalization’ (HMG

2011). In this role, they are constituted as the protectors of Britishness.
‘Prevent’ can equally be seen as a tool for the British government to con-
struct itself as progressive, white, non-terrorist, as part of it casting itself
in the civilising mission in the ‘war on terror’ (Butler 2008). This func-
tions to mask the state’s own dominating role and its own imperial
violence.
Conclusion
The state of emergency has implications for education in the nation state,
where it is possible to recognise forms of sovereignty that are both more
incipient and more commonplace than the plight of Guantanamo detain-
ees. Some might argue that such arguments are extreme for education.
However, neoliberal developments in education such as the UK ‘Prevent’
programme that aims to prevent the radicalisation of young people cre-
ates new and increased spaces of surveillance, control and ultimately, as a
Butlerian analysis suggests, desubjectivation. The ‘Prevent’ programme
does not aim to subtly encourage young people into self-surveillance or
technologies of the self (Foucault 2008); rather those targeted by the
programme are subject to external and explicit technologies of control.
Their lives, like that of the homo sacer, are thus deeply politicised, as are
those of the practitioners working with them. As Douglas (2009, 37)
argues ‘in the state of exception, what needs to be emphasised is that it is
not a power relation of pure violence, but rather, of potential violence.’
Indeed, ‘Prevent’ ‘aims to oversee, regulate and govern “the Muslim prob-
lem” around ideas of security and securitisation […] This racialised poli-
tics helps construct Muslims as racialised outsiders – who pose an
imminent security threat’ (Miah 2017, 5/8, my quotation marks).
These spaces of control and desubjectivation are indicative of increased
state control in education, a common feature of neoliberal politics despite
neoliberals’ claims that they believe in the reduction of the role of the
state. As Butler argues, this is how the state of exception becomes reified,
through such practices, which are
164 C. Chadderton
part of a broader tactic to neutralise the rule of law in the name of security.
[…] In other words, the suspension of the life of a political animal, the
suspension of standing before the law, is itself a tactical exercise, and must
be understood in terms of the larger aims of power. (Butler 2004, 67–68)
Notes
1. Compliance with the duty will also require the institution to demonstrate
that it is willing to undertake Prevent awareness training and other train-
ing that could help the relevant staff prevent people from being drawn
into terrorism and challenge extremist ideas which risk drawing people
into terrorism. We would expect appropriate members of staff to have an
understanding of the factors that make people support terrorist ideologies
or engage in terrorist-related activity. Such staff should have sufficient
training to be able to recognise vulnerability to being drawn into terror-
ism, and be aware of what action to take in response. This will include an
understanding of when to make referrals to the Channel programme and
where to get additional advice and support. (HM Government 2015, 5)
2. when deciding whether or not to host a particular speaker, RHEBs should
consider carefully whether the views being expressed, or likely to be
expressed, constitute extremist views that risk drawing people into terror-
ism or are shared by terrorist groups. In these circumstances the event
should not be allowed to proceed except where RHEBs are entirely con-
vinced that such risk can be fully mitigated without cancellation of the
event. This includes ensuring that, where any event is being allowed to
proceed, speakers with extremist views that could draw people into terror-
ism are challenged with opposing views as part of that same event, rather
than in a separate forum. Where RHEBs are in any doubt that the risk
cannot be fully mitigated they should exercise caution and not allow the
event to proceed. (HMG 2015, 4)
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8
The Role of Race in Research Through
a Butlerian Lens: Representation,
Knowledge and Voice
Introduction
While Butler is best-known for her work on gender and sexuality, the
implications her work has for ethical issues in research, such as represen-
tation, knowledge creation and voice have been overlooked by many
(Thiem 2008). In this chapter I consider Butler’s thinking and explore
the implications of this thinking for the role of race in research. Although
Butler’s work has not really dealt with issues in research directly, if we
view the research space as a location in which we are interpellated as sub-
jects, Butler argues ‘… the scene of address can and should provide a
sustaining condition for ethical deliberation, judgement and conduct’
(Butler 2005, 49).
Butler’s work offers us a lens through which we can view the formation
of the subject, the way in which oppression functions, the way dominant
and oppressive norms are maintained and the way in which norms are
cited in the shaping of realities. Following Butler, in this book I have
argued that race can be viewed as functioning as a hegemonic norm, a
force which both subjectivates and desubjectivates. Moreover, like other
identities and norms, race functions as a performative, the ‘citational

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73365-4_8
168 C. Chadderton
practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ (Butler

2011, xiii), and is performatively produced. In Butlerian terms therefore,
race has no ontological status. Equally, Butler argues that all identities are
unstable. Subjects are formed fully in relation to others and do not pre-
exist their subjectivation: there are no ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ identities.
Lives, bodies and realities are understood through what Butler refers to as
‘frames’, or collections of discourses and norms which shape perception
but also subjectivate. Subjects are formed and continually shaped in a
performative process of which our awareness is only partial.
Such an approach has significant implications for research, some of
which I consider in this chapter. For example, if race has no ontological
status, that is, it is not, as Butler (1994) might argue, ‘a proper object’,
when researching around issues of race, what is actually being studied?
Equally, if subjectivities are unstable, how do we conduct research around
identity or culture? If our knowledge of any situation or issue can only
ever be partial, and shaped by numerous and contradictory norms and
discourses of which we are only partially aware, how can we as researchers
create meaningful knowledge? Such considerations are important for
debates in qualitative research, in particular for research about or with
marginalised groups.
Qualitative Research
with Marginalised Groups
Historically, qualitative research has been deeply implicated in the history
of the domination and oppression of marginalised groups (Said 1978;
Bishop 2005). Academics (mostly male, white and upper class or at least
representing the views of these privileged groups) have set out to provide
‘knowledge’ about marginalised groups, or groups which are different to
their own. The ‘knowledge’ produced by these academics has then been
used to control, dominate and exploit (Spivak 1990). The data collected
by academics is often compared to a white, upper or middle class norm,
and marginalised or disadvantaged groups found to be lacking. The
knowledge created about these groups is then held to be neutral, objec-
tive, value-free, and perhaps most importantly, true (Said 1978) by
The Role of Race in Research Through a Butlerian Lens… 169
ominant groups such as academics, policy makers, and the media, and
d
is used to guide policy and cultural approaches towards them and shapes
dominant discourses. ‘Fieldwork […] serves as a guarantee of the author-
ity of the ethnographer and of the authenticity of the object of the study’
(Alexander 2004, 137). Such discourses reinforce existing deficit dis-
courses around oppressed groups, and the masculinist, colonial world-
views of the establishment represented by the researcher (Nayak 2006).
Individuals from marginalised groups who are the subjects of research are
frequently seen as representative of the group they belong to, or are per-
ceived as belonging to. In education this has meant that disadvantaged or
racialised groups in Europe have been pathologised and viewed as defi-
cient in some way, framed in terms of problems they cause for an essen-
tially fair and equitable education system, or suffering from cultural or
identity crises (see for example, Carby 1994).
Despite much criticism of such practices, pathologisation of oppressed
groups via qualitative research still occurs, and ‘[r]esearch on race and
ethnicity in Britain has centred on the discovery of internal ‘tribes’ that
reinscribe the Self/Other dynamic of traditional ethnography’ (Alexander
2004, 139). For example, research on protests in Oldham, Bradford and
Burnley in northern England in 2001 resulted in the unrest being blamed
on unquestioned, alleged cultural differences between Asian and white
people in that area, and the inability of British Asians to assimilate and
adapt to modern British life which in turn was seen to have led to racial
segregation and social tensions. This masked the historical context of
structural inequalities, deindustrialisation, racist attacks and police
harassment (Home Office 2001; Alexander 2004). Such research thus
reinforces essentialised notions of race, culture and religion and notions
of difference as innate and natural and silences other important factors
contributing to the topic of study (see also Sanada 2012).
Some of the Tensions in Social Justice Work

Questions of where knowledge comes from, who has created it, what
status it has, and who benefits from it or is oppressed by it, have taken on
increased importance in debates on qualitative research over the last
170 C. Chadderton
20 years or so, and continue to be debated. How can research avoid the
essentialisation and pathologisation of minority or disadvantaged groups?
How can we ensure that the stories which are told do not merely promote
oppressive, dominant narratives which fuel inequalities? Several argu-
ments have been put forward to address these questions. In this chapter I
look at three of these through a Butlerian lens:
1. Qualitative research for social justice should foreground the margin-

alised and frequently misrepresented voices, accounts and perspectives
of disadvantaged groups, which will provide an authentic narrative of
their social reality and challenge dominant oppressive discourses.
2. As far as possible, research should be conducted by individuals from
the same background or community as those who are being researched.
3. The researcher should avoid aiming to be a neutral observer, as objec-
tivity in research is impossible. Rather researchers should reflect on
their own subjectivity and the role this plays in the research process so
the reader can understand the different influences on the analysis of
the findings.
1. Whilst the foregrounding of the voices and perspectives of disadvan-

taged populations is vital, this initial point contains a number of prob-
lematic assumptions.
Firstly, that participants will provide an alternative story which chal-

lenges dominant and oppressive narratives, secondly that this will be an
authentic reflection of their social reality, and thirdly that this account is
accessible to the researcher who will understand it in the same way it is
intended to be understood. In fact, it may be that participants’ narratives
do not counter oppressive narratives, or their narratives may not be
straightforward, nor unproblematically accessible to researchers (White
and Drew 2011).
Butler argues that the subject is formed in relation to hegemonic
norms. Although other, contradictory discourses will circulate, the sub-
ject is likely to behave as expected and conform to norms: ‘…the subject’s
self-crafting […] always takes place in relation to an imposed set of
norms’ (Butler 2005, 19). Thus as others have also argued, oppressed
people sometimes tell stories which marginalise them (for example

Solorzano and Yosso 2002, 28). As Butler argues,
When the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, it can start with itself, but it
will find that this self is already implicated in a social temporality that
exceeds its own capacities for narration; indeed, when the ‘I’ seeks to give
an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own
emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist. The
reason for this is that the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story
of a relation – or set of relations – to a set of norms. (Butler 2005, 8)
Indeed, this first point assumes that a subject will have understood
their experiences, can remember them accurately and relate them exactly.
It also assumes that the participant will have insight into their circum-
stances, and will understand these circumstances. However, through a
Butlerian lens, we cannot have a complete understanding of ourselves
and our positioning,
[The temporality] constitutes the way in which my story arrives belatedly,

missing some of the constitutive beginnings and the preconditions of the
life it seeks to narrate. This means that my narrative begins in media res,
when so many things have already taken place to make me and my story
possible in language. I am always recuperating, reconstructing, and I am
left to fictionalise and fabulate origins I cannot know […] My account of
myself is partial, haunted by that for which I can devise no definitive story.
[…] There is that in me and of me for which I can give no account. (Butler
2005, 39–40)
Moreover, this assumes ‘a doer behind the deed’, a self who stands
outside or beyond oneself and has a privileged understanding of one’s
circumstances. As postcolonial theorists such as Spivak (1988) also argue,
for Butler we have each been constituted within a specific historical and
cultural context, and there is no ‘original’ individual who has not been
socially constructed in this way. As Butler has asked, can there be ‘an
emancipator vision after the critique of emancipation’? (Butler 1999, 18)
Linked to this, the first point assumes that accounts are singular—
rather than plural and potentially contradictory—and tell a particular
172 C. Chadderton
straightforward story. It also assumes that this story would reflect a ‘truth’
external to the context of the telling. However, for Butler this is problem-
atic because it assumes a singular, sovereign subject with insight into the
conditions of their formation. Instead, Butler’s notion of subjectivation
maintains that our lives and the narratives of our lives are shaped by oth-
ers, and by conditions we do not choose, leading to our realities being
complex and contradictory,
An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or exist-

ing […] Moreover, the very terms by which we give an account, by which
we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others, are not of our
making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a
domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our ‘singular’ sto-
ries are told. (Butler 2005, 21)
Moreover, the first point assumes that research participants will describe
their reality, or an aspect of their reality, and that this will accurately reflect
their lives and experiences. However, for Butler, identities and narratives
are performatively and discursively constituted in an ongoing process.
The individual is therefore constituted in the interview, or focus group.
Interviewing involves being addressed, which comes with a set of assump-
tions about what one is being addressed about. Therefore rather than
interpreting the words of participants as ‘authentic’ descriptions of their
lives external to the interview, in fact, the location of the interaction, the
individual’s assumptions about why they are being interviewed, their per-
ceptions of the interviewer, will all shape participants’ responses.
The ‘I’ can neither tell the story of its own emergence nor the conditions of
its own possibility without bearing witness to a state of affairs to which one
could not have been present, which are prior to one’s own emergence as a
subject who can know, and so constitute a set of origins that one can nar-
rate only at the expense of authoritative knowledge. (Butler 2005, 37)
Equally, Butler’s theory of performativity suggests that the social roles

of both the researcher and participants will shift throughout the interview.
The subjectivity we observe as qualitative researchers is an effect of prac-
tice: it is being constituted through repetition. Thus as researchers of
social and cultural issues, narratives from participants should not be

viewed as reflecting a cultural truth, rather as a narrative which consti-
tutes a notion of culture at that moment. Subjects are not stable and
subjectivities are constantly being remade.
So the account of myself that I give in discourse never fully expresses or

carries this living self. My words are taken away as I give them, interrupted
by the time of a discourse that is not the same as the time of my life. (Butler
2005, 36)
In addition, Butler would argue the researcher cannot access any kind
of reality via language. ‘Language is not an exterior medium or instru-
ment into which I pour a self and from which I glean a reflection of that
self ’ (Butler 2008, 196). Meaning is inherently unstable, and as such, the
narratives of the research participants will not provide the researcher with
a reflection of their reality: ‘The means by which subject constitution occurs
is not the same as the narrative form the reconstruction of that constitution
attempts to provide’ (Butler 2005, 69, her italics). Butler’s work, in seeing
language and discourse as constitutive rather than reflective or descrip-
tive, challenges straightforward notions of data collection and research
findings. In a Butlerian framework, knowledge and subject positions are
created and generated together with the participants in a research space.
2. The notion that research should be conducted by researchers from the

same background as those they are researching is also problematic
from a Butlerian point of view.
It may be argued that there may be situations when it is more sensitive

to try and match researcher and interviewee, for example, if the research
is specifically about race and racism. Indeed, Butler has argued that per-
haps most of us will be interpellated as subjects as expected, for example,
white people are likely to respond to and activate discourses of whiteness
in different ways to minority ethnic individuals. However, whilst
researcher matching may in certain situations be more viewed as more
sensitive, it should be acknowledged that this practice is also under-
pinned by potentially problematic assumptions when viewed through a
Butlerian lens.
174 C. Chadderton
Not only does this approach not take into account the vast range of
differences between individuals even when they are racially matched (if
this is possible) such as gender, age, class, political stance, family culture,
which may mean that assumptions of similarity are mistaken, or mislead-
ing, but assumptions of similarity within a specific category assumes
monoculturality in race which essentialises individuals along ethnic lines.
The notion of race as a performative, rather than a fixed identity, has
significant implications for researcher-matching. In a Butlerian frame-
work, race and racialised processes, while undeniably shaping lives and
experiences, will be experienced differently and interpreted differently by
different people. While it is important to acknowledge that lived experi-
ence may heighten a person’s awareness of power, oppression and mar-
ginalisation, oppression is not experienced in the same ways by
individuals, neither does the experience of oppression automatically
equal an awareness of it and the structures which allow it to operate.
Researcher matching assumes that there is a racial truth which will be
available to people of similar racial heritage (assuming this can be estab-
lished) and understood in similar ways. It assumes a connection between
racial heritage and experience, and that racial subjectivities are fixed,
homogenous and monolithic rather than shifting and (re)produced in
the research space (see also Gunaratnam 2003; Alexander 2004). For
Butler this approach assumes an essential whiteness or blackness or a
single white, black or Asian experience, for example, which people of the
same or similar heritage will be able to tap into. As others have argued,
the notion that for example, a black person should conduct research on
black people is underpinned by a belief that if a ‘real’ black person con-
ducts the research, they are seen as ‘authentic’ and having ‘real’ insights
(for example Alexander 2004, 140), thus presuming a racial authenticity
or specificity. Indeed, it suggests a belief in a pre-existing subject, which
Butler explicitly denies. It also assumes that race is attached to bodies or
experiences, rather than being performatively constituted in the inter-
view space. Equally, researcher matching also does not stabilise the insta-
bility of language and meaning. Indeed the assumption that researcher
matching will (inevitably) address issues of racial oppression and domi-
nance also assumes that participants will tell a straightforward narrative
which will reveal structures of oppression and privilege, data which will
straightforwardly support their own racial or cultural group. Butler has

argued that individuals are all subjectivated by norms which do not nec-
essarily benefit us, and therefore the self can be complicit in its own
oppression by citing norms which oppress,
…those who are oppressed by certain operations of power also come to be

invested in that oppression, […] in fact, their very self-definition becomes
bound up with the terms by which they are regulated, marginalised or
erased from the sphere of cultural life. (Butler et al. 2000, 149)
None of this means that race does not matter in research. In fact,
Butler would argue that all subjects are racially subjectivated according to
a range of racial discourses. In a methodology underpinned by a Butlerian
framework, race should be considered to play a complex role as a perfor-
mative, a discourse which constitutes and desubjectivates, which shifts
and is negotiated by all, but which most importantly, is cited and repro-
duced through the act of conducting the research itself—I return to this
idea below.
3. Reflexivity as a solution:
Critical reflexivity by the researcher tends to be viewed as very impor-

tant in social justice research. The practice challenges the notion of research
as neutral and objective and tends to be used to allow the researcher to be
transparent about how knowledge is produced (Pillow 2003). Equally, it
is argued that critical reflexivity allows the researcher to try to avoid con-
ducting exploitative research by better understanding the impact of power
relations and the researcher’s own subjectivity on the data, and it enables
the researcher to better understand her own racial and cultural positional-
ity in the world, in order to avoid reinscribing people into stereotypes.
Thus practices of self-reflexivity aim to attempt ‘to account for how the
self is involved in the research process’ (Pillow 2003, 182). It is accepted
firstly that the story the researcher tells has inevitably been filtered through
her own beliefs and values and is therefore to a large extent ‘dependent
upon our prior understandings of the subject of our observation’ (Siraj-
Blatchford and Siraj-Blatchford 1997, 237), and secondly, the way the
176 C. Chadderton
participants position her will influence the data (Siraj-Blatchford and

Siraj-Blatchford 1997). In order to address this, it is argued that the
researcher has a responsibility to scrutinise how the story she tells, the
knowledge she claims to produce came about, and be completely open
about the assumptions which underpin it.
However, others have argued that reflexivity has not worked as
assumed. Alexander (2004) argues that just thinking and writing about
race does not necessarily lead to an avoidance of unequal power relations
or the reinscription of people into stereotypes. ‘If they appear at all,
notions of partiality and positionality have entered into ethnographic
practice of ‘writing race’ as a watered-down and half-hearted gesture-
reflexivity by rote’ (Alexander 2004, 138). Equally it has been argued that
simply documenting and admitting one’s own contributions to racism is
a non-successful performative—it has no performative force (Ahmed
2007) and does not actively or effectively challenge white hegemony.
Employing Butler’s tools to examine the function and effectiveness of
reflexivity, it can also be argued that it is in fact impossible both to know
all the cultural norms at work, and to banish them. For Butler, the sub-
ject remains within the social and cultural bounds of its subjectivation. A
researcher cannot be external to these, cannot know exactly the condi-
tions of their emergence. Reflection on one’s own positionality is there-
fore not an ultimate answer because it presumes an ‘I’ who acts, who can
be fully external from social norms which form it (Thiem 2008).
…there is no ‘I’ that can fully stand apart from the social conditions of its
emergence, no ‘I’ that is not implicated in a set of conditioning moral
norms, which, being norms, have a social character that exceeds a purely
personal or idiosyncratic meaning. (Butler 2005, 7)
Our capacity for reflection is thus affected by Butler’s notion of the

subject as unknowing, with limited capacity for self-evaluation. This is a
condition we can never escape ‘because the scenes of one’s becoming can
never be fully recovered through reflection’ (Thiem 2008, 23). Informed
by Butler then, researchers need to accept that reflection can also only
ever yield partial answers. We can, and should, interrogate social and cul-
tural norms and power relations which influence our work as researchers,
but we need to acknowledge that we cannot know all of these.
ubjectivation, Intelligibility and the Limits

S
of Knowing
Thinking such as that of Judith Butler, which is informed by anti-
foundationalist norms, and which can broadly be described as poststruc-
tural, has been criticised for threatening to cause a kind of paralysis to
social justice research because some argue that it has caused research to lose
its point and its transformative potential (McLaren 2003). However, it can
equally be argued that such work also gives us tools to move forward.
Firstly, a theory of subject formation that acknowledges how we are
formed in relation to others, the power of norms to subjectivate and
establish the viability of the subject (Butler 2005, 9) has significant impli-
cations for qualitative research. For example, it has important implica-
tions for the now more common notion that research is always inevitably
subjective. Butler argues that the conditions of our subjectivation mean
that we are not, and never can be, neutral individuals in any way. We are
all defined in relation to each other. The very conditions of the formation
of the subject dictate that this is how we become recognisably human.
‘The ‘I’ is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of
its emergence’ (Butler 2005, 8). This in fact extends the idea that the
researcher is always inevitably inextricably involved in the knowledge
they create. It provides a fundamental challenge to enlightenment notions
of the autonomous subject and notions of agency based on a belief in
freedom and counters the neoliberal understanding of ‘individual
accountability’ (Chambers and Carver 2008, 109).
This struggle with the unchosen conditions of one’s life, a struggle – an

agency – is also made possible, paradoxically, by the persistence of this
primary condition of unfreedom. (Butler 2005, 19)
Some might argue that this is paramount to claiming in a liberal way

that we are all the same, all already equal. However, that is not what is
being argued at all:
Does recognition, as Hegel argues, consist in a reciprocal act whereby I

recognise that the other is structured in the same way I am? And do I rec-
ognise that the other also makes, or can make, this recognition of sameness?
178 C. Chadderton
Or is there perhaps another encounter with alterity here that is irreducible

to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity? (Butler
2005, 27)
Butler is arguing that our encounter with otherness should broaden

our notion of human. This is not the same as arguing that we are all the
same. It is also different from a valuing or celebration of ‘diversity’ which
one often finds in education, which tends to essentialise or commodify
the other. ‘If one is to respond ethically to a human face, there must first
be a frame for the human, one that can include any number of variations
as ready instances’ (Butler 2005, 29). Butler is arguing for a broader
notion of the human, in which all humans are intelligible and culturally
and socially viable, a radical rethinking of the category of human. This
provides a fundamental challenge to the research process, which requires
researchers to categorise research participants, their practices, experiences
and cultures in order to render them intelligible to others. Butler argues
that it is precisely this process of categorisation which creates hierarchies
of humans and desubjectivates the most disadvantaged groups. In her
work she rejects all categories as constraining and as the source of oppres-
sion. The notion that we are formed in relation to each other also has
additional implications for researching around issues of race. It could be
argued that Butler’s theory of subjectivation is inevitably threatening to
whiteness, because whiteness is defined by its position as a dominant
norm, a standard, a privilege, which is called into question if we under-
stand the conditions of subjectivation which reveal the instability of this
privilege, and also its role as a performative rather than a fact.
Secondly, acknowledging that ‘the other’ cannot be known could
potentially go some way towards interrupting practices of dominance in
research. The notion that ‘the other’ can be known is an important, if
often implicit, assumption underpinning much qualitative research. As
Butler (2005) argues, ‘The other to whom I pose this question [Who are
you?] will not be captured by any answer that might arrive to satisfy it’
(p. 43). Butler would argue that representation involves the constitution
of the subject rather than a reflection or even interpretation of any
reality:
I also enact the self I am trying to describe; the narrative ‘I’ is reconstituted
at every moment it is invoked in the narrative itself. That invocation is,
paradoxically, a performative and non-narrative act, even as it functions as
a fulcrum for narrative itself. I am, in other words, doing something with
that ‘I’ – elaborating and positioning it in relation to a real or imagined
audience – which is something other than telling a story about it, even
though ‘telling’ remains part of what I do. (Butler 2005, 66)
This view of research as the constitution of subjects rather than a reflec-

tion of cultural truths has important implications. These insights inevita-
bly shift the role of the researcher from a reporter of cultural truths about
others to a creator of partial and incomplete knowledge which is likely to
reflect a complex range of discourses: those they are able to both see and
name. This is key because as others have argued, oppression works in
some ways via the construction of powerful, dominant discourses about
marginalised groups which function as truths and knowledge (Said 1978)
and form the basis of institutional and political arrangements. Butler
argues this process can potentially be interrupted if research is viewed not
as the creation of single truths or fixed knowledge, but as an acknowl-
edgement of the limits of knowledge:
As we ask to know the other, or ask that the other way, finally or defini-
tively, who he or she is, it will be important not to expect an answer that
will ever satisfy. By not pursuing satisfaction and by letting the question
remain open, even enduring, we let the other live, since life might be
understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give
of it. If letting the other live is part of any ethical definition of recognition,
then this version of recognition will be based less on knowledge than on an
apprehension of epistemic limits. (Butler 2005, 43)
I argue therefore, that Butler would promote a notion of not-knowing,

rather than knowing and certainty as a way of moving forward (Thiem
2008). This needs to be a specific type of not-knowing though, as not-
knowing can also be employed to justify the reinforcement of hierarchies.
As Butler argues,
180 C. Chadderton
[s]uspending the demand for self-identity or, more particularly, for com-
plete coherence seems to me to counter a certain ethical violence, which
demands that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and
require that others do the same. For subjects who invariably live within a
temporal horizon, this is a difficult, if not impossible, norm to satisfy.
(Butler 2005, 42)
The notion of accessing an objective ‘truth’ about people’s lives is not

only unattainable but also undesirable, because the creation of fixed
truths about humans is what makes oppression possible.
hat Does This Mean for Researching Racially

W
Marginalised Groups?
In a Butlerian framework, race, then, is a performative and is performa-
tively constituted. Race is a norm which subjectivates and desubjecti-
vates. It is not ‘a proper object’ (Butler 1994), nor a fixed identity, nor is
it a stable or unified category. The challenge for researchers employing a
Butlerian framework is to problematise the notion of race as a fixed iden-
tity whilst recognising that this is how many (most?) others will experi-
ence it. An anti-foundational reading of racial identity views racial
identity as an impossibility (see also Nayak 2006). Whilst more conven-
tional approaches would assume that race is one of many factors which
influences research, a Butlerian approach would consider race to be pro-
duced in the research space via the citation of various discourses. In
Butlerian terms then, research constitutes, it does not describe or reflect.
Racial positioning and racial identity do not precede the research in any
kind of single or fixed way, and therefore cannot be ‘captured’ via research.
Instead these are performatively constituted in research: in the research
questions, in interviews and focus groups, in observations, in the report-
ing of the findings. In Butlerian terms, race has no structural ontology
‘apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’ (Butler 2008,
173). As Sanada (2012) argues,
[r]esearchers inevitably shape the nature of ethnographic encounter to

elicit particular kinds of voices and performances. In this perspective, it can
be considered that ‘racial’ identities and ‘racialised’ voice of narrators and
research participants are, to an extent, artefacts of research design and pro-
cess. (p. 99)
For Butler, race is therefore not ‘only’ a factor influencing research, it

is a performative which is produced by research. Researchers are therefore
complicit in producing race, and research normalises and legitimises
notions of racial difference. The significance of race changes throughout
the interview. In Butlerian terms, the report on the protests in northern
England in 2001 was ‘a repeated and ritualistic production of [Muslim]
ness’ (Butler 1993, 16).
From a Butlerian point of view, neither foregrounding the voices of the
oppressed, nor researcher-matching, nor researcher reflexivity necessarily
(or at all?) challenges the production of race via research. Butler’s work
challenges us to do research while subverting the meaning of race.
Following a Butlerian framework, subverting race might involve a num-
ber of different approaches both in the field and at the writing stage,
which include but also go beyond directly and explicitly challenging dis-
courses which claim there are essentialised/natural differences between
groups. It might also involve disrupting narratives and powerful norms,
for example, whiteness and blackness by detaching these from bodies or
identities perceived to be black or white, making race unrecognisable in
the research process, explicitly analysing race as a performative through-
out the research process, analysing the cultural and social norms which
create and shape race as a performative, addressing any interpellation by
dominant norms, such as whiteness. It might involve a shift in purpose
for research which focuses on race, or on racialised minorities, for exam-
ple, an exploration of the ways in which notions of stable racial identities
can be disrupted (Byrne 2011). Sanada (2012) calls for a ‘writing race
into absence’. By this, he does not mean not writing about it at all—
silencing something does not make it disappear. However, the challenge
is to write about it differently. As Butler argues about categories, ‘[t]he
assumption of its essential incompleteness permits that category to serve
as a permanently available site of contested meanings’ (Butler 2008, 21).
182 C. Chadderton
The notion, for example, that whiteness is legimtimised and normalised

through our continual performative constitution of it as hegemonic,
means that we can subvert it by constituting it differently. The narratives
of whiteness as hegemonic, whether these are overt or covert, need to be
challenged.
For white people, this might for example involve listening to and part-
nering with racially marginalised people in social justice projects rather
than directing and leading (Patton and Bondi 2015). For Butler, this is
important not only because of the potential social justice impact of the
individual act, but also because of what it posits (Butler in Butler and
Spivak 2007): the challenging of whiteness as hegemonic, the challenging
of whiteness as a norm, as a performative with authority, the challenging
of the meaning of the category of whiteness.
Kitching (2011) argues that employing a Butlerian framework may
prevent white people from reifying the notion of the ‘good’ white subject,
re-fixing the notion of whiteness and recentring white privilege when the
racially privileged try to take individual responsibility for challenging
hegemonic whiteness, which in fact risks recuperating racism, racial hier-
archies and fixed notions of race. Instead, Kitching takes up Butler’s
(2005) Levinasian argument that we are made inevitably responsible for
the Other without having any agency in the process. As such, responsibil-
ity and agency are separated.
For Levinas, who separates the claim of responsibility from the possibility
of agency, responsibility emerges as a consequence of the unwilled address
of the other. This is part of what he means when he claims, maddeningly,
that persecution creates a responsibility for the persecuted … Persecution
is precisely what happens without the warrant of any deed of my own. And
it returns us not to our acts and choices but to the region of existence that
is radically unwilled, the primary, inaugurating impingement on me by the
Other, one that happens to me, paradoxically, in advance of my formation
as a ‘me’. (Butler 2005, p. 85)
Kitching argues that this means firstly that the Other (in this case,
racially minoritised person or group) should lead in efforts to dismantle
whiteness, and secondly, it prevents racially privileged individuals from
emerging as coherent ‘good’ white people, with ‘good’ white attitudes,
politics and behaviours.
Breaking the link between responsibility and agency means that any act
that attempts to transgress whiteness cannot be interpreted as having taken
‘full responsibility’ for one’s limitless, immeasurably iterated, ongoing whit-
ening. (Kitching 2011: 172, author’s italics)
Rather the process of challenging hegemonic whiteness and the fixity

of race remains an ongoing process, which leaves whiteness and race as
unstable categories open to change and resignification, the racially domi-
nant taking a supportive role, and the purpose of research to interrogate
and change the terms of recognition and intelligibility.
onclusion: The Purpose and Aims of Research

C
Following Butler
In a Butlerian framework then, research constitutes both the researcher
and the researched. The purpose of research, following Butler, should be
twofold:
Firstly, an interrogation of categories, discourses and norms. Through
a Butlerian lens, these cannot be considered ‘real’ discourses, rather as
researchers we are constrained by our own social contexts and therefore
the discourses recognised and identified will depend on the researcher
(Youdell 2006, 514). However, for Butler, it is via the interrogation of
categories that they can be challenged, and ultimately, perhaps, be made
meaningless—via our awareness that it is our practices which make them
meaningful:
That the category can never be descriptive is the very condition of its politi-
cal efficacy. In this sense, what is lamented as disunity and factionalisation
for the perspective informed by the descriptive ideal is affirmed by the anti-
descriptivist perspective as the open and democratising potential of the
category. (Butler 2011, 168)
The second purpose of research should be to increase the intelligibility

of all, or in other words, to broaden category of human so that it includes
everyone as fully intelligible subjects.
184 C. Chadderton
We must understand our own contribution to creating and withholding

the conditions of possibility of particular lives. We must constantly ask
what it is that makes for a viable life and how we are each implicated in
constituting the viability or non-viability of the lives of others. (Davies
2006, 435)
As it is norms which establish the viability of the subjects, it is via the

challenging of norms which we can increase intelligibility.
Research questions based on Butler’s work might include:
• How do power, norms, discourses shape subjects in order to margin-

alise or privilege them?
• Which lives become intelligible, socially acknowledged, and which do
not? Which subjectivities are rendered viable?
• Which frameworks of intelligibility are operating, which subjects are
marginalised and which are privileged by these?
• How do frameworks of intelligibility shape our interpretations of
events/interaction/subjects? How do they shape our understanding of
events, privilege or exclude certain responses? What do they allow us
to hear, what is foreclosed? How do they shape notions of the human
and non-human?
• Via what norms is race made real?
• How is race made visible in this research and which racial frames are
operating?
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9
Conclusion: A Butlerian Approach
to Social Transformation in Education
Introduction
In this final chapter I explore the implications of Butler’s thinking for
social transformation and change. Butler’s work has been critiqued for
not having a clear framework for social transformation (as reported by for
example Lloyd 2007). This critique seems mainly to be due to the fact
that Butler’s work focuses primarily on interrogation, analysis and cri-
tique rather than explicitly on action, which may be regarded by some as
a limitation. However, as I discuss in this chapter, transformatory notions
are contained in Butler’s work. Her approach to social transformation has
also been critiqued for being focussed on the individual, rather than the
collective or institutional (for example Boucher 2006). Critical theory
tends to be underpinned by the idea that individuals must organise col-
lectively for political transformation to be effective. Whilst Butler does
not dispute the importance of collective action, she does argue that this
should not be on the basis of an essentialised subject. Rather, it can be
argued that her work potentially opens up opportunities for new coali-
tions and alliances (Ruitenberg 2010) and an understanding of the diver-
sity of ways in which oppression, based on identity categories, can

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73365-4_9
188 C. Chadderton
function. Equally, Butler does not, not support movements for equal
rights for marginalised groups. However, she argues that there is a cul-
tural template which works to disempower, which shapes all relations and
interaction, and it is this template which needs to be critiqued and chal-
lenged. Butler (2008b) argues for the
possibility of a political framework that opens up our ideas of cultural

norms to contestation and dynamism within a global frame [that] would
surely be one way to begin to think a politics that re-engages sexual free-
dom in the context of allied struggles against racism, nationalism, and the
persecution of national and religious minorities. (p. 20)
The critique also seems to be based on the fact that, as Salih (2002)
argues, Butler does not really provide answers; she asks questions: ‘Butler’s
works themselves are part of a process or a becoming which has neither
origin nor end’ (p. 3). Her ideas are not written in straight lines, and do
not flow in a single direction, and cannot be fixed as single truths.
ransformatory Implications for Thinking

T
Through Issues of Race
Firstly, Butler views the aim of social transformation to be the shifting of
cultural norms and discourses and the changing of cultural spaces. Butler’s
work concentrates on change at the level of civil society and cultural rep-
resentation, rather than at the level of the state. Indeed she sees the state
as oppressive and constitutive of limited notions of the human. For
Butler, legal action does not necessarily change cultural spaces (Butler
2008a, 52), but the cultural sphere is seen as providing a space for both
critique and transformation. As Giroux argues
Culture is the public space where common matters, shared solidarities, and
public engagements provide the fundamental elements of democracy.
Culture is also the pedagogical and political ground in which shared soli-
darities and a global public sphere can be imagined as a condition of demo-
cratic possibilities. Culture as a site of struggle offers a common space in
Conclusion: A Butlerian Approach to Social Transformation… 189
which to address the radical demand of a pedagogy that allows critical

discourse to confront the inequities of power and promote the possibilities
of shared dialogue and democratic transformation. Culture as an emanci-
patory force affirms the social as a fundamentally political space, just as
neo-liberalism attempts within the current historical moment to deny cul-
ture’s relevance as a democratic sphere and its centrality as a political neces-
sity. (Giroux 2004, 499)
Butler argues that cultural discourses structure what subject positions

are possible, and which are not. Raced subjects are constantly interpel-
lated via raced norms, as this work is never complete. Butler’s work allows
us to understand that such discourses are not ‘only’ texts, they have mate-
rial effects and shape reality.
[T]acit normative criteria form the matter of bodies [these discourses

should be understood not] as epistemological impositions on bodies, but as
the specific social regulatory ideals by which bodies are trained, shaped and
formed. (Butler 1993, 54)
Butler would argue that influencing cultural intelligibility is perhaps a

more effective way of effecting political change than political lobbying.
For Butler then, resistance to oppression is cultural. As she argues about
feminist theory, which could apply equally to race theory:
If, however, it is a life of the body beyond the law or a recovery of the body
before the law which then emerges as the normative goal of feminist the-
ory, such a norm effectively takes the focus of feminist theory away from
the concrete terms of contemporary cultural struggle. (Butler 2008a, 52)
Indeed, Butler views the ultimate goal of resistance to be the gaining of

recognition for all subjects, not only formal state recognition but also
cultural recognition in the everyday. This should not however, involve
recognition on the terms of those who are in dominant positions because
the terms of recognisability do not change if this is the case. Rather it
should involve an ongoing interrogation of the limits of intelligibility in
general (Ruitenberg 2010). It should not involve the invention of new
categories, which Butler argues will inevitably be exclusionary, rather the
190 C. Chadderton
questioning of categories and movement towards the abolition of

categories. Butler’s aim is to work towards ensuring that categories can no
longer function as categories, because they become meaningless through
work, acts and practices which challenges their boundaries.
For Butler, the idea that we aim to transform cultural spaces, discourses
and norms redirects the notion of resistance away from the individual,
and away from individual acts.
The transformation of social relations becomes a matter then, of transform-

ing hegemonic social conditions rather than the individual acts that are
spawned by those conditions. Indeed, one runs the risk of addressing the
merely indirect, if not epiphenomenal, reflection of those conditions if one
remains restricted to a politics of acts. (Butler 1990, 276)
Butler does in fact support public protest, however her main reason for
doing so is because it enacts what it aims to achieve, which is the chal-
lenging of boundaries. Several examples of this appear in her work, such
as the singing of the US national anthem in Spanish, an act which chal-
lenges the notion of the nation as white and English-speaking, implicitly
broadens the category of the nation to include other ethnic groups and
languages, and therefore challenges signals towards challenging the
notion of the US citizen-subject as of European heritage and English-
speaking and intelligibility of the US subject as also including other eth-
nic groups and speakers of other languages:
We have to understand the public exercise as enacting the freedom it posits,

and positing what is not yet there. (Butler in Butler and Spivak 2007, 69)
She has also referred to the example of the movement ‘Black lives mat-
ter’, which she argues is important because it challenges the notion of
human-as-white, both broadening the category of human so that it
includes black people, as well as rendering black people intelligible as
humans, thus rendering the category human—in dominant majoritarian
discourse always assumed to be white—potentially meaningless as it no
longer inevitably means white. This is done by challenging the notion
that only white US or European lives are grievable, so often pedalled by
the media by an outpouring of pubic grieving for black lives:
But, of course, what we are also seeing in the recent and continuing assem-
blies, rallies and vigils is an open mourning for those whose lives were cut
short and without cause, brutally extinguished. The practices of public
mourning and political demonstration converge: when lives are considered
ungrievable, to grieve them openly is protest. […] For it is often in public
spaces where such violence takes place, so reclaiming public space to oppose
both racism and violence is an act that reverberates throughout the public
sphere through various media. (Butler in Yancy and Butler 2015, n/p)
Secondly, Butler’s understanding of the subject as produced by dis-

course means that hegemonic meanings can be unsettled, the subject can
be reconstituted due to the wide range of discourses that constitute it, as
these discourses can potentially be interrupted (Butler 2004, 2010). For
Butler, there is no raw material pre-existing or beyond the workings of
power: no ‘original’ body, identity, or discourse: It is the lack of fixidity of
the material which allows for the possibility of transformation. For some
scholars, this is viewed as making it possible to ‘subvert fixed, essentialist
notions of identity – a critically important move if one’s goal is to effect
social transformation’ (Kondo 1997, 7), as well as potentially being able
to identify where race might be unmade or disrupted (Byrne 2011, 5)
and shifting focus away from stable identities such as whiteness or black-
ness (Warren and Fassett 2004; Kitching 2011). Although it has been
argued that this approach could promote an apolitical racelessness which
ignores very real structural inequalities (as reported by Nayak 2006),
Butler’s work focuses explicitly on the way in which structural oppression
occurs, and far from being unpolitical, instead argues for the eradication
of the supporting pillars of structural marginalisation such as identity
categories, which function to exclude and desubjectivate.
Furthermore, Butler’s theory of the subject is fragmented and plural,
and constructed along multiple axes of identity. This view of the subject
disrupts the perceived essential links between racial categories and phe-
notype, as identity categories are understood as performative and politi-
cal. This destabling of identity categories has the potential to disrupt
notions of ‘difference’ as natural and neutral, so often found in educa-
tional settings and research.
192 C. Chadderton
Essential to Butler’s theories of social change, the possibility of trans-

formation lies within the character of identity, of reality, as performative:
‘In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting
its reified status’ (Butler 1990, 520). For some, this is controversial as it
rejects the notion that social change is only, or at least, mainly, brought
about through conscious political action. For Butler however, conscious
political action requires an original sovereign subject, which for her is
impossible. As she argues,
A great deal of feminist theory and literature has nevertheless assumed that
there is ‘a doer’ behind the deed. Without an agent, it is argued, there can
be no agency and hence no potential to initiate a transformation of rela-
tions of domination within society. (Butler 2008a, 34)
The theory of performativity, however, allows us to understand that

aspects of life we tend to view as fixed, such as identities, are made to
appear fixed through repeated and ongoing practices, acts and utterances.
As identities are reproduced via repeated practices, there is always the
chance these will be reproduced differently. This can then function sub-
versively, as in the examples, she gives above:
The critical task is […] to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled

by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention
through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that consti-
tute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting
them. (Butler 2008a, 201)
In the end, Butler hopes, ‘the social audience, including the actors
themselves [may] come to [sincerely] believe and to [sincerely] perform
in the mode of belief ’ (Butler 1990, 271). The key to understanding
Butler’s approach to social transformation via performativity, which
many critics fail to understand, is that the transformation is about expos-
ing all identities and norms as performatives i.e. as based on nothing
concrete, no original, no authenticity.
The redescription needs to expose the reifications that tacitly serve as sub-
stantial gender cores or identities, and to elucidate both the act and the
strategy of disavowal which at once constitute and conceal gender as we
live it. (Butler 1990, 281)
Resignification actually operates whenever norms or discourses are

taken up, practised or embodied, even if it is not mobilised as subverting
dominant norms (Thiem 2008, 87). Cultural norms and discourses are
more likely to be transformed if the ‘speaker’ is seen to have authority,
which lends the discourses performative force by strengthening the dis-
courses of subversion.
This notion of social transformation being integral to the notion of the
social world being performatively shaped is not dissimilar to ideas of
postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha, who argues that everything cul-
tural, including identities, are constructed in a
contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation [which] constitutes the

discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and
symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same
signs can be appropriated, translated, re-historicised and read anew.
(Bhabha 1994, 37)
Some have argued that the process of redescription or resignification

cannot be understood as subversive or political (as discussed by for exam-
ple, Bell 1999c), however, again this critique seems to depend on the
notion of a conscious agent acting politically, which is an idea Butler
rejects.
Thirdly, Butler’s notion of social transformation is driven, particularly
in her later writing, by the concept of attaining a liveable life for all:
What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is livable
only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is
unlivable for some. (Butler 2004, 8)
For Butler, all norms are coercive, and all are tied to cultural frame-
works and are culturally specific. Butler’s answer is to work towards
providing the conditions of a liveable life, or a viable life, for all subjects.
194 C. Chadderton
All subjects should be intelligible. She argues that we should address

intelligibility by interrogating how certain lives and subjects are enabled
or foreclosed and by changing frameworks of intelligibility. Butler argues
for the interrogation of norms, not the institution of new ones, which
would further constrain and essentialise the possibilities for the subject
by introducing new ‘truths’, which in turn would further exclude other
‘truths’. She warns us that such projects risk becoming static truths about
identities which cannot be fulfilled by subjects and do not allow for any-
thing beyond themselves. This new normalising would simply patholo-
gise. Political recognition requires the fixing of characteristics which
ultimately serves to normalise and thus to exclude. The political recogni-
tion of specific cultural identities serves to fix those aspects of identities
and exclude others, and ultimately shifts attention towards certain fea-
tures rather than inequalities in terms of resource and wealth distribu-
tion, for example. In work which employs a Butlerian framework, the
focus should thus not be on recognising specific identities or groups. It
should be about interrogating whose lives are valued and creating the
conditions for all lives to be valued, intelligible and liveable.
What Does This Mean for Education?

Others have argued that schooling and education today tends to be
depoliticised (see for example, Giroux 2000, 2004). Butler’s thinking
provides a challenge to this, allowing us to see culture as political and also
pedagogical terrain, and that pedagogical spaces are inherently political.
Giroux (2004) argues that
the very processes of learning constitute the political mechanisms through

which identities are shaped, desires are mobilized, and experiences take on
form and meaning within those collective conditions and larger forces that
constitute the realm of the social. (p. 499)
For Butler, knowledge, identities, subject positions and values are dis-
cursively and performatively produced and reproduced within particular
social and cultural arrangements and settings. This means that in a
Butlerian framework of understanding, explicitly educational spaces are

political, and also all cultural spaces are spaces of learning.
In her response to recent work on schooling by German scholars,
Butler calls for us to ‘develop a critique of the school as it seeks to repro-
duce the subjects legible for the nation and for the broader, hegemonic
economic order’ (Butler 2014, 180), focussing in particular on the way in
which schooling aims to produce subjects who are intelligible within spe-
cific raced, gendered and classed structures. This can be both interrogated
and disrupted by educationalists, practitioners and researchers. Equally,
Kitching (2011) argues that Butler’s tools offer us the potential to develop
‘radical race pedagogies’. Taking up Butler’s argument that a person is
subjectivated through norms and discourses, we can explore how indi-
viduals are constituted as different kinds of beings: black or white, male
or female, troublemaker or good student, ‘to search out the ways in which
things were made fixed and apparently unchangeable’ (Davies and
Gannon 2005, 5). This approach could help us not take for granted what
we think we know in education: as the subject cannot pre-exist its subjec-
tification, it has little choice but to accept and act its position if it wants
to survive in society. Therefore a student is so, or acts as such, because she
has been designated as such (Youdell 2006b). Butler would argue that
meaning cannot be fixed once and for all, which means all discourses can
be redeployed and redeployed differently. As Youdell puts it, ‘…nobody
is necessarily anything and so what it means to be teacher, a student, a
learner might be opened up to radical rethinking’ (2006a, 43). Equally,
the instability of categories means that the notion of race itself can be
troubled, it is not in fact fixed (Kitching 2011). If the student (or indeed,
a colleague) were designated differently, she would be different (Youdell
2006b, 519). Therefore changes in practice and policy can destabilise
certainties and reform and re-inscribe subjectivities, changing for exam-
ple what it means to be black, white, minority ethnic, a pupil, a teacher,
a British person.
Scholars have looked at how this might play out in educational spaces,
mostly focussing on heteronormativity as the hegemonic norm to be
challenged. For example, Atkinson and DePalma (2009) argue that het-
erosexual hegemony cannot exist once we withdraw our consent, and ask,
how can we therefore disorganise consent? Following Butler, they argue
196 C. Chadderton
that rather than just stamping on homophobia, teachers should be

empowered to promote new, intelligible identities. The aim is not to have
the Other included in existing frameworks, rather it is to challenge het-
erosexual hegemony and our complicity in that. Butler (2011) asks,
If one comes into discursive life through being called or hailed in injurious
terms, how might one occupy the interpellation by which one is already
occupied to direct the possibilities of resignification against the aims of
violation? (p. 123)
Atkinson and DePalma (2008) suggest developing ‘an imaginary of the

homonormative’ to challenge heteronormativity, arguing that
the act of hailing other not-heterosexuals as legitimate constitutes the not-

heterosexual both as intelligible and as having discursive agency, thus creat-
ing the possibility for new citations to reconstitute new legitimate subjects.
(Atkinson and DePalma 2008:30)
What would the withdrawal of our consent for hegemonic norms of

racial difference look like? How could teachers, and other educational
practitioners, be empowered to promote new, intelligible identities which
do not reify race, whilst still affirming students’, and their own, lived expe-
riences of race? Such questions are not easily answered and will require
constant, ongoing work and questioning. Employing a Butlerian approach
to addressing race and racism in education would focus on interrogating
the education system and educational practices and discourses, and the
way these produce raced subjects, as this book has done. The aim would
be to unsettle race as an ontological category, challenging the more usual
hegemonic norms and essentialising notions of fixed racial difference. It
would also mean aiming to abolish race as a signifier and as a privilege,
which has similarities with Ignatiev and Garvey’s (1996) notion of abol-
ishing of whiteness (often misunderstood as advocating the abolishment
of white people, Ignatiev and Garvey in fact advocate the abolition of
whiteness as a signifier of privilege). It would reject a behaviourist approach
to dealing with racism in educational institutions. It would involve a
destabilisation of the ‘certainties’ of whiteness (Kitching 2011).
The question arises as to whether social transformation via education

can really work without it being a mass movement. Butler talks of the
creation of new political ‘convergences’, ‘alliances’ or ‘collectivities’
(Butler2007, 2008b), which can be antagonistic, heterogeneous and plu-
ral in nature. Youdell (2011), drawing on Butler, argues that potentially
radical, seemingly individual acts ‘have the potential to shift meaning
over time and that a shift from a focus on personal freedom [can shift] to
a focus on the operations of the state’ (p. 134). This can be seen as raising
the possibility that what appear to be individual acts can be repeated in
different spaces to challenge hegemonic norms, or they may also include
a more conscious sharing of knowledges, thoughts and practices and col-
lective thinking. In this way these ‘new collectivities’ can be made up of
very distinct individuals and groups, who may or may be consciously
working together towards educational change. Youdell (2011) suggests
that education be reimagined ‘as a space of open-endedness, dialogue and
possibility; as a space of becoming’ (p. 143).
Potential exercises or pedagogical tools based on Butler’s work to use
with students or colleagues in education might include the following:
• Rather than presenting race as a truth, trying to understand where

racial identities come from and how they are produced;
• Interrogate how different gazes produce different interpretations of the
same issue;
• Consider the conditions for a liveable life for different social groups;
• Explore the multiple influences on identities and show how these con-
stantly shift;
• Interrogate racial categories, norms and discourses in order to unsettle
perceived ontological categories;
• Subvert racial stereotypes in order to reinscribe meanings;
• Identify identities which are often unintelligible in educational spaces
and interrogate how they can be made intelligible.
‘This reinscription may be risky, and may not always work,’ warn
Atkinson and DePalma (2008, 30). However, for Butler, where our
obligations towards others do not depend on cultural sameness but on
social plurality, race should be constantly interrogated in our ongoing
work towards creating the conditions for a livable life for all.
198 C. Chadderton
Conclusion
According to Butler then, race is not a pre-given, rather it is constituted
via the education system, education policy, and in educational spaces, as
well as beyond. Subjects become intelligible by performing legitimate
racial subjectivities. These racialised subjectivities are both already legiti-
mated, but also (re)produced educationally: ‘One “exists” not only by vir-
tue of being recognized, but in a prior sense, by being recognizable’ (Butler
1997, 5, Butler’s italics). Those subjects who do not appear to be perform-
ing legitimate subjecthoods—those whose subjecthoods do not (appear
to) match dominant social and racialised norms, will often be perceived as
unintelligible: these non-normative subjecthoods will simply not be rec-
ognised or accepted. Indeed, ‘our status as human rests on our recognisa-
bility – livable lives depend on this recognition’ (Youdell 2011, 43). They
may moreover face actions whereby others attempt to reinstate the norms.
Many have considered it controversial that the focus of Butler’s work is
not equal rights, despite her main interests including power and oppres-
sion. However, although she actively supports equal rights and those who
work towards these, the focus of her work is cultural and for her, social
transformation occurs culturally. Social transformation, according to
Butler lies in
the possibility for the speech act to take on non-ordinary meaning, to func-
tion in contexts where it has not belonged, [which] is precisely the political
promise of the performative, one that positions the performative at the
center of a politics of hegemony, one that offers an unanticipated political
future for deconstructive thinking. (1997, 161)
When exploring race in education, a Butlerian approach would aim to

unsettle or subvert the idea that race is a fixed identity, biological or cultural.
Such subversion would potentially expose the assumed fixedness, truth and
naturalness of racial, racialised and racialising discourses as non-original
and constructed. A Butlerian approach would aim for a performative rein-
scribing of identities, it would seek ways of legitimating non-normative
identities, reinscribing non-normative identities as legitimate, and ensuring
these are recognised as culturally and socially legitimate.
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Index1
A Anti-foundationalist, 4, 6, 12, 18,

Accents, 17, 54, 70, 101, 102, 41, 76, 177
115, 131 Archer, Louise, 9, 138
Acting black, 16, 115, 120, 121, Arendt, Hannah, 151
125, 126 Asianness, 7, 41, 110
Acting white, 16, 53, 109–128 Aspirations, 12, 13, 16, 17, 39, 41,
Africa, 98, 99 131–145
Agamben, Giorgio, 71, 150, 153–155 Australian school, 40
Agency, 17, 51, 71–73, 110, 126, Authentic identities, 56, 73, 114, 168
127, 132, 137, 142–145, 177, Autonomous subjects, 177
182, 183, 196
collaborative, 140, 144
individual, 17, 71, 109, 132, 137, B
142–144, 177, 182 Ball, Stephen J., 5, 111, 112
Ahmed, Sara, 31, 32, 96, 176 Bare life, 152–154, 161
Al Qa’ida, 103, 161 Bell, Vikki, 3, 50, 52, 54, 68, 193
Alternative fuer Deutschland, 2 Bhabha, Homi, 4, 5, 33, 34, 41,
Andreotti, Vanessa, 30, 32 155, 193
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73365-4
204 Index
Black lives matter, 190 Critical Race Theory (CRT), 3, 14,

Blackness, 3, 7, 16, 19, 28, 41, 51, 27–30, 32, 41
55, 110, 111, 113, 115, 121, Cultural representation, 18, 66,
123–127, 174, 181, 191 68, 188
Brexit, 2
Bridging the Gap (report by the
Social Exclusion Unit), 135 D
British citizens, 15, 81, 84, 85, 88, Democracy, 33, 62, 64, 75, 85,
94, 97 105n1, 133, 150, 153, 183,
British National Party (BNP), 91, 92 188, 189
Britishness, 15, 16, 83, 86–88, 90, 92, Deracialisation, 9, 10
93, 100, 102, 104, 105, 163 Disadvantage, 6–8, 10, 15, 18, 28, 29,
Byrne, Bridget, 1, 3, 4, 19, 54, 57, 31, 54, 63, 81, 85, 111, 121,
113, 181, 191 133–136, 140, 168–170, 178
Diversity, 6, 32, 33, 40, 41, 85–87,
94, 96, 178, 187
C Doer behind the deed, 61, 171, 192
Cameron, David, 135, 136 Du Bois, W.E.B., 3
Capitalism, 2, 33, 132
Carbado, Devon W., 6, 30, 121, 125
Careers work, 132, 139 E
Carver, Terrell, 1, 48, 61, 69, 72, 177 Education Maintenance
Chambers, Samuel A., 1, 48, 61, 69, Allowance, 10
72, 177 Emancipation, 18, 33, 62, 63, 71,
Citizenship, 13, 15, 41, 71, 81–105, 75, 171
134–136, 144, 150, 153, 154 English Baccalaureate, 10
Citizenship Education (CE), 15, Entrepreneurial, 8, 136, 145
81–105 Essentialised/essentialising/
Civilisation/civilised, 96, 97, 101, 160 essentialisation, 4, 6, 7, 11, 12,
Civil society, 18, 133, 188 19, 30, 34–37, 41, 98, 99,
Coalition government, 9, 136 103, 119, 124, 125, 127, 128,
Colonialism, 50, 83, 101, 102 169, 170, 181, 187, 196
Colour blind/blindness, 7, 9, Eurocentric, 33
92–99, 119
Connexions service, 139
Conservative government, 9, 136 F
Counter-terrorism (agenda), 12, 17, Fanon, Frantz, 4, 5, 33, 34, 41, 50,
18, 149, 150, 158 51, 55, 60, 83, 120, 155
Crick Report, 85–87, 105n1 Femininity, 37–39, 49, 114, 115
Index
205
Feminism, 35, 36, 62 Human, beyond the, 58, 59

Foucault, Michel, 5, 17, 50, 69, 71, Human, less than, 58–60, 71, 152,
72, 111, 137, 149, 163 154, 162
Front National, 2
I
G Ideal learner, 37, 123
Gender, 1, 4, 11, 13, 15, 28, 29, Ignatiev, Noel, 120, 196
31, 34, 35, 37–41, 48, 52–54, Imperialism, 18, 97, 98, 150, 163
62, 63, 65, 67–69, 71, 73, Individualsim, 2, 5, 8, 9, 11–13,
74, 76, 81, 84, 88, 102, 103, 15–17, 19, 28, 29, 35, 37, 38,
110, 113–115, 118, 125, 127, 48–50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58–60,
131, 133, 134, 161, 167, 174, 62, 67–69, 71, 72, 81, 84, 85,
193, 195 88, 90–93, 104, 109–115,
German schools, 40 119, 121, 125, 127, 128,
Gillborn, David, 8–10, 28, 29, 85, 132–144, 152, 154, 158, 159,
86, 90, 105n1 163, 169–175, 177, 182, 187,
Gilroy, Paul, 4, 41, 124 190, 195, 197
Giroux, Henry, 8, 64, 67, 132, 133, Intelligibility, 7, 12, 14–19, 36, 38,
143, 188, 189, 194 39, 41, 47, 56–60, 75, 83, 84,
Global Citizenship, 98 88, 94, 102, 115, 119, 131,
Gove, Michael, 135 145, 172, 177–180, 183, 184,
Governmentality, 17, 70, 189, 190, 194–198
149–152, 157 Interpellation, 37, 40, 49, 53, 88,
Grievable life, 156 113, 123, 156, 167, 173, 181,
Guantanamo Bay, 59, 151 189, 196
Gulati, Mitu, 6, 30, 121, 125 Islam, 92, 154, 156, 160–162
Gunaratnam, Yasmin, 48, 174
J
H Johnson, Patrick E., 64, 71
Hall, Stuart, 62, 64, 67, 94, 157
Harvey, David, 151
Heteronormativity, 11, 38, 41, 49, K
116, 124, 195, 196 King, Rodney, 51
Heterosexual matrix, 38, 39, 145 Kitching, Karl, 1, 82, 83, 88, 101–103,
Higher Education, 17, 139, 149–164 134, 182, 183, 191, 195, 196
HIV, 90, 91 Knowledge, 18, 32, 33, 76, 84, 94,
Homo sacer, 153, 163 99, 102, 159, 167–169, 172,
hooks, bell, 35, 36, 105 173, 175–177, 179, 194, 197
206 Index
L O
Ladson-Billings, Gloria, 28, 29 Obama, Barack, 2, 8
Lawrence, Stephen, 85 Omi, Michael, 2, 4, 7, 68, 71
Leonardo, Zeus, 30–32, 114 Ontological status (of race), 4–6, 48,
Liveable life, 75, 193, 197 81, 128, 153
Lloyd, Moya, 63, 67, 71, 74, 187 Orientalism, 40, 156, 160
Loizidou, Elena, 1, 70
London Bombings, 91
P
Parody, 16, 73, 74, 82, 99–105
M Pedagogy, 73, 99, 109, 132–134,
MacPherson Inquiry, 85 189, 195
Marketisation, 2 Phenomenology, 30
Martin, Travyon, 60 Political, 2, 3, 6, 7, 15, 17–19, 30,
Marxism, 30, 33 34, 47, 54, 58, 60–67, 70–72,
Marxist theory, 3 75, 76, 82–84, 86, 92, 104,
Masculinity, 37–39, 49, 57, 63 105, 105n1, 125, 126,
Meritocracy, 7–10, 29 132–134, 152, 153, 155, 157,
Mirza, Heidi Safia, 28, 35, 124 162, 164, 174, 179, 183,
Monocultural, 15, 87, 94, 95, 99, 187–189, 191–195, 197, 198
104, 105, 174 Positionality, 6, 35, 175, 176
Muslimness, 156 Postcolonialism, 5, 8, 32–34, 41, 55,
Muslims, 10, 12, 17, 18, 91, 92, 95, 69, 83, 99, 141–143, 145,
96, 103, 132, 142–145, 150, 171, 193
155–157, 161–163, 181 Postcolonial theory, 32
Post-racial, 7, 10, 124
Poststructuralism, 33, 61
N Poverty, 7, 98, 134–136
Nayak, Anoop, 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 54, 55, Power, 1, 4, 9, 10, 17, 27, 33, 34,
114, 169, 180, 191 38, 41, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56,
Nazism, 91, 92 60–62, 66–69, 71, 72, 74, 75,
Neoliberal/ism, 2, 7–10, 17, 111, 83, 84, 86, 92, 102, 104, 116,
112, 131–136, 138–145, 151, 119, 124, 125, 128, 133, 142,
152, 163, 177, 189 149–153, 155, 157, 163, 164,
New Labour, 9, 88, 135 174–177, 184, 189, 191, 198
Normativity, 31 Precarity, 133
Index
207
Prejudice, 15, 67, 85, 90–92, 96 Sexuality, 1, 4, 11, 29, 34, 35, 38,
Prevent, 10, 17, 18, 90, 149–164, 182 39, 62, 69, 71, 167
Propaganda, 91 Social constructionism, 3, 31, 69,
70, 113, 127
Social constructionist, 3, 4
Q Social exclusion, 135, 136
Qualitative research, 14, 168–170, Social inequality, 136
177, 178 Social justice, 18, 84, 169–177, 182
Social transformation, 5, 12, 14, 15,
18, 62, 65, 71, 76, 126,
R 187–198
Race Relations (Amendment) Act Sovereignty, 17, 71, 149–164
(2000), 86 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 32, 33,
Racial frame, 5, 18, 50, 51, 75, 82, 105, 153, 154, 161,
142–145, 150, 154–157, 168, 171, 182, 190
162, 184 State of emergency, 17, 71, 149, 150,
Racial specificity, 4, 5, 41 154, 163
Racism, institutional, 8, 85, 121 State of exception, 150–153, 155,
Racism, structural, 8, 9, 13, 85 159–160, 163
Radicalisation, 157–159, 163 State power, 17, 149–164
Reflexivity, 175–176, 181 State violence, 149, 161
Researcher-matching, 174, 181 Structural discrimination, 29
Research methodology, 14, 175 Subversive, 74, 113, 192, 193
Research questions, 180, 184 Surveillance, 10, 71, 82, 152, 155,
Resignification, 73, 183, 193, 196 156, 163
Resilience, 133, 134, 136, 143
Resistance, 5, 12, 15, 19, 64, 66,
71–73, 99–105, 112, 127, T
189, 190 Thiem, Annika, 68, 76, 137, 138,
Rollock, Nicola, 28, 30, 31 143, 167, 176, 179, 193
Thomas, Kendall, 54
Threat, 2, 13, 17, 18, 40, 41, 54, 60,
S 71, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 93, 94,
Said, Edward, 33, 40, 94, 168, 179 97, 102, 104, 105, 134, 149,
Secondary schools, 15, 17, 84, 88, 150, 154, 156, 157, 159–163
121 Tolerance/t, 15, 86, 89–94, 104, 105
Security, 13, 64, 151, 155–164 Troops to Teachers, 10
Self-definition, 56, 127, 175 Trump, Donald, 2
208 Index
U White hegemony, 12, 32, 40, 49, 70,

Underclass, 9 71, 111, 126, 176
Unemployment, 8, 9, 103, 141 Whiteness, 3, 7, 9, 14, 16, 19, 27,
Ungrievable, 60, 191 30–32, 40, 41, 51, 54, 55, 57,
Unified subject, 15, 47, 49, 61, 63 88, 93, 98, 104, 109–128,
Unintelligibility, 17, 132 142, 143, 173, 174, 178,
Unviable identities, 12, 59 181–183, 191, 196
White privilege, 2, 6, 30, 32,
118, 182
V White supremacy, 29, 60, 90, 120
Viable identities, 12, 58 Winant, Howard, 2–4, 7, 68, 71
Vocation/al, 32, 131 Worklessness, 136
Voice, 18, 29, 30, 32, 55, 61, 97, 99,
100, 104, 167–184
Y
Yancy, George, 54, 60, 191
W Youdell, Deborah, 1, 11, 12, 28, 30,
War on terror, 5, 9, 18, 71, 150, 35–40, 53, 66, 69, 73, 88, 97,
151, 154–156, 160–163 99, 102, 103, 127, 145, 162,
Welfare, 2, 132, 136, 151 183, 195, 197, 198

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Judith

Judith Butler, Race

ISBN 978-3-319-73364-7 ISBN 978-3-319-73365-4 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934906

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover design by Fatima Jamadar

Printed on acid-free paper

2 Judith Butler, Race and Education: What Can a Butlerian

3 The Work of Judith Butler and the Study of Race 47

4 Race as a Hegemonic Norm: Citizenship Education

5 Making Whiteness and Acting White: The Performativity

6 Aspirations and Intelligible Subjects 131

7 The ‘Prevent’ Agenda in Higher Education: Sovereignty

8 The Role of Race in Research Through a Butlerian Lens:

9 Conclusion: A Butlerian Approach to Social

Judith Butler’s work is variously regarded as radical, liberating, complex,

© The Author(s) 2018 1

c­ haracteristics believed to be natural properties of certain bodies, as

constructed, or how people come to be located in racialised spaces. On

than a pre-given or fixed identity, a Butlerian view of race is of race as a

seen as naïve or overly liberal, or it could end up perpetuating racial dis-

terms through which identity is articulated’ (p. 203). An understanding

discourse was the way in which the election of Barack Obama to US

[S]uccess is attributed to...entrepreneurial genius while those who do not

Equally if a group identified as a racial, ethnic or religious group is

Ideally, within a neoliberal theorization of society, the success of the indi-

Neoliberal regimes in fact further marginalise minority ethnic popula-

Despite the deracialisation of policy, educational experiences and out-

­ resenting essentialised categories, and implying that race is a valid physi-

A Butlerian Framework for Race in Education

examined how non-normative identities, such as non-heterosexual, are

Of course Butler’s work does not provide us with a ‘truth’ or an access

• How are racial norms cited by individuals and policies in education

The Structure of the Book

Butler’s work offers a framework in which race can be seen as a hege-

parody which subverts hegemonic norms of Britishness, and which, while

liberal context. Firstly, I provide an analysis of a political focus on aspira-

Atkinson, Elizabeth, and Renee DePalma. 2008. Imagining the homonorma-

———. 2014. Epilogue. In (Re-)Produktion von Ungleichheiten im Schulalltag.

Pool, Helen. 2006. Citizenship as peformativity: Is citizenship democratic or disci-

This chapter functions as a bridging chapter between the introduction

© The Author(s) 2018 27

Research on Race and Education

inequality but to sustain it at manageable levels’ (Gillborn 2008, n/p).

reproduction of dominance rather than subordination, normativity

(or not). Equally Leonardo (2009) argues that ‘[w]hiteness is less of an

to ‘civilise’, ‘modernise’ and ‘develop’ the colonised Other, as a form of

Well over 100 years later, and intersectionality tends now to be linked

the decentring of the ‘normative subject’ of feminism and the multiplic-

J udith Butler and the Production of Gendered

Youdell (e.g. 2006a) employs a Butlerian framework to explore educa-

Much scholarship employing a Butlerian framework to explore educa-

I use the term heterosexual matrix … to designate that grid of cultural

fixed notions of gender, but also of sexuality. Scholars employing a Butlerian

Discourses and practices of homophobia, (hetero)sexism and misogyny all

Youdell (2006b) for example, employed a Butlerian framework to

by scholars in education to analyse the constitution of educational sub-

Atkinson, Elizabeth, and Renee DePalma. 2008. Imagining the homonormative:

Chadderton, Charlotte, and Casey Edmonds. 2015. Refugees and access to

———. 1994. Teaching to transgress. Education as the practice of freedom.

Pilkington, Andrew. 2014. The sheer weight of whiteness in the academy. In

Warren, John T. 2001. Doing whiteness. On the performative dimensions of

In this chapter, I consider some of Butler’s main ideas, and investigate

© The Author(s) 2018 47

2 Judith Butler, Race and Education: What Can a Butlerian

3 The Work of Judith Butler and the Study of Race 47

4 Race as a Hegemonic Norm: Citizenship Education

5 Making Whiteness and Acting White: The Performativity

6 Aspirations and Intelligible Subjects 131

7 The ‘Prevent’ Agenda in Higher Education: Sovereignty

8 The Role of Race in Research Through a Butlerian Lens:

9 Conclusion: A Butlerian Approach to Social

c haracteristics believed to be natural properties of certain bodies, as

resenting essentialised categories, and implying that race is a valid physi-

A Butlerian Framework for Race in Education

The Structure of the Book

Research on Race and Education

J udith Butler and the Production of Gendered

Subjectivation: Race as a Hegemonic Norm

Butler and the Politics of Race