Word.ws English Dictionary

performativity

performativity noun: the capacity of language and expressive actions to perform a type of being.

Noun

performativity (countable and uncountable, plural performativities)

  1. The capacity of language and expressive actions to perform a type of being.
  2. The quality of being performative.
    • Keeping both American theater and its double within the sight lines, I would like to look at MPD as a pathology in which both both performativity and social performance are outstripped by a mise-en-scène that veers past the merely performative and dangerously close to theater itself, threatening to...2002, Anthony Kubiak, Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty, →ISBN

Synonyms of performativity

Forms of performativity

pluralperformativities

Origin of performativity

From performative + -ity.

Questions about performativity

What does performativity mean?
Performativity means the capacity of language and expressive actions to perform a type of being.
What part of speech is performativity?
Performativity is a noun.
What is the plural of performativity?
The plural of performativity is performativities.

Words near performativity in the dictionary

  1. performatively
  2. performativeness
  3. performatives
  4. performativism
  5. performativities
  6. performativity
  7. performators
  8. performatory
  9. performaunce
  10. performaunces
  11. performe

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: performativity (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “performativity.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/performativity. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.