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This essay compares Judith Butler's and Erving Goffman's theoretical contributions to performance and performativity with the goal of bridging their approaches, usually seen as mutually incompatible. Using eighteenth-century women's politeness as a case study, it argues that politeness is a practice that is essentially both performed and performative; analysing it as such offers us valuable new information on eighteenth-century subjectivities. The essay suggests that combining performance and performativity can be used to reconceptualize agency and find a way out of the Butlerian impasse of the impossibility of resistance. Performance thus has the potential to confound the paralyzing non-agency of performativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this project is to explore why, given United States women's historical struggle to gain legal and social acceptance of nontraditional naming forms, the overwhelming majority of women continue to follow tradition and adopt their husbands' names upon marriage. To begin to explain this phenomenon, this study focused on Catholic women, who changed their names between 1940 and 1998. This article illustrates the role tradition plays in participants' worldview and how tradition influences their behavior and attitudes toward naming practices. The naming behaviors and attitudes of the women in this study are then analyzed within a larger sociocultural and political context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]