The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature, ed. Douglas A. Vakoch and Sabine Sharp (2024), 29-39    :::   DOI: 10.4324/9781003365938-4    

Performativity—how language tacitly or overtly affects social actions—is the core of all utterances and imaginative literature. This chapter examines transness through a theory of trans performativity. Specifically, this chapter engages what might be called body-swap narratives in a global context that were not labeled as trans, including Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Sally Potter’s film adaptation of it, Makoto Shinkai’s film Your Name, the Wachowski Sisters’ Matrix trilogy, as well as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Trevor Nunn’s and Andy Fickman’s film versions of the comedy.

      Joubin’s theory of performativity hinges on the ideas that gender are social practices and interpersonal relationships that evolve over time and in different social spaces and that these practices are constituted, and sometimes undermined, by performative speech acts. Performativity destabilizes the idea of singularity and the perceived absolutism of such signifiers as gender.