Social Text has been an important forum for the development of performance studies, and a productive space for debates around performativity as well. That is probably primarily due to the journal's hospitability to the development of trans and queer studies (see "Queer and Disorderly" in this issue). Indeed, while some in the field of performance studies proper might gnash their teeth at the thought, it is likely the case that, to a broader intellectual world, performativity and queer performativity are almost synonymous, no doubt in part due to the work of Social Text. (The other area to which Social Text has contributed important strands of performance theorization--contemporary popular culture, especially although not exclusively black popular culture -- is hardly likely to placate some purists.) If "performance" as a concept exists in a permanent and productive tension with "performativity," one in which neither term can fully extricate itself from or, alternatively, subsume, the other, Social Text has been among the few intellectual venues to consistently foreground, rather than anxiously resolve, that tension.
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