How to Transform Yourself from Your Kitchen Table: Performance,Citation,and Subject Refashioning in Concerned Women for America

Abstract

The sociology of performance and action has primarily focused on how actors are able to create new renderings of the social world. However, this perspective has yet to explore the process through which new formations of power become encoded and forms enduring structures. In this article, I analyze the rise and spread of the evangelical activist organization Concerned Women for America to show how performances of the self serve as the basis for more stable structures of social relations. I argue that these initial performances provide frameworks of action and interpretation that serve as an ethical repertoire that people may draw on as techniques of agentive subject formation. The everyday performative work of subjects thus serves as the actualization of new expressions of power invoked by dramatic performances. I develop the theoretical language of subject refashioning to highlight how frameworks for subjectivity serve as the deeper process affected by performances.