‘POSTED: No Trespassing’: On the Performativity of Property and Gender as Intertwined Social Practices of Power

Abstract

This article aims to reconsider what property is and how it functions to critically scrutinise it as a matter of power. I rely on gender performativity theory to interpret contemporary research on property as a social practice and offer to think about property as equally performed. I suggest that property, just like gender, functions as a script for interpersonal engagement that determines what one can or cannot do and requires social recognition or enforcement as well as repetitive enactment to produce effect, that is, to operationalise a relationship of power. Reconceptualising property as performance also helps to elucidate how property participates in gendering the social world. Having argued that property and gender constitute intertwined practices of social power, I suggest that to perform property is, at least in some instances, to perform gender and vice versa. As a result, I contend that subversive gender practices can be read as subversive property practices and that property law constitutes a promising site for feminist theorising and reform.