This paper is a critical engagement with some of the writings of Judith Butler who is perhaps best known for popularising the idea of gender as performative. Here we trace the origins of the notion of performatives in the work of J.L. Austin. We outline Butler's extended definition of performative gender and comment on its relationship to earlier sociological accounts. We follow her development of the idea through the later deployment of Derrida's notion of citationality. We draw attention to potential problems of this usage and to the difficulties of linking it to a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity. We consider her extended example of drag as sharing the impersonatory character of gender and as allegorizing the melancholic character of heterosexual gender identity. We comment on her interest in a theatrical politics that may make trouble for gender. Finally we consider the theoretical burden that these ideas attempt to carry.

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The article examines the inter-implication between Foucault's and Derrida's representations of one another's work in the debate over Histoire de la folie and discovers a chiasmic structure between them, an inverted mirroring of each in the other, in which philosophy and historicity alternately encompass and exceed one another. At the heart of this is a problem of language (and the reason that accompanies it), which defines the limitations of the historian's work.

This paper is a contribution to a long standing debate over the nature of research and the relations between knowledge and power recently instantiated in exchanges over the criticisms of Hammersley (Hammersley, 1992, 1995, 1997; Gelsthorpe, 1992; Ramazanoglu, 1992; Williams, 1993; Hammersley & Gomm, 1997a and 1997b; Romm, 1997; Temple, 1997). It takes as its starting point Beth Humphries’ recent critical commentary on Hammersley and emancipatory research, and her attempt to ‘go beyond ourselves’ (Humphries, 1997). It argues that the logical endpoint of arguments that suggest the continuous salience of the social divisions commonly found in the current sociological lexicon is a bewildering impossibility and that they should not be taken as guidelines for research practice. It clarifies this critique in relation to ‘gender’. It further argues that Humphries's position, despite her apparent sympathy for post-structuralism, retains much from earlier structuralist positions, which undermines the basis of her attempt to develop a position beyond the constraints of current emancipatory research.