City and Performativity: Normative Ruptures in the Informal Public Space — A Case Study in the City of Recife, Brazil

Abstract

By questioning the idea of a hegemonic city and with totalizing structures, this article takes the bodies in the urban space as a way to argue the normative structures and, therefore, seeks to investigate the thinking of the city for various performativities, by taking into account bodies beyond certain normatives. To this end, the concepts of performativity of the philosopher Judith Butler (1990/2020) and the concepts of micropolitics and macropolitics of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980/1996) are used for the interpretation and construction of the research, through which it was possible to understand the segmentation of the everyday doing. Those segments can be characterized as linear (the historical processes), circular (the territory occupations) and binary (the social dualities). The application process in the field of the concepts studied was carried out in Brazil, in the city of Recife, and the area chosen was the surroundings of the São José market, located in the historical center, where existed an intense informal trade activity until 2019. The investigation was structured in interpreting how some of the social segmentarities of this space conform, with the objective of characterising the relations of spatial appropriation by the performative bodies. Consequently, the enunciation of a concept was reached as a result to characterize the relationship between the bodies and the observed area: the disruptive performative spaces. Therefore, this work seeks to contribute to the practice of urbanism, by proposing a more inclusive look at the city.