 Material offered by speech act theories in philosophy—by J. L. Austin (1962) and John Searle (1969)—have given rise to “speech act” theater studies and performance theories. This is perhaps because the idea of thinking of a word “not as [an expression of an] idea but as action, as gesture” was already a familiar albeit contested idea among such theorists (Carlson 1984 [1993: 398]). These philosophical theories about the nature of language utterance hold that there are more ways in which to communicate some attitude about a content than by asserting it first and only then expressing an attitude (see §3 of the entry on  speech acts  as well as §5.2 and §6.1 of the entry on  assertion  in this Encyclopedia). A performative utterance is one that aims at achieving some state of affairs in the world rather than reporting whether the state of affairs obtains, and such an utterance could fail due to certain “infelicities” of circumstance of speaker, listener, or environment. Interestingly both Austin and Searle thought that the utterances of actors, because actors were merely pretending to do things (see  §2.2),  were not genuinely performative utterances. However, these ideas about performative utterances gave rise to views like Judith Butler’s—who used them in an argument, specifically with respect to gender, that we should “take the social agent as an object rather than the subject of [a] constitutive [speech] act” and that we should 