Performativity is a process that implies being acted on in ways we do not always fully understand, and of acting, in politically consequential ways. Performativity has everything to do with “who” can become produced as a recognizable subject, a subject who is living, whose life is worth sheltering and whose life, when lost, would be worthy of mourning. Precarious life characterizes such lives who do not qualify as recognizable, readable, or grievable. And in this way, precariety is rubric that brings together women, queers, transgender people, the poor, and the stateless. It is worth remembering that one of the main questions that queer theory posed in light of the AIDS crisis was this: how does one live with the notion that one’s love is not considered love, and one’s loss is not considered loss? How does one live an unrecognizable life? If what and how you love is already a kind of nothing or nonexistence, how can you possibly explain the loss of this non-thing, and how would it ever become publicly grievable? Something similar happens when the loss or disappearance of whole populations becomes unmentionable or when the law itself prohibits an investigation of those who committed such atrocities. For the queer movement, this was emphatically the case with AIDS, and remains the situation on the African continent and for all those populations throughout the globe who have no access to new drugs or no way to pay for them. These are but a few of the ways in which the differential distribution of grievability takes place, and when it does not actually lead to the annihilation of those who are already socially lost or socially dead, it ties them in knots without hope of ever becoming undone.

(Judith Butler "Performativity, Precariety and Sexual Politics")