"PERFORMATIVE HUMILITY" Research Paper Publication

Elite Appropriation of Low-Status Labels in Contemporary Chinese Post-Disciplinary Academic Discourse

This article examines a recurring discursive phenomenon in contemporary Chinese post-disciplinary academic culture whereby elite institutions and their affiliates adopt lower-status labels as ironic forms of self-description. Rather than suspending educational hierarchy, such utterances depend on its prior intelligibility. Their humour works only because the bor-

rowed terms already carry associations of lesser value, institutional inferiority, and reduced prestige.

Drawing on Bourdieu, Butler, Goffman, hooks, and Ahmed, the article argues that these expressions turn social devaluation into rhetorical resource, allowing prestige to be publicly softened, denied, and restored. It therefore proposes Performative Humility as an open-ended concept for understanding how symbolic power may continue to operate through the language of modesty itself.