Reading about the tragedy of Karbala, no can turn blind eye to the crucial role of lady Zainab bint Ali. Her recount of the tragedy of Karbala is not merely an expression of grief or defiance, but it is performative act that (re)produced communal identity and destabilized hegemonic narratives of the Umayyads. This reading goes in line with the stipulation of Judith Butler who in Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993) posits that identity is not an innate or stable essence, but rather a phenomenon constituted through iterative acts, gestures, and speech.

Returning back in history to the immediate aftermath of the massacre at Karbala, Lady Zainab’s publicly addressed the people of Kufa which disrupts the expected gender norms of the time. In a society that largely confined women to the private sphere and expected them to be modestly silent, she stood bravely before the crowds and delivered a scathing moral indictment: “O people of Kufa! O people of deception and treachery!”. “Do you cry? May your tears never dry nor your wailing ever cease. You are like the woman who undoes her thread after she has spun it strong.” Here, she performs what is traditionally reserved for men. When addressing the people of Kufa, she ruptures the gendered script of her time.

What's more, the lady performed What's termed as "illocutionary speech act" that is utterances which do not merely describe a reality but bring something into being by the very act of saying. This is conspicuously crystal clear in her fearless confrontation with Yazid in his own court. She declares vehemently, “Scheme whatever you wish, and carry out your plots, and intensify your efforts. By Allah, you shall never obliterate our memory, nor will you ever destroy our revelation.” Here, she affirms her lineage’s sanctity and the invocation of divine justice. In Butler’s sense, her speech did not simply represent resistance; it forms a collective memory that would perennially outlast the immediate political dominance of the Umayyads.

Moreover, Butler proclaims that through performativity one may enforce norms or subvert them. The lady repeatedly says that she is a descendant from the prophet. As such, she reinscribes the spiritual sovereignty of Ahl al-Bayt. Her words actively reinstate the tragedy of Karbala in the moral consciousness of people. Thus, in turn directly undermined Yazid’s attempts to erase or rewrite the epic epic of Karbla.