you are performative

tbf so am i

I take a while to get ready in the mornings. Or at least, longer than I used to—I can still toss on a shirt and a pair of jeans and be out in under 10. These days it’s a bit more of a ritual, though one I enjoy thoroughly.

First is shower and skincare. Just cleanser and moisturizer/sunscreen, no need to complicate it. On Wednesdays, however, I wash my hair, and that’s an event unto itself. Two rinses of shampoo (one to get rid of the dirt, one to lather and deep clean), a twenty-minute hair treatment that my salon gave me after I got it bleached and dyed (I just sit around in a bathrobe and play a round of Hades and rinse it off when I die), real conditioner, and then—after rinsing and drying—leave-in conditioner, applied while the hair is still damp. It’s involved, yeah, but since I only wash my hair once a week (can’t let the hair dye fade) it’s worth it.

Then I open my closet and start to deliberate. Not a difficult decision, at least when it comes to color—it’s black, black, and more black. The fun thing about a monochrome wardrobe is that it cuts down on the decision points you have to make. You don’t have to think about which colors fit with what—you’ve already got a stock style, you just have to mix and match and make something you like. On good days I think about silhouette and aesthetic. Do I want to look more elegantly gothic, or do I want to be a spiky punk? On lazy days I just take out a pair of jeans and toss on a t-shirt and a jacket and call it a day. Who cares? It’ll all match.

Next is jewelry. A necklace or two, maybe some earrings. Never rings, never bracelets, but always silver. Then makeup, usually just eyeliner, thick on the undereye and smudged all around. Sometimes I’ll open my little red palette of emo colors and smudge a little gray, a little purple, a little black here and there. On rarer occasions I’ll take out a little pot of gray-purple lip mud, tap it on my lips, smear the excess on my cheeks to make me look a little less alive. The latest addition into the routine has actually been perfume; I’ve acquired a signature perfume that smells like vanilla, spice, and old books. I spritz it on my wrists and shoulders.

The result is an intentional, unique look, that I literally don’t think about at all. At one point maybe it was deeply considered, every single piece picked to perfection. But now it’s as natural to me as breakfast and dinner. I roll out of bed; I nom on some rice and ulam; I transform, body and soul; and I leave the house for class. It’s three paragraphs on the page but thirty minutes of my day. (Aside from the hair deep-cleaning, which is a once-a-week thing.) All for the express purpose of making it so that every time I get a glance at my own reflection—in the bathroom or in the hallway—I get to smile at my own handiwork.

Is this vain? Maybe. But I feel like I can be afforded a little vanity, you know? I came out as nonbinary at fifteen in an exurban environment with less than a handful of people that seemed like me. I thought I had to prove my identity—that if I achieved Perfect Androgyny people would finally gender me correctly. And I do think I achieved some semblance of it, but it wasn’t really me, you know? Just an attempt to make people recognize me. But a lot of those people weren’t ever going to gender me correctly no matter how short my hair was or how little makeup I wore or how masculinely I stood. To them, my lived reality was some ideology they could affirm or deny, and not the core part of the identity of a young teenager, desperate for validation and acceptance.

Anyway, who even cares about them? I’m out of the closet entirely, and all the clothes are coming with.

Third-wave feminist Judith Butler, throughout their many books and essays, has developed the theory of gender performativity. The idea is that no one is born with their gender—they are instead assigned one (usually, but not always, based on sexual characteristics at birth) and it is reinforced through repeated acts throughout one’s life. To them, gender is not the same as sex, which are the binary categories that a person is placed in based on their genetics and physical characteristics; neither is it defined as a role that one takes upon, because roles are aspects of one’s identity, that either describe or disguise the “self” of a person. Gender is entirely socially constructed—socially assigned and reinforced.

Think about it. If God picked you up and deposited you in a cabin in the woods, with the ability to meet your basic needs but no other people for hundreds of kilometers around, tell me—would you still perform only the tasks of your gender? Would you avoid mending your own clothes because men don’t do that, or avoid chopping wood for the fire because you’re just a girl? Surely you need clothes and warmth more than you need to affirm your identity. Would you cut your hair if there was no barber to maintain it, or would it remain the length that is most convenient to your person? If you were truly, one-hundred-percent alone, in a place where acting and reacting to your society’s social structures is irrational, would you do so?

Of course, we do not all live in cabins in the woods. So let’s say you claw your way back to society, and rejoin your place in the world. What would everyone say—about your strange haircut, your strange ways? They would probably think you were strange and wild, unfit for polite society. You would have to cut your hair or refresh it, wear your gender-assigned clothing, stop mending your clothes or having to chop wood. You act in a manner that is acceptable to your peers or risk being outcasted. The in-groups and out-groups are defined by gender lines; to be within the in-group, to be accepted as “one of us”, you must act like them, too. And it is those acts that make up your gender—the repeated actions that act as a social signifier. Which group you stand in, and which one you don’t.

Relevant here is the knowledge that Judith Butler themself is nonbinary, having said in an interview that they never felt at home with being assigned female at birth.¹ So while certainly there are people who have internalized their gender as a role and a set of values they feel obligated to perform, not everybody agrees with those values, or feels comfortable performing them. In their essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, they even go on to say that “the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.”²

To illustrate that subversive repetition, let’s go back to my morning routine. Why black? Because it’s the color of shadows, and therefore hides the curves that would be cast on my body by other colors of fabric. Why emo fashion? Because it’s a subculture that encourages men and women both to defy traditional beauty standards. Why dye my hair in the first place? Because leaning into the stereotype of the “blue hair and pronouns” is more likely to alert people to think that maybe this guy has something more going on with their gender than we think.

It’s one example of many that reinforces my unique gender identity and experience, but for the most part most people just fall into one camp or the other. And anyway, there’s plenty of space within the lines to play if you want to.

For example: consider the performative male. (Here’s the part of the essay you were probably waiting for.) Likely you already have an image, played and replayed over countless Tiktoks and Reels. I barely need to describe him here: his tote bag with the Labubu hanging off it, his baggy-jeans-and-Carhartt-jacket outfit combo, with the ceremonial-grade matcha in one hand and a copy of Gender Troubles in the other. It’s an archetype that’s been beaten to death and laid to rest with its fellow horses. If anything, this essay is probably horrifically late to the party. Which is why we will not spend a whole lot of time interrogating the trend itself. Plenty of people already have done so, and will continue to do so, until we all find something more interesting to talk about.

After all, everyone is saying the same thing. Every single essay I can find that talks about this topic cites the exact same argument posited earlier in this essay: all gender is performative, and Butler said so. Many of these essays then go on to say that “because all gender is performative then all men are performative, so take that men!” but honestly I feel like that’s a bit of pedantry we’re doing there. In this context, performativity is less about performing actions and more about putting on a performance for a specific purpose.

Because the performative male, contrary to his name, isn’t really performing masculinity—he’s actually performing femininity. He’s reading feminist literature to prove he’s interested in women and their problems, he’s drinking matcha and buying Labubus because they’re popular among women, he’s using therapy-speak because it proves he’s in touch with his emotions. All of this, of course, is an act—he is simply doing this to get into women’s pants. Once he’s achieved what he wants, the mask comes off. He shows himself to be just like any other man.

But what does it mean, to be “just like any other man”? What does it mean to be a “real” man as opposed to a “performative” one? Because while the performance in the context of the performative man is a façade, I’m more interested in what our performative males aren’t doing, and what that reveals about traditional masculinity. Is it archetypically masculine to not care about women’s problems and interests? To be out of touch with one’s emotions? To dislike cute keychain plushies and Japanese green teas? Like it or not, the average man isn’t performing any less than the performative male—he’s just doing it in a way that doesn’t get ridiculed on short-form video apps. The performative male is deviant and notable largely because the “real” man, the “ordinary” man, is normalized despite his myriad flaws.

And at least, personally, I don’t think that’s fair! Why is one presentation of gender problematized while the other go scot-free? We are living in the rise of the Andrew Tate Sigma Male and the Tech Bro, and it’s the men that with weirdly specific taste in literature that are put on blast by TikTok? Come on, guys. At least the performative male reads.

The difference is that the other kinds of men have a subculture to them—they are signaling status and masculinity among each other, whereas the performative male is perceived as only seeking feminine approval, and thus is ridiculed by both genders. The performative male finds no subculture, no community and no care because the stereotype is a pejorative, through and through, applied to men with feminine interests as if they can’t possibly enjoy the things that they’re doing, they only do it for feminine attention. He is made outcast not only for being a dickhead, but for being a deviant dickhead, not performing masculinity correctly, and therefore he’s not allowed to sit at the real boys’ table.

I am not advocating sympathy for the performative male. He is a stereotype. It would be like having sympathy for the cardboard cutouts you stick your face inside at theme parks. But I do want to ask: why them? Why make fun of them without looking inward, at yourself?

After all, aren’t you performative too?

Again, the performative male doesn’t perform any more than anyone else—he just performs in a different way, for a different purpose. But you don’t exactly live in a cabin in the woods either. You are performing; for your peers, for your parents, for the strangers on the street who want to understand you at first glance. You have built up a routine, just like mine, to transform into the person that you want the world to see. Maybe it’s shorter than mine; maybe it’s longer! But it exists, and you don’t think about it, but it’s there.

But what does that performance mean to you? What does masculinity, or femininity entail? For many people they represent admirable things that they strive for—chivalry, respect, kindness, gentleness. For people like me, they’re chafing or stifling, like clothes that fit too small or too big. For others they represent a hard and fast biological reality, and anyone who steps even a toe out of line needs to be socially punished. For others still they’re nothing but checkmarks on your birth certificate. But if you don’t know, then you’ll spend the rest of your life getting into fights with people who don’t share the same view with you, unaware that the debate is not occurring under clearly defined terms.

I believe it is in everyone’s best interest to interrogate their own gender. Not necessarily in a transgender way, though if the inquiry ends in transition then hey, more power to you. I want people to ask these questions because once you have an answer, then you can move forward embracing that part of your identity; so that the performance is not simply one foisted upon you by society, but one that you make entirely your own.

I spent years thinking that I wasn’t “girl” enough. Too rude, too blunt, too sharp, too proud. At some point I decided I was happier when I didn’t have to hold myself to that standard, and I could just do whatever I wanted with my own identity. For that, I took on a lot of pain, suffering, anger, frustration; but I also gained the ability to construct, from nothing, an identity that is entirely mine. It’s not vanity when I look at myself in the mirror and smile. It’s pride. I have made myself, and no one else gets to define me ever again.

So ask yourself: what am I performing for? The answers will not come easily, but nothing important does. Whatever happens next is yours to decide. There is only you, and the stage, and the whole world waiting, with bated breath, to see what you’ll do next.

1. https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-living-anti-intellectual-times

2. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893?seq=8