Performative

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“It’s a crucial moment in history,” said Abraaj founder, Arif Naqvi. “It’s an opportunity to immutably and absolutely change the course of innumerable lives.”

Performative
/pəˈfɔːmətɪv/ (adj.)

1. (Media relations) Describing an action that resembling a dramatic or artistic performance, being one in whose acquiescence one must suspend disbelief willingly — if on a stage of some kind — or gullibly, if in a political or commercial context. A magician’s misdirection.

The key to this kind of performativity — quite different from the sense used by Judith Butler though, ironically, performative of it — is the tacit understanding that one is not expected to personally believe what one is saying. Just as we do not expect Anthony Hopkins personally to like eating human liver with fava beans and chianti just because Hannibal Lecter does, nor do we expect the ultra-high net worth wealth management executives to really mean it when they pledge to reduce global income inequality. It isn’t like they are about to give out their clients’ money to poor people, or even stop cooking up elaborate tax shelters to further increase global inequality in favour of their clients, is it?

2. (Critical theory) Characterised by the performance of a social or cultural role: the contextual and performative aspects of gender.

This usage has its origin in Judith Butler’s view that gender is a mutable social construct, characterised by repeated actions, language and dispositions that shape (and are shaped by) the physical environment.

“When we say that gender is performed, we usually mean that we’ve taken on a role; we’re acting in some way... To say that gender is performative is a little different, because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman ... We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that’s simply true about us, a fact about us. Actually, it’s a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.”

If gender is “performative” in this way — and this encapsulation seems more like “male role model” and “female role model” than “man” or “woman” as such: it is at any rate a distance from what was traditionally meant by “biological sex”, though the two have since become conflated — then it stands to reason that where one can choose one’s performance, then your gender can be whatever you chooses it to be, and indeed might be neither, if you can summon the energy to maintain a different vector despite the embedded tidal forces in society. All the world’s a stage, after all.

This does not even seem especially controversial, as far as that goes: but we will duck out of further extrapolations of what this might mean in practice, since they run fairly quickly into a kind of political grand guignol that does no-one any favours. But it is an interesting starting point, deserving serious attention.

3. (Technical, and not really in use these days) Relating to an utterance by which the speaker performs a particular act merely by making the utterance (e.g. “I guarantee”, I “represent” or I “promise”).

See also

• Virtue-signalling
• Performative governance