On performative males

I like to go out and read in cafes. The background noice helps me concentrate, I like coffee, and it is at times nice to be surrounded by people that you do not know. However, all of a sudden I find myself slightly uncomfortable holding my book in this context. Also my shoes, my Doctor Martins that are entering their seventh year (and before this pair I had the exact same ones, which lasted for four to five years, love them), make me a bit nervous. What if people will think that I am a ‘performative male’? What if they think I am here pretending to read because that would be cool, sensitive, and, most of all, something that women are attracted to? Thankfully I did not bring a tote bag, but that I am reading my umpteenth novel of De Beauvoir is definitely not helping. Now, this is probably the least significant problem a person can have, but it sure is interesting. Our obsession with authenticity has reached a level where random individuals have internalized this obsession so much that they start to worry about not not-being authentic.

There is plenty of ways to approach the topic of perfomative males. Is it problematic that men are performing feminism in order to win over girls? One could think yes, obviously, because problematic male behaviour is hiding itself behind a performance of feminism and sensitivity, hence keeping  itself alive through the appropriation of its opposite. One could also perhaps say that is not a problem at all, that certain behaviours start first with performance, and can then become authentic overtime, in the same way that we need to force certain behaviours in order for them to become habits. These are interesting questions, but I think that these approaches do not question the more fundamental concepts by means of which we tend to understand and frame these discussions, and therefore are bound to get stuck and repeat themselves over and over again.

The problem (assuming there is one) with the performative male is not only the performative male, but also the critique of it. The common critique of the performative male misses the point. And, all discourse on the performative male should be seen as inherently critical. The term itself – performative male – points out exactly that which is criticized: performativity. All memes about the performative male are centered around this critique: those indivuals are performative and not authentic. However, what is often missed is that the critique is just as much part of the nihilistic nature of the performative male as the performative individual themselves. The critique is as simple as this: performativity is bad because performativity is not authentic, and authenticity is good. Thus, it is the conclusion of three premisses, namely that authenticity and performativity are opposites and mutually exclusive, that the former is good, and that the latter is bad. The performative male, I would argue, is however defined by the full appropriation of this self-critique: the performative male is a critique of itself. 

The performative male should be seen as just another example of the deep nihilism that still traverses our times. In the performative male, authenticity and performativity completely overlap: I am (truly, authentically) nothing but performativity. The performative male embraces the idea that the individual fully coincides with their performativity. This self-identification with performativity does not mean that the performative male does not feel a certain distance from their character. In fact, they absolutely do so, and this distance is considered to be inevitable and constitutive. The individual is considered to fully coincide with performativity, that is, with always not being oneself, with being a character, a persona. The idea is that even when he would not be the performance of a soft, deeply emotional, stylish and caring man, he would simply become the performance of another type of individual. The permative male basically stands for: I am not myself, because ‘myself’ is always a performance anyway. This constitutive irony is reflected in the performative male contests: a certain ironic distance is required in order to compete and organize an event that is fully based on self-critique.

Hence the ‘external’ critique of performative males misses the point and is futile. In a way, the performative males are perhaps closer to happiness than those that try to criticize them are. Indeed, to critique the performative male for a lack of authenticity problematically presupposes the possibility of being completely ‘authentic’, the idea of an authentic and not-performative individual, someone that fully coincides with themselves, with their desires and their taste. All types of discourses, like pyschoanalysis and sociology, have long showed that our desires, ideas, prefrences, et cetera, are not fully our ‘own’, but are socially constituted. The performative male, while embodying a far development of nihilism, also displays something that we might be able to learn from. This something is the impossibility of clearly distinguishing between authenticity and performativity. Instead, the true problem with the performative male is that authenticity is exactly seen as something that is forever lost, as something that belonged to the people of the past.

Then, how can we think more productively about this dialectic between performativity and authenticity? Here is a suggestion, which  is basically an Agambenian approach to this matter. What I am is nothing more than the inability to be this or that performance. The way in which I am not completely the performative male, the soft boy, the it-girl or the pick me girl, is most properly me. We live our lives living performance to performance, but we always fail them, and we always do so in our own particular way.

The individual is a field traversed by two irreducible poles of appropriation and expropriation. Yet these two movements require each other. Let me explain. The stereotype of the performative male is an identity, something by means of which I become a certain type of person, a stereotype (appropriation). Yet, in the appropration of this stereotype, in the becoming of this persona, one has to expropriate ones mannerisms, ones particularities. The possibility of identifying myself requires the abondonment of myself. Yet, the vision of the self is only possible in this expropriation, in the manner in which I am not fully identified in the act of identification.

The question then, is whether it is possible to fully appropriate our expropriation. Not as the performative male does, to live from performance to performance, from ‘self’ to ‘self’, but to be a self that is nothing but performativity, a self that performs, but is never this or that performance. In such a way of living, performance and authenticity are completely transformed into something barely recognizable (that is, impossible to be properly characterized by the dichotomy of authenticity and performativity). Life as a pure and authentic performance that is indifferent to solid forms, that pays no attention to ‘I might be a performative male’, but realizes that my performance is defined first and foremost by the inability to be the performative male, the pick me girl, or whatever stereotype will define future public discourse. Perhaps then we could live in a contest that is defined by the impossibility of winning.