The viral “performative male” meme trend shows us that everyone wants to break free of gender roles
A few weeks ago, I caught up my friend when the conversation turned to the subject of “performative male” memes which had flooded our deadlines. We did the required jokes (“performative male competition in my room, stat!” Etc.) before laughing and shaking your head. Call men who drink matcha and paint their “performative” nails had always struck me as an idiot, but of course, it is thanks to a conversation with another trans person that he would become clearer for me why the trend induces such an eye: “CIS people are so close to the understanding that all gender standards are performative”, I said to him, “only to go back and reintegrate the back and reinstate the back and reintegrate
The so-called performative male is nothing new. This is the point of view of this year “The Toxic Softboy” or “Male Manipulator”. But in recent weeks, the same has reached a fever. There have been meta-ironic “performative male competitions” in New York, Chicago, Seattle and even Jakarta. (I continue to think about myself, all these double contests are simply sliding, but for the heteros? But this is a question for another test.) The performative male is essentially men who occur in a manner intended to look at women, downloaded from observations of women and filtered through algorithm. The tools of their arsenal? Matcha, Clairo Vinyls, Labus, painted nails, Take-all bags, Sally Rooney / Joan Didion / Bell Hooks (but only never All about love) Paperback – The types of signifiers that young modern men could adapt in order to call on young progressive women. Supposedly, these are all things that could encourage a woman to believe that this man is Not like other men. Not so violent. Not so Chauvinist. Not so frightening to be a subject of desire.
In the allegedly post-sexist era today, we see a compulsory desire to taxonon in the genre binary. And maybe it shouldn’t be surprising. The concept of transgender is more common than ever before, it is logical that these “men come from Mars, women are Venus”, style jokes stimulated like subconscious reactions to perceived destabilization of traditional gender paradigm.
In Gender troublesThe seminal homosexual theorist Judith Butler suggests that “gender is not a name, but it is not a set of free floating attributes”. Instead, the genre is “performative”, made up of “repeated acts in a very rigid regulatory framework which freezes over time to produce the appearance of … a natural kind of being”. In other words, Butler does not subscribe to the notion “born in this way” that gender identity is an inherent and stable truth; What we rather understand as gender (and sex) is produced by the continuous and violent application of a set of standards. “Man” and “woman” are only impossible symbolic ideals, and yet the power of these fictions is essential.
