Performativity and awareness: how do we draw the line?

Sitting down to write this, I had nothing to say. I’ve never been especially into the idea of any Days We Have to Celebrate, and I can’t help but roll my eyes at most of the articles and posts that mushroom every year around this time. Because that’s the extent of it. A post, a hashtag, then we, the people of the internet, are collectively moved on to the Next Trend. This disillusionment with social media is not reflective of any personal disillusionment with my own convictions. But I am growing more and more hopeless when it comes to collectivity, to anything that fails to go beyond the egocentricity of personal branding and individual coming-into-oneself.

It's alarming to witness, in real time, the performativity of social media translate into the tangible world. Translate into behavioral patterns, into publications, and then, inescapably, into the formation of others’ opinions. Because we do not exist in a vacuum, and people do get influenced by what they read and are exposed to, which means that the online world feeds the offline world such that performativity seeps into how we behave in our real lives—people become like actors, everything they do only going as far as to perpetuate the image of themselves they’ve curated online.

With such individualistic tendencies becoming more and more prevalent, it’s forgivable to assume that such heavy performativity is contributing to our failure to collectively organize and come together.

People become like actors, everything they do only going as far as to perpetuate the image of themselves they’ve curated online

We see it happening today, in this increasingly polarized world where the algorithm reigns over us and validates even our most dangerous thoughts. We see it through the almost mechanical anger elicited in us all when we are described as uncivilized—which then makes us scramble to prove the opposite to the party that condemned us in the first place. This is what bothers me about this day internationally reserved for women. That we need to prove, or at least bombard others with posts until they are convinced, that women are not worth less than men. Just like we need to prove to the aggressors that we are not less than them. The parallel is undeniable.

But my main question is, why? Why would anyone want, or need, to seek the validation of the condemning party—or anyone else at all? Is it not absurd to willingly, though perhaps obliviously, give somebody the power to determine one’s humanity?

The funny part is, you can never win. I’ve seen it happen in my own life, be it now or at a younger age, always being accused of being too much of a feminist—as if that’s a bad thing—and constantly being made to feel like a killjoy, first and foremost by the people who claim to be die-hard allies. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t try to make people more aware of the rampant inequalities in our world, but where do we draw the line? Where does it stop being up to us to expend more energy to speak up, and start being up to people to have the responsibility to learn for themselves? Why is it so rare that people peel back the first shiny layer of what they see or read and think critically about the what, how, and why of it all?

Anyway, I think it was Angela Davis who wrote something about the birth pangs of political consciousness. While the historical context she was discussing is different from our context today, it does seem that more and more people, previously comfortably perched on their pedestals of privilege, are experiencing these birth pangs and are coming to terms, not without pain, with the side-effects and, indeed, the motors of their privilege.

But how do we make sure that individual thought is translated into collective action? It’s getting old, and even the arguments are tired. I’m not sure I have the answer. All I have is more questions. Let’s solve them together.