Words: Stella Small (she/her)
These souvenirs – the annotations, the essay collections, the spines facing outwards – all become proof not of the experience, but the fact that you were there.
The other day, my mum asked if I’d enjoyed the book she got me for Christmas, I Who Have Never Known Men.
‘It was interesting, but very bleak,’ I said. ‘Quite philosophical. It’s about these women who escape a bunker in a deserted dystopia and realise they’re the only people left.’
She looked puzzled. ‘That’s not what I expected at all. Waterstones said it was a “TikTok book”.’
Because, despite being published 30 years ago, it is a TikTok book. The novel was advertised to me on social media, packaged as a trend, and promised to let me in on something. So, what was my motivation for choosing it? Was I trying to obtain what the recommendations insisted: that I, too, could be an intellectual?
Being “performative” is the internet’s current insult of choice, though its definition has collapsed through overuse. It is shorthand for posturing – a hollow imitation of depth, trying too hard to be something you are not.
However, intellectualism, like many identities, is not pre-existent. It is rehearsed until inhabited. If someone performs intellectualism, does that make them fake, or just naive, or, at worst, a bit embarrassing?
Think about the guy who sits in the New York Public Library with his quill and ink, making Instagram reels about yearning. To call him performative is not quite accurate. Performance is not the opposite of authenticity – it is often the mechanism through which authenticity is formed. You can call him fake if you like, but if his fraudulence is so obvious that it attracts a legion of comments, what is the real harm? He is not fooling anyone.
Accusations of performative intellectualism have become tied to tired critiques of the “performative male.” Easy to caricature, his marginalia is photographed, and his engagement with feminist literature is read as strategic, even predatory.
In fear of becoming the very person I describe, I will not labour the point, but Judith Butler outlines in Gender Trouble that gender is constituted through repeated acts. In this vein, I take issue with the “performative male” because it is misleading. To perform maleness would be to perform masculinity, yet what people often mean is the performance of something feminised – sensitivity as sleight of hand, emotional complexity worn by a disingenuous chauvinist.
There is valid criticism of men who manipulate women by presenting themselves as kinder, softer, and safer than they truly are. But, I dislike how the blame has shifted from the manipulation itself onto the acts used to achieve it. In condemning these things, we risk pathologising the visible markers of intellectual and emotional engagement, many of which are historically coded as feminine.
The “performative intellectual,” then, is more interesting. It is performative in its original sense, reading as an act meant to signify identity. The Bell Jar on the bookshelf of the weepy coquette, Just Kids in the tote bag of the travelling musician, 12 Rules for Life on the coffee table of the gilet-clad “podcast bro”. These souvenirs – the annotations, the essay collections, the spines facing outwards – all become proof not of the experience, but the fact that you were there.
The crime, it seems, is being seen reading. We are encouraged to live our lives online and to treat life itself as material for content. In that context, reading in public becomes something that could be documented. Yet, we do not accuse wellness influencers of being “performatively healthy” (although maybe we should). Through the performance of good health, you may become healthy, but does the performance of reading make you intelligent? You have to hope.
How do we combat anti-intellectualism, amid a rise in AI art and living across the pond from a burgeoning fascist state, when we are putting each other down for trying to educate ourselves? To dismiss visible engagement with literature as inherently false is to create a culture in which trying earnestly is embarrassing. The other day, I overheard two girls saying they had bumped into their friend on the bus reading a book: ‘Literally so performative.’ It seemed to me that the book could have been anything from It Ends With Us to Infinite Jest. The novel itself was irrelevant.
As Generation Z, our lives are conditioned to be marketable to our own social media audiences and neatly categorisable for companies to target us. It seems inevitable that what we read has become entangled in this. It may not be ideal, but it hardly seems like the worst thing in the world when 40% of people in the UK reportedly read no books in 2024. What begins as the instinct to appeal to an in-group has produced a community.
Yes, the substitution of substance for aesthetics can flatten art. Yes, it can replace depth with shallow signalling. But it also creates entry points: even if a book is picked up for the “wrong” reason, chosen for its algorithmic popularity, young people are still reading. Performance, in this context, becomes a rehearsal space – a means of trying on identities. If you perform the appearance of being well-read, I like to think that eventually you will be.
Jacqueline Harpman was a Holocaust survivor who wrote over thirty books in her lifetime. Only two have been translated into English from French. I Who Have Never Known Men is a brilliant work of literature that I might never have read had I not been seduced by its online virality. The novel’s protagonist explores what it means to be human in a world devoid of human connection. One of the things she finds the most comfort in is reading.
In our climate of excess, where we are inundated with other people’s faces, pets, holidays, and hot takes, we may have arrived at an inversion of the protagonist’s world. Where she had depth but no connection, we have connection but no depth – yet we have all turned to literature.
