Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 84

The Cultural Implications of
Performance
Christine Adams
Christine Adams has taught at St. Mary’s College in Maryland since the fall of 1992. She has
published primarily in French family and gender history, including two books: A Taste for Comfort
and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France and Poverty, Charity and
Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France.
Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube have created a world that effaces the
line between real life and performed reality. Academics refer to a particular
type of performance as performativity: on social media, we share photos and
posts that not only reflect who we are but that also construct the identity
we wish to communicate. Performativity is heavily gendered, and the stakes
for young women are both different and perhaps higher than for their
male peers. Today, in a world dominated by social media, young women in
particular seek empowerment through performing for both their friends and
a wider world that often treats them as little more than sexual objects (Note
�). Some are celebrities, some are wannabe celebrities; some are simply
looking for the gratification of public approval for their self-presentation
while others have broader aims. We all act in a specific historical, political,
and now technological context, which affects the nature of the image we
try to present of ourselves as well as how it is received. This impulse to
perform (and to judge those performances) is nothing new (Note �), but
conditions of and incentives for those performances are historically specific
and help us understand the spectacle of social life and the consequences for
the individuals who are part of the show.
And yet, despite the fact that we recognize the omnipresence of performance
in our own self-presentation as well as that of others, we also claim to
value transparency, sincerity, and authenticity—on TV shows such as “The
Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” in the United States, the participants
always profess to be searching for that ever-elusive “sincerity” in a potential
partner. In the ���� political campaign season, one of the biggest criticisms of
Hillary Clinton was her lack of authenticity. In fact, political pundits regularly
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