If you live in a city with public transportation, you are probably familiar with the transit struggle, in which, oftentimes, half your day is spent commuting from one place to another and so forth. During my own long voyages across a labyrinth of endless railways, through underground passages beneath the canopies of New York City skyscrapers where the only sound is that of screeching metal, I frequently would glue my eyes to my phone, falling into aimless, subway scrolling.
When this became quite boring and mind-numbing, I started carrying a book in my bag wherever I went per a friend’s suggestion. And hence on my endless commutes from Brooklyn to Manhattan I would pull out my book and start reading. Yet given that humans are inherently quite judgmental mammals, a thought kept tormenting my mind that I just couldn’t shake: Do people think I’m performative because I’m reading in public?
“Performative” is a term that has been coined on social media to describe people that are staging themselves as intellectual and progressive by adopting certain characteristics in their lifestyle. For example, tote bags, an iced latte or matcha (obviously oat milk), indie music, and of course, dense novels shoved in their back pockets, revealing enough of the title to show off their taste in fine literature. While this may seem like a silly social media trend, I have often heard friends and other young adults mocking avid readers, calling them “performative.”
In fact, researchers found that reading for pleasure has declined by 40% in the past 20 years. While the statistics didn’t disclose a specific reason for this drop in leisurely reading, the researchers suggested that the rise of digital media may be a factor.
Within the digital world, social media, specifically, creates a world of constant online surveillance where individuals must perform for an invisible audience that remains hidden behind screens, but never silent. This, in correlation with the dropping literacy rates, make the written word seem like an undesirable labor, becoming a prop in the theatrics of intellectual performance.
Furthermore, the connotation that public reading is “performative” portrays the activity as inaccessible, as something that people are only capable of doing if they are faking it because of how intellectual or difficult it is. Hobbies like reading but also writing, creating art, playing an instrument, or any sort of passion beyond online content are carefully curated for the online community and then constantly scrutinized and deemed “fake.” People have turned to “brain rot,” mindless, short-form internet content that usually lacks any sort of real meaning. The existence of this kind of media makes other habits seem distant and obnoxious, and many people’s instinct, fueled by online trends, is to criticize these activities.
Ultimately, it is impossible to not perform at all. If you think about sleeping, the first thing you do in order to fall asleep is lie down in bed, close your eyes, and pretend to sleep until you actually do so. This doesn’t mean that sleeping is not real just because we are performing it. Performance can be true.
Every day, people wake up, show up to school or work, and perform. We perform all different roles; as coworkers, peers, friends, parents, significant others. We engage with dissimilar and like-minded individuals positively, and sometimes negatively. We perform our hobbies, our passions. We perform our dreams. Perhaps we perform for other people, because it is human nature to want to be accepted and perceived positively, but perhaps we too perform for ourselves.
In this digital age, it is apparent that people will always impact one another. If people say that reading is performative, then it becomes as such. But if we dare to push past those allegations, maybe we can motivate one another to disengage with these notions and actually pick up a book.
On one of my long commutes between boroughs, maybe someone saw me reading and laughed to themselves thinking I couldn’t possibly be actually reading, let alone publicly. But maybe, just maybe, someone got home and slipped a book in their bag for their own lengthy commute.
About the author
Kika Jiménez Singer is a writer and editor from New York City and Havana. She is currently entering her fourth and final year as an English student at Brandeis University, where she is crafting her thesis on literature about the ocean and its relation to the Caribbean quotidian. Beyond reading and writing, she is a fashion-lover and obsessor of all things Soul, R&B, and Post Punk; she hosted a show titled “Eclectic Feels” on her college radio station. Previously, she interned at a Contemporary art gallery in NYC and then at a mosaic studio, Studio Cassio, while studying abroad in Rome.
