In recent discussions online, people have explored the idea of “performativity.” Whether it be examples like the performative male or performative allyship, it normally refers to someone performing something for the optics, inauthentically acting like an ally in order to gain approval.
For some people, sexuality shapes how they relate to others, understand themselves and overall how they move through the world. I think of Madonna, who is open about her sexuality, or Roxane Gay’s “Bad Feminist,” which expresses desire and pleasure having tension with her politics.
What does performativity mean in terms of our relationship to sex? I don’t mean the act of having sex itself, I mean the act of performing one’s sex life to other people is where the idea of performativity lies in this question.
Sex positivity is necessarily performative, but performativity does not equal inauthenticity.
I believe that social phenomena like performativity can be best understood through the philosophical sense: performativity is not fake, it is simply how identity is constituted. Philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler explains well in her 2009 essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”, how performance is a repeated act: “In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status.”
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Because performance is repeated and not biologically predetermined, our performances can be challenged. To Butler, gender is a socially constructed norm — we perform acts of that gender, but how gender appears has not always stayed the same through time and space.
One performance that has been challenged more recently in history is sex negativity — the idea that we need to be ashamed or hide our sexual endeavors from other people. Shows like “Sex and the City” are a good example of how that performance is challenged.
In “Sex and the City,” sex positivity is shown openly through the four main characters discussing their sexual endeavors in great detail. In the show, there is a character named Samantha Jones, a career woman who, in her personal life, was known for sexual endeavors and non-monogamous relationships.
She is incredibly sexually liberated and is unapologetic about who she is regarding her sex life. She is an overtly sex-positive character.
In relation to how Jones expresses her personality, another philosopher, Edmund Husserl, posited the idea of the personalistic attitude, which explains Jones well. The attitude refers to how individuals understand their actions from their own lived experience. Jones’ sex positivity shows this well, as she understands herself through her liberation.
Jones is a real-world version of this performance. She understands herself through openness about liberation, but also is performing to act against a societal norm of sex negativity. I think this is a good example because I have personally encountered people with the exact same type of personality as Jones — they are unapologetic about their sexuality and are willing to perform their way of understanding the world with other people.
For some people, like Jones, openness about eroticism is simply part of how they understand themselves.
Jones filters the world through her own experiences and then performs that perspective for others. It reminds me of Madonna and the art she has put out over the years. Songs like “Justify My Love” exemplify this understanding of the world and sharing it with others, and it’s revolutionary in how it was so sex positive for the time.
Gender and sex positivity are necessarily performative. Performing one’s habits of their gender or other personalistic attitudes to be socially intelligible is just a part of being human, and it does not have to be inauthentic.
I have seen Samantha Jones in many people – people for whom sexual liberation is an unapologetic part of themselves. That part of themselves is performed for others, not as a show, but to share who they are and how they engage with the world. Expressing and embracing pleasure is a performance and is a key part of living authentically.
Performing your sex life to other people does not undermine your personal authenticity. Performance is how authenticity is communicated to the world. Like Samantha Jones, being yourself is a performance, and that does not make it fake.
