performative en · ADJ
Etymology
Etymology tree English perform Proto-Indo-European *-h₂ Proto-Indo-European *-éh₂ Proto-Indo-European *-tós Proto-Indo-European *-eh₂tos Proto-Italic *-ātos Latin -ātuslbor. English -ate Proto-Indo-European *-wós Proto-Indo-European *-iHwósder. Latin -īvus Old French -ifbor. Middle English -yf English -ive English -ative English performative From perform + -ative.
Meanings
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Being enacted as it is said.
Thus in the example: 'By saying “I do” I was marrying her', the performative 'I do' is a means to the end of marriage. Here 'saying' is used in the sense in which it takes inverted commas and is using words or language, a phatic and not[…]
1975 April 15, J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: Second Edition, Harvard University Press, →ISBN:Saying "I do" as part of a wedding ceremony is performative, enacting a marriage.
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Insincere, inauthentic or disingenuous; done solely or largely as a performance, to produce an impression or enhance one's reputation.
“To me, centrists can go fuck themselves,” said Léa Zimmerman, 34. “They’re fucking useless, they don’t stand for anything, and if they do stand on something, it’s pathetic. I’m done with pathetic, performative people.”
2026 June 28, David Smith, “Will the Mamdani effect make 2028 the year of the leftwing president?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:We were beginning to suspect that her ethical qualms were sometimes performative, as the urgent need for fairness and justice seemed to apply to some people but not to others.
The Harambe meme soon became the perfect parody of the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterized it.
2017, Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies, Zero Books, →ISBN, Introduction:With the danger of science becoming purely “performative” (Lyotard 1984), not seeking any pretense of “truth” but simply performing a service for those in charge while still occupying its decision-making role in a technocratically dominated political sphere […]
2013, Martha McCaughey, Michael D. Ayers, Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, page 200:Although the seeming copycat nature of the plots in Port Huran and Conyers was terrifying because of their repetitive, performative, even texted nature—their seeming theatricality—more harrowing was the threat that, like theater, the performance would settle quickly into repetition compulsions in schools across the nation.
2002, Anthony Kubiak, Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty, →ISBN, page 4:That tension – between actual taste and strategic signalling – maps on to the “performative men” discourse: the suspicion that some men curate feminist politics or literary taste as a dating strategy rather than them being their authentically held beliefs and preferences.
2026 February 13, Emma Loffhagen, “‘His favourite book was by Jordan Peterson, which was a massive ick’: how books perform on dating apps”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:After the photos of Jenner and Elordi were published there was a stream of online discourse stating we had entered an era of performative reading.
2024 February 9, Chloe Mac Donnell, “‘Reading is so sexy’: gen Z turns to physical books and libraries”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:The reality of remote working has turned out to be different. Days have become longer and employees are demonstratively visible. Work has become more performative.
2022 January 8, “The rise of performative work”, in The Economist, →ISSN:
Forms
| Spelling | Features | Labels | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| most performative | Degree=Sup | lexicographic | |
| more performative | Degree=Cmp | lexicographic |
Deriveds
performativity · performative authoritarianism · performativeness · nonperformative · performativism · performative utterance · performatively
Relateds
preform · preformative · preformance
Synonyms
illocutionary · performatory · workly
Translations (6)
es performatorio (performatory) · es performativo (performatory) · fi esityksellinen (performatory) · fi performatiivinen (performatory) · es performántico (performatory) · es performático (performatory)