Performative What Now?

The Gender Divide Meets the Written Word – in Public

Recently, I learned about so-called “Performative Reading,” which is, apparently, a thing, especially for the overly-online, under-30s. An essay in the New Yorker magazine defines it in these terms:

A performative reader treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others. While everyone else is scrolling social media and silencing life with noise-cancelling headphones, the performative reader insists upon his intelligence with attention-seeking insincerity, begging to be noticed with the aid of a big, look-at-me, capital-“B” book.

The understated feature of this description is the idea that a performative reader is, by definition, a man: “the performative reader insists upon his intelligence.” Am I naïve in thinking that a man reading a book in public thirty years ago was just a man reading a book in public? Nowadays, however, such activity is being noticed, and, it seems, is rather suss.

My podcast with Reed is back. We’ve been losing brain cells and dignity in equal measure reading Curtis Yarvin so you don’t have to. Check out our latest episode here. You can also subscribe via Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.

I bring some field notes on the topic. At a despedida late last year with some of my students, who had suffered through their semester with me reading books of a certain heft (like Atwood, Camus, Achebe, Laforet or Murakami), this notion of performative reading surfaced with vigour. A bunch of them (all young women, note) declared flatly and unequivocally that their male peers who read books in a public space are doing it for distinctly non-bibliophilic reasons. The several men at our gathering were rather indifferent to this parry against their sincerity; indeed one or two even agreed. But I wanted to know more, so I unleashed my inner anthropologist. Upon being pressed, one of them offered the following: a man reading a book in public, especially if it is a paperback, and super-especially if it has the front curled round the back, is being performative. That seemed rather specific, and I was incredulous. Isn’t that just called reading a book? No, she insisted, and the others – to a woman – agreed. What, I asked, if it were a woman doing the same? That’s fine, they said. Not performative. The takeaway seemed clear: women read books because they are interested in them. Men read books because they are interested in women. Really? Another feature of our modern culture that leaves me feeling old and bewildered.

Now, I read books exclusively in digital format, and to the surprise of at least some folks (looking at you Milo!), I prefer to read them that way. This is for two reasons. One, my (admittedly performative) bookshelves are full, so I don’t have space for a bunch more. Two, my age-addled brain finds the search function useful more often than I’d like to admit to remind myself – wait, who is this character again? True story: halfway through the second part of Richard Powers’ (highly recommended) novel The Overstory, I had the vague sense that the characters felt familiar. Turns out I had already met them all in part one, completely missing that it was a series of interconnected narratives. Honestly, how am I even allowed to teach?

Anyway, to this I can now add a third good reason for the digital consumption of the written word: no-one can accuse me of performative reading. I am just another person staring down at his device – I’m blending! Although it turns out I don’t really have to worry about it since, as my students (gently) let me know, as a sad-sack Generation X oldster, I am well outside of the performative demographic. Good to know. I guess?

Last summer fearless Guardian columnist and Millennial (not in that order) Alaina Demopoulos also discovered this phenomenon, and set out to test the theory of performative reading. She bravely took a train from Brooklyn to Washington Square Park while conspicuously reading Infinite Jest, and yet despite her best efforts at “I’m better than you” (her words) attitudinizing while nose first in the pages of David Foster Wallace’s incomprehensible novel received apparently no opprobrium whatsoever from her fellow passengers –  indeed no attention at all. Well except for one Gen-X guy, who gave her some encouragement and then wandered off. Buoyed by this heartening experience of (checks notes) reading a book on a train, Alaina notes that “a crazy thing happened: I enjoyed myself.” Whew, another lucky day when you don’t show up in a TikTok video reading David Foster Wallace. That certainly jibes with my definition of a good time.

Thing is, and I am not casting shade here, but I question the anthropological nous that informed this excursion out amongst the natives. See, Alaina is a woman. So of course she can read Infinite Jest, or Ulysses, or even, one imagines, foreign literature in Brooklyn without exciting the performance-aware antennae of the average female Gen-Z, waiting with schoolmarmish disapproval to cast judgment in TikTok short video form. What she needed to do was recruit a male friend to observe discreetly how his reading of Infinite Jest was received by Washington Square hipsters (this, I venture, is what Clifford Geertz would have done). Then, perhaps she would have seen the real deal since – based on my own fieldwork – oh yes, it’s real. Doubtless, she would have been witness to olympic eye-rolling from judgy young ladies thinking that Dua Lipa would like a word.

Look, this substack is not of much value, I know that, but here’s a worthy takeaway. Boys – put away those paperbacks, and DON’T EVEN THINK about curling the pages around the cover. Buy a Kindle instead. You can thank me later.

Thanks for reading and consider throwing an apparently much-older-than-he-thinks man a like!