Performative Activism and its Uses
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Just when I think everyone must finally have received the memo explaining what “performative activism” really means, up pops another call out. “Performative allyship is not allyship!” my X feed announces confidently, in response to a post about the protests on North American campuses calling for an end to military support for the attack on Gaza.
“Performative activism” is defined by various online sources as activism done to increase one's social capital rather than because of one's devotion to a cause. While the term is short and catchy enough for a chant or a banner, it’s most at home on social media, where it refers to the repositing of slogans and memes in order to “perform” solidarity in a way one might perform a role in a play – as a costume that can be put on and removed at will, so the wearer can appear to be supporting a cause rather than doing anything concrete about it.
“Performative activism” has been a useful expression for identifying opportunistic posturing from people who jump on the latest activist cause from a safe and often privileged distance (for example, some white social media influencers who participated in the online Blackout Tuesday event following the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020). And as a concept it’s also valuable for thinking about what kinds of activism work well and less well. And what roles words and symbols play in all this.
As A. Freya Thimsen suggests, “performative activism” needs an other, “some corresponding sense of nonperformative activism – activism that is real, sincere, effective, or more thoroughly engaged”. And because “performative activism” is typically associated with empty gestures on social media, its opposite is by implication something more tangible – something, in other words, more than words. The contrast between performative and non-performative activism implies that there is a hierarchy between language and action – even, Thimsen suggests, that language is the opposite of action.
Enter that other meaning of performative, the one that has gained traction in university humanities departments over the past few decades. Following the work of the philosopher of language JL Austin and others, theorists of performativity are interested in how certain words and phrases – what Austin calls speech acts or performative utterances – do things. Perhaps the most famous example he gives is the phrase “I do” at a wedding ceremony – a statement that performs the act of uniting the speaker to their spouse in marriage.
How do we resolve these seemingly irreconcilable meanings of performative (the use of language to cover inaction vs the use of words to perform actions)? For some scholars the answer seems to be that activists need a language lesson. In a 2021 episode of their generally enlightening and entertaining podcast Overthink, philosophers David Peña-Guzmán and Ellie Anderson provide a handy overview of performativity in contemporary academic theory, confidently concluding that the term “performative allyship” is “philosophically incorrect”. But we won’t get far telling people not to use certain expressions because they offend academics. As linguists and philosophers of language know very well, words and their meanings are constantly changing, whether we like it or not.
“Performative activism” and “performative allyship” are examples of expressions that have been popularised in the digital age and have proven useful for thinking about the possibilities and limitations of online activism. But the more geeky definition of performativity – which the philosopher Judith Butler refers to wryly as a “relatively obscure theory of speech acts” – can also be of use to activists. In their book Notes Towards a Theory of Performative Activism, Butler – whose 1990 book Gender Trouble helped to spread the term performative beyond the academy through their theory of gender performativity – argues that performativity is relevant to people involved in protest movements because it is a “way of naming a power language has to bring about a new situation or to set into motion a set of effects”.
Instead of trying to police activist language, then, we might use the academic lessons of the performativity of language to ask what accusations of “performative activism” do. Where some might hear this call out as the bad usage of a useful philosophical term, Thimsen argues that it’s an example of how words work in ways that are not always predictable:
The accusation of performative activism […] does something quite distinct from what it says. Assigning the label of “performative activism” is not a condemnation that demands silence or that demands withdrawal. It is an accusation that demands more action, more activism – more than social media posts and progressive advertising themes. In short, it demands more performance.
So if someone accuses me of being a “performative activist”, I don’t have to hear that as a dismissal. Instead, I could hear it as opportunity to reflect on the usefulness of my words and actions, and to find better ones. Similarly, an accusation of “performative allyship” can be met not with defensiveness, but with a willingness to learn about more constructive solidarity.
As the proliferation of slogans and symbols at protests attests, activists know very well the power of language to do things. And attempts by commentators to misrepresent activist messages is a clear sign that words don’t always do what we want them to do. Knowing these things, we might take pause before hurling accusations of “performative activism” at others. Returning to the example of the student protests against the attack on Gaza, there have been endless criticisms in the mainstream press of ostensibly elite, “woke” students playing politics. It’s true that the protests have been more successful in generating mass media attention than achieving their stated aim of getting universities to divest from companies profiting from the Israeli invasion of Gaza. And it is certainly important to hold Western media to account for its seemingly insatiable obsession with elite American institutions. Even some of us who support the protests – I include myself here – have grown weary and wary of photos of tents on campuses displacing images of tents in Palestinian refugee camps.
But my thinking on this changed when I read an account of Palestinians living in one of those camps in Rafah, the city in southern Gaza currently under bombardment, who have been following the events on American campuses on their phones (when they’re able to charge them and get a signal, that is). For some of these people at least the images of protest across the world have been a source of hope, a sign that the brutal hegemony of Western militarism is not going entirely unchallenged in the countries whose governments are arming Israel. So the protests, and even the media hype around them, are having an important political impact – even if their stated goals have not yet been met.
The problem with hasty accusations of “performative activism” is not their philosophical incorrectness, but that they can assume too much and demand too little. Instead of taking for granted the illegitimate motives of activists’ performances and pretending to know in advance the outcome of any particular action, we might be better off to remember that all actions – including those on social media, and those that get sensationalised by the mainstream media – have multiple meanings and effects. And when it’s clear that certain actions are not working, or they’re doing more harm than god, we would do well to go beyond the call out – demanding that activists, including ourselves, perform not less, but more.
Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. If you like what you read, you can get a paid subscription or leave me a tip.
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