"The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue."

Said David Axelrod, with a distinctively clever way to state the numerical fact, quoted in "Should Biden Run in 2024? Democratic Whispers of ‘No’ Start to Rise. In interviews, dozens of frustrated Democratic officials, members of Congress and voters expressed doubts about the president’s ability to rescue his reeling party and take the fight to Republicans" (NYT). 

Another quote from Axelrod: "Biden doesn’t get the credit he deserves for steering the country through the worst of the pandemic, passing historic legislation, pulling the NATO alliance together against Russian aggression and restoring decency and decorum to the White House. And part of the reason he doesn’t is performative. He looks his age and isn’t as agile in front of a camera as he once was, and this has fed a narrative about competence that isn’t rooted in reality."

I should make a tag for "performative." It's a buzz word these days, I believe, and I'd like to keep track of it. 

Did it come from gender studies? The most notable appearance of "performative" in my archive was a quote from the famous hoax "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct": "The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct."

And from the field of racial studies, there's this, quoted from a NYT op-ed about Rachel Dolezal (the white woman who identified as black): "But Ms. Dolezal’s view of herself — however confused, or incongruent with society’s — reveals an essential truth about race: It is a fiction, a social construct based in culture and not biology. It must be 'made' from what people believe and do. Race is performative."

And I quoted this, about an "anti-racism" mural in Madison: "[The artist] said her intent is to show the nature of performative allyship and the manner in which white savior complex permeates Madison."

We talked about the word a few days ago, in connection with a Georgetown professor who'd tweeted that the defenders of Brett Kavanaugh "deserve miserable deaths." She called her tweeting "performative."

I got some push back in the comments saying that the word "performative" should be restricted to the "How To Do Things With Words" philosophical meaning — speech that performs an act. Indeed, that is the only meaning of the word in the OED. 

But the vogue usage of "performative" that I'm seeing in the media these days isn't that. "How To Do Things With Words" was required reading in my first semester of college. That was 1969. These days,  more than half a century later, young people are picking up different ways of thinking and talking in college, and performativeness is something different. 

If people these days are finding the word "performative" useful, it suggests that they also believe in a more authentic and substantive aspect of life that is deeper and more important than the things we do for show — the theater of politics and society. I hope so! 

But it is also possible that people are coming to feel that there is nothing inside, that it's all performative, that everything is fluid. That's not a new idea, that we are empty and soulless — that Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more.