One Woman Show: The performance of gender and self in the digital age

Humans have been performing their identities since the dawn of language. The concept of constructing a performative self identity emerged primarily in the 1960’s with the advent of Performance Studies as its own academic field. Richard Schechner’s 1965 article entitled ‘’Approaches’’, published in The Tulane Review articulated that performance is ‘’an inclusive category that includes play, game, sports, and everyday life and ritual.” Our identities are multi-layered, and are comprised of subcategories such as our gender and our race. As I emerged into adolescence and later in adulthood, I sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously, partook in carefully nuanced performances that I hoped would help me understand myself and in turn be understood by the outside world. How I dressed, how I spoke, and even my mannerisms all contributed to the on-going performance of myself and my femininity.

How we perform our identities and specifically our gender identities has transformed with the advent of social media and the dawning of the digital age. Our identities are now even more carefully constructed, a deliberate curation of digital image and language- every photo and its caption, including nuances of language such as punctuation and abbreviations, all dizzying efforts of claiming our images and our online personalities. I’ve noticed myself and my peers taking advantage of these parsed and packaged ( and at times fleeting) mediums: using Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Tumblr to display (some more subtly than others) our personal style and taste, glimpses into our everyday lives– projecting these constructions into cyberspace and in return, taking in and absorbing the images and digital identities of our peers.

While on one hand, the coming of social media may have facilitated the projection of our gendered identities, it has also complicated these manifestations of self by inundating us with visual stimulation and making us think in lists, snaps, and tweets; we feel the need to simplify our very complicated and conflicting identities and in turn to do the same to others. The everyday performances of our genders that during one time were only seen in person become exceedingly public and are therefore further questioned, provoked and hyper-stylized. We become hyper conscious of our self-portrayals. Being a woman, especially a Latina or panethnic woman, your image is constantly under scrutiny. The way in which you craft an image of yourself and present it the world is constantly being called in to question, constantly has to be proven. Is it more or less real to wear makeup, to straighten your hair, to go natural, to constantly fluctuate between both because neither fully encompasses or represents the way you see yourself?

On the one hand, ideals of beauty are still ingrained in Western and patriarchal ideals, and on the other, choosing to adopt practices or elements of images that fit these “norms” or standards can call in criticism in certain feminist/chicana spheres. The practice of “putting on your face” can be self-expression, an important part of how one interprets femininity, but it also a sort of performance, a mask. How do we find ways to inhabit these multiple spaces? How do we take control of our own image without feeling like we need to explain ourselves? When do you stop being a work of art and when do you begin to find a way to stop justifying every choice, every identification?

I have found myself becoming reliant on social media as a way of presenting myself and my thoughts, and at times I believe it to be a healthy and natural outlet for voicing opinions, but to what cost? I feel that if we are not careful, our generation will delve even further into the chasm of digital representation and take these virtual and concise representations of their peers as reality. That being said, social media has provided a safe community for body positivity and feminist spheres overall and has provided a forum for young women such as myself to have their opinions and thoughts heard by a larger audience than would normally be possible. For this I am infinitely thankful, but still — I worry.

Header image via.