Performative Creativity

It’s why I quit writing.

A doodle I made to remind myself of what to do.

Performative Creativity is not an official term with a definition. I basically just made it up because it fits what I’ve been doing and what keeps me from making things.

Judith Butler first used the term performativity in connection with gender. I understand her argument to mean that gender is not a true identity but a range of behaviors we enact to show our belonging to a societal gender construct.

In other words, doing shit that doesn’t express who we are, but that signifies a certain societal label we claim.

I’m not a student of feminist theory, and this analogy will fall apart in a sec, but it helps me express an inconvenient truth about my struggle with creativity: Sometimes, I express a real part of myself, and sometimes I perform an idea of what it means to be a writer.

Whether you’re a writer or another kind of maker or creator, maybe you can relate to what I mean by performative creativity.

Performative Creativity:

• Making a thing, not for the sake of making it or the pleasure of the process, but for the sole purpose of offering it for consumption.
• Desiring validation not only for the thing made but for myself as a person.
• Making the thing not to…