performative

performative adjective: being enacted as it is said.

Adjective

performative (comparative more performative, superlative most performative)

Being enacted as it is said.
- Saying "I do" as part of a wedding ceremony is performative, enacting a marriage.
- Thus in the example: 'By saying “I do” I was marrying her', the performative 'I do' is a means to the end of marriage. Here 'saying' is used in the sense in which it takes inverted commas and is using words or language, a phatic and not[…]1975 April 15, J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: Second Edition, Harvard University Press, →ISBN
Insincere, inauthentic or disingenuous; done solely or largely as a performance, to produce an impression or enhance one's reputation.
- We were beginning to suspect that her ethical qualms were sometimes performative, as the urgent need for fairness and justice seemed to apply to some people but not to others.
- Although the seeming copycat nature of the plots in Port Huran and Conyers was terrifying because of their repetitive, performative, even texted nature—their seeming theatricality—more harrowing was the threat that, like theater, the performance would settle quickly into repetition compulsions in...2002, Anthony Kubiak, Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty, →ISBN, page 4

performative (plural performatives)

A performative utterance.
- The distinction between constatives and performatives is one of the distinctions that he starts questioning.2011, Phyllis Kaburise, Speech Act Theory and Communication: A Univen Study, page 77

The Harambe meme soon became the perfect parody of the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterized it.2017, Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies, Zero Books, →ISBN, Introduction:
After the photos of Jenner and Elordi were published there was a stream of online discourse stating we had entered an era of performative reading.2024 February 9, Chloe Mac Donnell, “‘Reading is so sexy’: gen Z turns to physical books and libraries”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
I’m done with pathetic, performative people.”2026 June 28, David Smith, “Will the Mamdani effect make 2028 the year of the leftwing president?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

From perform + -ative.

What does performative mean?: Performative means being enacted as it is said.
How do you use performative in a sentence?: The Harambe meme soon became the perfect parody of the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterized it.
What part of speech is performative?: Performative can be an adjective or a noun.

Adapted from Wiktionary: performative (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “performative.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/performative. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.