on performativity
When I was pretty young, I had abdominal pain and went to the doctor and got prodded. I figured, okay, doctors like to prod around, he's feeling for something, so I endured it even when it hurt. He didn't say anything when he started. When he was done, though, he asked in frustration, "Didn't any of that hurt?!"
Well, yeah, but you didn't say you wanted to know that.
My failure mode is still silence. I've actually rewired myself somewhat, so that I can have reflexive yelps and stuff, and I bet I seem almost normal. I think of myself as quiet, because that's my default setting, but I'm almost always operating in "let people see me" mode because when people see me they can actually have a valid opinion about me. I am not at all quiet when I'm working to show myself.
(The things people project onto silent, centered-seeming girl are interesting in their way, but not about me. I prefer to have relationships where I'm really there.)
Not being neurotypical? Just strong and self-aware introversion? Who knows.
But the failure mode remains. For instance, I was silent in the face of casual misogyny a couple of days ago.
Person 1 made a pun that was a little squicky. Person 2 said, "that's disturbing" and then "I love it." And Person 1 came back with "wow, I'll have to read up on women, I would've thought that meant you didn't like it." I, in fact, did not like it. I said nothing.
All I would have had to say was, "It bothers me." But I got tangled in "different women are different argh" and the cultural context being the only thing that made any of it a problem and the unexpected depths of hurtful foolishness lurking in reasonable-seeming people and the social pressure of not making my friends feel awkward. I didn't even leave, I just vapor-locked.
So that's the bad part of not being a person who just yells out whatever they're thinking. (We dissected types of stress response as grad students. There are three responses to getting overwhelmed in your general exam: some people attack, some cry, and some go silent. We practiced to moderate all of them, but silent is the hardest to claw your way out of to reach a useful response.)
The good thing about performativity is that when I show my feelings I am doing it on purpose. All my interactions are performative: if I weren't performing I'd be silent and unresponsive. The fact that on some level I am aware of deciding to do everything I do can seem weird to people. I guess I laugh when tickled; I can decide not to, but laughing is the default. There may be sexier exceptions as well. :)
Showing my self and my feelings is important to me, but it's never automatic -- it's like there's always a little checkpoint. For uncomplicated things, I've mostly managed the checkpoint down to a sort of rolling slowdown and wavethrough. Sometimes what I want to say gets pulled over, though, and sometimes the output can't get through at all, there's a tangle of fuckery and then the moment has passed. (That's one factor in why people will frequently get email from me about something we discussed a while ago, on which I have developed new or newly expressable thoughts.)
My friends sometimes don't know how to take it when I talk about playing a role or interacting in certain ways on purpose. I guess the other piece of "playing a role" is that I often view personal relationships through the lens of existing stories. (See also: my strong identification with Abed.) Because I don't necessarily understand people very well, I tend to put narrative patterns onto my real interactions. I maintain that everyone does this: how many of us have failed to see that we were in bad relationships because we were telling ourselves things were moving along a story arc that turns out okay? So I think it's better to do it consciously, though of course I often get wrong what part of the story is the most applicable. (See also: my complex relationships with various manga.) But it's like writing poetry to a strict form, or pulling meaning from a Tarot spread: having a place to stand lets me interpret what's happening better, see the parallels and where it's wrong.
TL;DR: I am usually conscious of my communication as a performance and as stories I'm telling to you and myself. It's still me, and still true.
previous relevant works
helpfulness fetish, 30 Aug 2012
interaction filters, 25 Mar 2013
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