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The performative man is no stranger to Harvard. With a matcha latte in one hand, a tote bag slung across his shoulder, and a carefully curated book held at a conspicuous angle, he is instantly recognizable. Add wired earbuds, a Labubu keychain, and a boast-worthy vinyl collection (though perhaps not the record player to play it), and the picture is complete. I can take most of it in good humor; I’ve even pointed out a few posers myself.

But it is the part about books that stays with me. The performative man reads in public, on benches, in parks, across cafe tables, for the gaze of others. What draws us towards him is how he subverts expectations. Men are not always imagined as attentive, sensitive, or contemplative, and so the sight of one immersed in a book acquires cultural weight. The trope of “a man who reads” has endured because reading is coded as care: care for detail, for language, for thought.

This culture is pervasive here at Harvard. Books are everywhere, tucked under arms in the Yard, spread across Tatte’s tables, stacked in the windows of Grolier’s and Harvard Book Store, woven into the walls of Widener and Lamont. On campus, contests of performance proliferate, from orchestral concerts to improv shows to competitive club comps, even to the most recent “performative male contest” on the Widener Library steps. The effect is that performing one’s identity, politics, and even reading habits becomes naturalized. Carrying a heavily annotated Nietzsche book is a badge, an audition, a proof of belonging to the intellectualism of this campus. In an environment where literature saturates the air, reading becomes less private and more staged.

Though it is tempting to mock the performative man, none of us are exempt. He embodies, in comic exaggeration, the instinct that runs through us all to let books stand in for identity. When I drag my battered Norton into Annenberg Hall and theatrically flip it open over my morning iced coffee, I know exactly what I’m doing. The performance isn’t his alone — it’s mine too.

And perhaps that desire for performance is defensive as much as it is playful. As a freshman, I am familiar with the impulse. Our identity is always in flux: fitting in, standing out, proving one’s seriousness, or signaling one’s irreverence. Freshman year is a season of reinvention. Every gesture is provisional, every choice a signal, from which clubs we comp, friends we meet in the Yard, first-year seminars we select, and even, to which books we carry across campus, onto the T, into the city. To be in public is to be watched in return; to read in public is to be read in return.

Perhaps this is the source of my discomfort with public reading. It feels like an extension of college’s constant contest for cultural capital: who can be the most intellectual, the most obscure, the most authentic. Reading becomes another chip in the game of social survival.

Yet performance, for all its artifice, can also be generative. On a campus where glowing laptop screens outnumber paper books, where conversations are increasingly mediated through pings and buttons, the sight of a physical page feels sanctified, almost radical. However posed, however self-conscious, performative reading insists that literature still belongs in public dialogue.

Further, performance may be less about deceit than about aspiration. When we are reading, we are becoming the person we want to be, and shyly showing others the spine of that dream.

Performative reading embodies the double-edged nature of college life: at once private and public, intimate and staged, raw and strategic. This duality unsettles me, but it also feels honest. College is a performance of becoming. Reading performatively may look pretentious, but perhaps it is also just another way of rehearsing the selves we are still learning to grow into.