Soren Morgan

My ethnographic project, The Role of Irony in Socially Constructing the Self: A Study of “Performative Male” Contests took place over 3 months from September to November 2025. The “Performative Male” micro trend seemingly had macro implications as online engagement with this satirical phenomenon manifested beyond the screen to in-person GenZ communities at many university campuses across Canada.

McGill, UBC, McMaster, and TMU organized their own versions of the “performative male contests”, though these contests appeared internationally along similar demographic lines. My research drew from a male performative contest in September 2025 at Toronto Metropolitan University and three interviews with organizers of performative male, masc lesbian and femme lesbian contests in Toronto.

To give a very brief overview of the trend, it essentially serves to highlight and critique “performative men” – specifically men who dress and act for the “female gaze”, ‘embodying’ progressive attitudes and non-toxic masculinity. In the critical discourse on the archetype of the “performative man”, men are criticized and satirized due to their performed in-authenticity and the aestheticizing of progressive values. Performative male contests often took place to magnify these characteristics to their extremes in the pursuit of crowning “the most performative man”.

I was intrigued by the trend’s undertones of irony, self-awareness, gender construction, capitalism, and embodiments of social justice.

My research initially posed the following questions: What are the ways in which the ironic humor used by GenZ social media users is actually political? What do both the form and content have to say about GenZ’s outlooks and attempts towards activism when addressing serious issues like misogyny, capitalism, public shaming, and gendered ideologies?

I attempted to look at the ways in which denotation and connotation was embodied and performed at the level of form to engage in subversive, paradoxical and ironic commentary. Ultimately, I reflected on how authenticity and performative authenticity functions politically within the public sphere.