03-On identities and the performative self

last edited : 10/23/25

/!\i do not pretend to give any actual answers here, like most of my texts this one is just my thoughts on the topic, i believe i am right but youre free to disagree and think further about it.

First, I think it's important here to define what identity is, both online and offline. For the latter one it's almost easy, material-identity is the accumulation of different factors, first our basic determinisms, sex, race, social class, health state, physical appearance, environment and even gender (which is not material nor biological, but forced onto us according to sex). In the material world we learn to build our identity around those main factors, sex/assigned gender at birth being the first essentialism of our lives. Just like our environment, our life events also affect our identity, depending on where we live, and the trauma we may go through, our identity will be drastically changed. It's important to highlight that sex and gender are the two least immutable factors since they're mostly based on social constructs rather than actual binary facts. Thanks to scientific and medical progress, we are now able to hack our biology with hormones, surgeries and going beyond the sex and gender binary. Moreover, it's not easy to change our identity in the material world, there's still nuances to our identity, we are not perceived the same by our parents or our friends for example.
Since identity online is not determined by any material factors we could say that active users online are able to adopt any identity they want, multiplying their dimensions of the self. By adjusting their profiles to match the online persona they want to perform, to be associated with, to feel like. It's important to notice that while the digital-self is often very influenced by the material-self, it doesn't mean the latter one is more important or more valid than the digital-selves, because as soon as you find your digital-personas, those will also begin to influence your material-self as you construct your identities online. All in all, our identities here are defined by our own consciousness, the more conscious you are about creating your other you online, the freer you are when creating those.
But what about material identity ? Do we get to choose who we are ? Obviously not as freely as we wish, this one is too dictated by our material condition, though we can change our gender, sex and sometimes, our social class. The material identity doesn't fully rely on how we want to be perceived. Our physical appearance cannot be as easily changed as a profile picture. We can try to customize our material-self as much as we want, although the reality of some materialistic features and how they're perceived in society will always keep us away from really choosing who we are.

All the selves on the same line, none being higher than the other, and all linked to another.

From those definitions, we could possibly affirm that identity is a performance and is pretty much fluid, creating other personas of our material-self is the closer we can get from escaping all of our material determinisms. You're becoming someone else but instead of one identity replacing the others, they all can exist simultaneously.
So, if we're all performing our identities, then it would mean we have no default settings, no default identity, making all of our different identities matter as much as the others.