How to Use performative in a Sentence

performative

adjective
  • What stood out was that none of it felt performative.
    — Kimberly Wilson, Essence, 1 Jan. 2026
  • The ones who were performative about it are gone.
    — Kimberly Wilson, Essence, 8 Oct. 2025
  • And so none of it was performative.
    — Gerrad Hall, Entertainment Weekly, 20 Nov. 2025
  • These performative emails are easy to spot.
    — Dr. Diane Hamilton, Forbes.com, 9 Sep. 2025
  • There’s nothing about it that should feel performative in any way.
    — Los Angeles Times, 9 Aug. 2022
  • The back-and-forth might have been read as performative navel-gazing.
    — Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, 9 Mar. 2017
  • If not, this is all performative.
    — Toria Sheffield, PEOPLE, 31 Jan. 2026
  • That can sound like performative wokeism.
    — Steven Zeitchik, HollywoodReporter, 5 Mar. 2026
  • The performative dolphins can be seen leaping through the air in the video.
    — Paloma Chavez, Sacramento Bee, 27 Jan. 2025
  • Each band was firmly in its creative and performative prime that night.
    — Rory Appleton, The Indianapolis Star, 11 May 2023
  • But Migos made the style sound fresh, less performative and more glossy.
    — Jon Caramanica, New York Times, 1 Nov. 2022
  • Swan said time will tell if the agency is being performative.
    — Sejal Govindarao, Los Angeles Times, 3 Feb. 2026
  • There's even been performative men contests in person that have drawn huge crowds.
    — Charles Trepany, USA Today, 17 Sep. 2025
  • Helfrich is quick to warn that the debates can’t be performative.
    — Anna Oakes, Quartz, 6 June 2023
  • The performative perks are gone.
    — Dasha Shunina, Forbes.com, 22 Jan. 2026
  • What the speech boiled down to is to shine a light on the justice system and that change just can't be performative.
    — Alamin Yohannes, EW.com, 24 Jan. 2023
  • Not in a performative sense, but in a cultural one.
    — Tinna Jackson, Forbes.com, 26 Aug. 2025
  • First, even more than usual, there’s a performative aspect to it.
    — David Roberts, Vox, 2 Nov. 2018
  • And there are some people in the house that do things that are very performative because that's their role in their shows.
    — Dalton Ross, Entertainment Weekly, 23 Feb. 2026
  • That hope is sincere, and not performative.
    — Clayton Davis, Variety, 28 Feb. 2026
  • It’s never been easier to spot a performative male out in the wild.
    — Viv Chen, Architectural Digest, 9 Sep. 2025
  • Which tells us that a place like Brodgar is really a performative space.
    — Alex Ross, New Yorker, 24 Nov. 2025
  • People know when your effort is performative, don’t fake it.
    — Dr. Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj, Forbes.com, 19 Aug. 2025
  • Consumers can spot performative engagement from a mile away—and will call it out!
    — Expert Panel®, Forbes.com, 26 Mar. 2025
  • But Hawkins said many of those vows to change proved to be more performative than productive.
    — USA TODAY, 14 Aug. 2023
  • Letting go here creates space for joy that feels more genuine and less performative.
    — Dossé-Via Trenou, Refinery29, 8 Feb. 2026
  • Brands need to be performative to succeed in a social media world.
    — Adam Hanft, Fortune, 25 Jan. 2024
  • Once detected, the performative aroma of this style is hard to shake.
    — Ron Charles, Washington Post, 7 Sep. 2023
  • It will be built by those who refuse to let performative outrage stand in the way of real solutions.
    — Rob Sisson and Danielle Franz, Boston Herald, 4 Apr. 2025
  • Lee countered that the protest by Democrats was more performative than sincere.
    — Bryan Schott, The Salt Lake Tribune, 22 Oct. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'performative.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: