How to Tell: Gender Performance and Viral “Identity Tests”
“Supposedly, only women can do this,” a typical video begins. The woman bends at the waist and lifts a chair, steps over a broom, kneels and puts her hands behind her back, the man strains, struggles comically, falls on his face. These “challenges”pre-date the internet—many commentators remember learning them decades ago in gym or physics classes—but have been given fresh relevance and urgency by public anxieties over transgender visibility and civil rights. On “X,” user “TTExulansic” writes, “this test, the chair test, and the knowledge we have about male and female skeletons’ body wide proportion differences, all lead to being able to distinguish sex based not simply on how they look as a still frame, but on the lines their bodies trace across time as they move.”
As with more overt strains of gender essentialist discourse online (here I’m thinking of Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s infamous embrace of trans-exclusive radical feminism), these tests/challenges are propelled by an empowering, feminist(ish) framing: “only women can do this.” The most popular videos emphasize the physical comedy of men confidently fumbling and flailing at something their wives or girlfriends perform easily.
Sometimes influencers juxtapose highly visible gendered physical differences (his bodybuilder physique) with invisible female strength or agility. (This particular influencer, Jarell Carter, makes a lot of these challenge/collab videos with other fitness influencers, typically showing himself attempting to replicate the workout routine of a slender, leanly-muscled woman, fielding interruptions from his sweet, clueless pitbull Dootie, and gamely failing spectacularly; I’ve never seen him succeed. He has essentially built a brand out of deflating stereotypes of toxic masculinity or Black male violence, with an assist from his pitbull, a dog breed with their own undeserved bad reputation to subvert.) He ends the video saying, “I’m sorry fellas,” like he has let down his entire gender, as if this performance is not largely aimed at and consumed by women. He has captioned this video, “I’m starting to realize there is so much women can do that men can’t.” (You can also see it’s sponcon; it’s actually an ad for these energy drinks in the background.) In another example of this genre, the chair test , this content creator has captioned this “constantly proving that women are the elite species.” This gymnast posts a lot of workout routines, but this particular post is by far his most successful post, 173 million views. The algorithm rewards men willing to humiliate themselves in order to affirm their masculinity and reify a gender binary—he is hitting himself in the balls, yes, but that proves that he has them!
Because these videos circulate as challenges or tests, the outcome is binary: either you can do it, or you can’t. At a time when transphobic politicians try to catch their opponents with the gotcha question, “What is a woman?” the gender essentialist frame of the meme offers concrete terms for quantifying womanhood, that thing all women share that makes it possible for them to do this: it has to do with height, or shoe size, with hip to waist ratio or center of gravity, or it’s not determined by gender but by age, fitness, core strength, flexibility. The playful, experimental format of memes opens up space, in comment sections and stitched video responses, to debate the the supposed science of gender, while simultaneously defusing the political stakes of the conversation in the way that vernacular culture does best: a humorous and plausibly denial focus on personal experience. “Should someone tell her” — ie, that her husband is not a real man—one comment reads on a husband-wife influencer account who have “debunked” the challenge. The original poster replies, unoffended, “lmfaooo.” As we know from folklore scholarship on legends, belief isn’t binary but social and relational, and legends are circulated most aggressively not by those who believe, but by those who doubt. This is to say that, just because there is no consensus in the comment sections on what these tests prove about gender does not mean these negotiations are meaningless—the virality of the genre is proof of their believability.
The performative, ritualistic aspects of these identity tests play into the social and embodied nature of belief: like the familiar duet-with-me and put-a-finger-down-edition meme formats, physical imitation and collaboration helps bring online relationships and identities home, ups our investment in virtual worlds. Katherine Young reminds us that “we activate folklore by moving into it bodily… by borrowing other’s subjectivities” (2011, 82, qtd. Barker 2019, 70). Categories of identity are social, but we live increasingly isolated, disembodied lives. A wide range of viral trends aim to fill this gap, by inviting users to confirm their relative health, age, agility by holding their breath, flexing their fingers, searching their body for a significant mole. Can you see the number, count the dots, read the expression? Are you colorblind, autistic, do you have ADHD? There’s a simple, actionable, at-home test for that—no need to visit a doctor’s office, which is convenient because you don’t have health insurance. Click your heels together, the evidence was in your own body all the time.
We can think of meme formats which call on users to physically re-enact what they see as social media rituals, which Trillo and co-authors define as “typified communicative practices on social media that formalize and express shared values.” They write, “Each contribution amounts to ‘a tiny value assertion’ (Gillespie, 2018, p. 210), which is then subjected to a series of tiny evaluations in the form of likes, shares, and comments” (Trillo, Hallinan, and Shifman 2022). This is what the enactment of social identity looks like online, each post stakes a claim on perceptual reality and backs it up with their body. Unlike the Yanny/Laurel meme (which do you hear first), or the famous dress of 2015 (do you see blue and black, or white and gold?), the virality of which relied on the impossibility of confirming our unique sensory experiences, these gender tests come prepackaged with supposedly appropriate outcomes, and attached to larger political discourses about the immutability of gender.
The chair test, the broom test, the balance challenge, and other things which only women can do lend a participatory, embodied authority to arguments that gender ideology is primarily an internet phenomenon, whose claimants are terminally online and need to touch grass. But as in all online trends, what can be seen cannot be felt, and what can be felt cannot be seen. No matter how engaging or realistic the world on your phone screen is, you can’t smell it, taste it, touch it. Liking a post is no replacement for spending time with friends in person—but it has replaced it. Social media is fairy food, leaving us even hungrier for the real thing. This is the principle that drives the social media popularity of conceptual art exhibits like Koch and Ortkrass’s Rain Room, James Turrell’s lightscapes, Yoyoi Kosama’s Infinity Mirror rooms, or the many pop-up “museums” that invite guests to swim in a pool full of sprinkles, fall into a ballpit of balloons, walk through a room-sized projection of a painting. These venues encourage patrons to document and post everything, knowing that whatever they post will be a sensuously unfinished experience—anyone seeing it through a screen will want to feel it for themselves. (“swimming around absolutely consumed with joy”). The Turrell lightscapes colorshift as you look at them because of the biology of your eyes—your human body is the canvas. Unlike Walter Benjamin’s famous essay about the Mona Lisa, these works of art cannot be mechanically or even digitally reproduced.
The theorist Anna Kornbluh calls this trend “immediacy,” typical of “too late capitalism”—a rejection of the abstract and the symbolic in favor of the present moment, the personal and experiential that, she argues, informs not just art and culture but politics, economics, and even academic discourses like affect theory, actor-network-theory, and post-criticism. Kornbluh writes, “Philosophers have … identified recent history with a ‘passion for the real’ or a ‘reality hunger’… Much of immediacy’s lure rests in the momentary compensatory solidities of imagined contact with imagined real… Immediatism demands these imaginary reals, grasping encounters with what circumvents or precedes mediation—but its aesthetic and political effects propagate infinite, individualized, phenomenalized attempts that perpetually, repetitively circle, multiplying into a hall of mirrors” (Kornbluh 61).
One comment on these videos, a more traditional male-fail, reads “am I the only guy who can do this easily” – the original poster encourages them to upload their own video in response, and conveniently boost their engagement and earnings—“Let’s see it!”
It’s an endless feedback loop: there is no effective way to respond to the conversation except in kind. But that video will not prove anything to viewers—seeing isn’t believing, belief is in the embodied, social interaction, in the co-construction of shared experiences and consequently shared realities. As Brandon Barker writes about folk illusions, “bodies are only human bodies as long as they are involved in social processes, and socialized, enculturated bodies shine a light on yet another core paradox: the universal materiality of human bodies vis-à-vis the singularly unique manifestation of each human’s body. Much is at stake when we make the move from the universal to the particular.” (Barker 75). Anyone watching these videos will need to try it for themselves, and their performance will, in turn, be reincorporated into online discourse, virtual evidence of the material reality of cultural constructs like gender.
Paradoxically, the insistence that gender is concrete and observable in virtual spaces—the transphobic rhetoric of “we can always tell,” the dissection of vocal pitch, shoulder breadth, adam’s apples, thigh gaps, and other so-called evidence—can only ever reaffirm that gender is performance, because everything online is performance. Every image, every video, is framed, selected, cropped, edited, filtered, hashtagged. It is all representation, not reality. There’s no there there. All these videos do is to invite us to examine ourselves. If our only interactions with stigmatized others is online, any stories we tell about them are stories about ourselves.
References
Barker, K. Brandon, and Claiborne Rice. Folk Illusions: Children, Folklore, and Sciences of Perception. 1st ed. New York: Indiana University Press, 2019.
Kornbluh, Anna. Immediacy. Verso, 2024.
Trillò, Tommaso, Blake Hallinan, and Limor Shifman. “A Typology of Social Media Rituals.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 27, no. 4 (2022).
CaMP Anthropology 