Foreword by Founding Editor Henry Fernandez
Caleb Kaufman, Collegetown Magazine’s staff photographer found himself in a land of wired headphones, Sally Rooney novels, matcha drinks, and screaming, satirically lustful young women.
Those were the images at Cornell’s Performative Male Contest, an afternoon pageant organized by Cornell’s “Big Red Moon Club” where hundreds of students sat on the grass, watching and evaluating a seemingly endless stream of contestants parodying the “Performative Male,” a contemporary strain of young man stemming from his ancestors like the 2020 softboi and early 2000s Metrosexual. The Performative Male is a young man with a soft, vaguely feminine aesthetic meant to draw female attention. He feigns interest in feminist literature, female indie artists (who he listens to on his wired earbuds) and can always be found sipping a matcha beverage.
This is not the first outdoor mass-gathering Kaufman has been commissioned to photograph for Collegetown Magazine, however unlike his prior assignment, which emphasized the rote, mundane aspects of life on Cornell’s Palestine encampment — here, Kaufman paints golden, gladiator-esque, ironically masculine portraits of the contestants in the throes of aesthetic battle.
