Gavin Butt, You Cannot Be Serious!: Gender Performance and Queer Authenticity Performance has often been approached as a sign of non-serious or value-less activity in the 20th and 21st century. For instance, in speaking pejoratively of someone as 'theatrical', we can see how performance is sometimes associated with a lack of authenticity, in this case by implying that they are exaggerated or affected, 'too much' to be taken seriously. Gavin Butt argues that this lack of seriousness refigures our relationship to so-called serious culture and 'authentic' acts and expressions. By considering the queer cabaret of New York duo Kiki and Herb and the pop performance of Antony and the Johnsons, he explores how such work refashions authentic expression and serious attention precisely through the supposedly non-serious forms of hyperbolised performance - of expressly artificial, 'unnatural', and theatrical forms sex/gender presentation.