Kayfabe
In the world of professional wrestling, the term “kayfabe” refers to the shared social agreement to pretend that clearly fake, staged, performed behaviors are real.
So while there are actual people engaging in at times quite physically demanding stunts within and beyond the roped-off wrestling arena, those stunts are performed in support of a narrative that is not genuine; the performers, in addition to being stuntpeople, are actors, and the feuds they play out, the personae they adopt, and the competitions they compete in are all part of a grander narrative they and those watching them treat like real versions of the same, despite their falsity.
This term, which may be derived from a pig-latin-esque reworking of the word “fake,” and which was maybe coined—in writing—in a wrestling newsletter published in 1988, thus refers to the weaving of an on- and off-stage storyline that performers present over the course of their careers.
This storyline orients around (but isn’t 100% reliant upon) a variety of collaborative stunts, framed by trash-talking, betrayals, relationships, and other elements commonly associated with soap operas and other long-term, ever-evolving yarns, alongside real-deal things that actually happen that are incorporated into the script (real injuries, breakups, beefs, etc).
The word kayfabe has, in recent years, been applied to other staged and seemingly staged performances as well, including relationships—real or made-up—between celebrities, meant to draw attention to a collaborative project or to amplify their respective careers by blending their audience-bases, giving their fans and detractors something to follow in the tabloids and on social media (the performance of fake feuds between public figures may be orchestrated to achieve similar outcomes).
Something like kayfabe exists in the world of politics, too, as attention-seeking politicians position themselves as representatives of certain groups and ideas, play-acting the role of hero or champion (or victim), using their behaviors on the House floor and in front of small crowds in small-town diners to reinforce that perception, alongside elements that would be familiar fare to wrestling fans: the performance of relationships and feuds between themselves and other politicians and public figures.
It could be argued that this concept has always been interwoven with the world of elected officials because they rely on public perception to put them in power (and to retain that power), so creating caricatured versions of themselves—based on their real selves, or based on what they think a segment of the voting population wants them to be—is part of the job.
But in the modern world, where everyone has a camera and live-streaming-capable hardware in their pockets, all day, every day, many public figures’ commitment to the bit has necessarily been taken up a notch or two: their fans expecting them to reinforce their place in their group’s shared grand narrative whenever possible, the complexity of these storylines and the density of the canon amplified as a consequence.