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In the 1970s, performance gained widespread purchase as a discrete artistic category and lens of scholarly analysis in the United States. At the same time, its discourses were mired in irresolution. This talk argues that these twinned phenomena issue from performance’s formal capacity to register contradictions at the level of political economy. I take artists as among the first and best theorists of the sharp rise in waged affective labor as it collided with long-standing social mandates for authenticity—both gendered and racialized—to offer a new historical account of performance’s dogged resistance to straightforward definition. With particular attention to the roles into which Black femininity is routinely conscripted, I interrogate the era’s shifting understandings of “neutral” (that is, “expressionless”) performing styles, mobilizing archival research and reception history to contend with the ways that audiences interpreted and misinterpreted the putative “reality” of stage presence. The paradoxical imperative “act natural” offers a prism to reconsider longstanding cathexes to avant-garde abnegations of authorship.