self-display

noun

self-dis·​play ˌself-di-ˈsplā 

plural self-displays

: the act or an instance of showing off or exhibiting oneself usually in an ostentatious manner : self-exhibition

He disliked self-display, making a scene, anything that threatened to rock the social boat.

—James Trilling

… reveled in the kind of self-display that a bourgeois woman was supposed to avoid …

—Laura Auricchio

Examples of self-display in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

My body had become a walking sign of misery and righteousness, slow death and supremacy, self-erasure and self-display. —Anna Shechtman, Harper's Magazine, 9 Feb. 2024

Swift’s big-screen self-display catches the youth of the Great Reset at their most gullible. —Armond White, National Review, 18 Oct. 2023

But this amplifies the problem staged afresh with every book, that of self-making, self-display: sculpting the self into a glittering object for the Other to cherish or stomp to shards. —Tobi Haslett, Harper's Magazine, 18 Sep. 2023

Word History

First Known Use

1806, in the meaning defined above