Judith Butler, from 1999 Preface to Gender Trouble, xv


Several important questions have been posed to this doctrine [of 
performativity], and one seems especially noteworthy to mention here.
The view that gender is performative sought to show that what we 
take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a
sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.  
In this way, it showed that what we take to be an "internal" feature of 
ourselves is one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts, 
at an extreme, an hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures.  Does this 
mean that everything that is understood as "internal" about the psyche is 
therefore evacuated, and that internality is a false metaphor?  ... 
Although I would deny that all of the internal world of the psyche is but an 
effect of a stylized set of acts, I continue to think that it is a significant 
theoretical mistake to take the "internality" of the psychic world for granted.
... This suggests that there may well be a psychic theory of performativity
at work that calls for greater exploration.