As Judith Butler puts it inBodies That Matter, “in the sense that the ‘I’ has no interior secure ego or core identity, ‘I’ must always enunciate itself: there is only performance of a self, not an external representation of an interior truth.” Or, there isn’t some coherent interior that we must faithfully ‘represent’ through our ways of being and speaking/ lifestyle/ jobs/ consumer choices/ haircuts etc, though this is largely what the ‘authenticity’ promise of consumer capitalism traditionally traded on. (altho personally, I do always aim to fully express my true self through my hair).
As Rob Horning says, “consuming authentically could seem to prove fidelity to our “real self”’, a self that was built on the foundations of what Katherine Hayles has called “possessive individualism, the idea that subjects are individuals first and foremost because they own themselves”.
Instead, it’s through these choices and actions that the self- and gender, as Butler famously argues- is enunciated and created, that is, through its performance, which gains coherency and legitimacy through its reiteration, rather than fidelity to any intrinsic, essential quality.