With a crash that shattered the last manifestations of the notion that some inner core renders human beings male or female, an ancient concept of the self fell to the axe of Judith Butler, one of the most important theorists rewriting identity and sexuality today. Gender is the bedrock of personal identity in Butler's conception, but, jettisoning conventional notions altogether, she argues that it is the acts of gender and only the acts of gender that constitute its reality. Gender emerges from the repetition of such acts. It is constructed in and through that repetition, with each iteration altering slightly the act it enacts. No additional “essence” lies behind this performance. Gender is thus the product of the “reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” People, speaking subjects, “I's” emerge only as always already gendered, as already existing within gender relations, where those relations are themselves the products of the utterances that constitute the substance of “gender” and “relation” in the first place.