  While Butler's theory was initially viewed by some as a kind of gender voluntarism, it is clear that this is very far from her actual view, further refined in Bodies that Matter (1993). Butler clarifies that instead of a kind of voluntary theatricality donned and doffed by a pre-existing agent, gender performance is constitutive of the agent itself. For Butler, even though the self is the mere effect of repeated gender performances, it is nonetheless real: There are selves, they are socially constructed. What is strictly fictional, for Butler, is the view that they are unified cores which exist prior to gendered behavior. Butler does not want to deny the existence of our psychic lives.