Among contemporary feminist theorists and critics, and particularly in discussions of identity, performance has become a central term. Scholars across a range of disciplines, inspired largely by the groundbreaking work of Judith Butler, now regard identity not as a stable construct, but rather as constituted by and through the performative acts that bring an “I” into being. Regarded in this light, performative acts generate rather than undermine the cultural fiction of the stable self, soliciting our assent to it, in Butler's words, as “a compelling illusion, an object of belief .” Extending the point to textual production, Sidonie Smith argues that “there is no essential, original, coherent autobiographical self before the moment of self-narrating”: the textual “I” achieves subject status by “the inclusion of certain identity contents and the exclusion of others; the incorporation of certain narrative itineraries and intentionalities, the silencing of others; the adoption of certain autobiographical voices, the muting of others.” By contrast with Elizabeth Robins’s view of stage performance, “where your business is not to be your real self,” the poststructuralist discourse on identity seems to contend there is no “real self” not to be.