contours of the body clearly marked as the taken-for-granted ground or surface upon which gender signification are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to significance?" (129). Building on the thinking of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, outlined in her Purity and Danger (1966), Butler claims that the boundaries of the body have been drawn to instate certain taboos about limits and possibilities of exchange. Thus the hegemonic and homophobic press has read the pollution of the body that AIDS brings about as corresponding to the pollution of the homosexual's sexual activity, in particular his crossing the forbidden bodily boundary of the perineum. In other words, Butler's claim is that "the body is itself a consequence of taboos that render that body discrete by virtue of its stable boundaries" (133). Butler proposes the practice of drag as a way to destabilize the exteriority/interiority binary, finally to poke fun at the notion that there is an "original" gender, and to demonstrate playfully to the audience, through an exaggeration, that all gender is in fact scripted, rehearsed, and performed. Butler attempts to construct a feminism (via the politics of jurido-discursive power) from which the gendered pronoun has been removed or not presumed to be a reasonable category. They claim that even the binary of subject/object, which forms the basic assumption for feminist practices—"we, 'women,' must become subjects and not objects"—is a hegemonic and artificial division. The notion of a subject is for them formed through repetition, through a "practice of signification" (144). Butler offers parody (for example, the practice of drag) as a way to destabilize and make apparent the invisible assumptions about gender identity and the inhabitability of such "ontological locales" (146) as gender. By redeploying those practices of identity and exposing as always failed the attempts to "become" one's gender, they believe that a positive, transformative politics can emerge. All page numbers are from the first edition: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, Routledge, 1990). Publication history Gender Trouble was first published by Routledge in 1990. Later that decade, a second edition was published by Routledge. In 2006, a Routledge Classics edition was published. Reception Gender Trouble was reviewed by Shane Phelan in Women & Politics. The work has enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring a fanzine, Judy! Butler, in a preface to the second edition of the book, writes