Gender Trouble
Summary

Butler questions the notion that "the body" itself is a natural entity that "admits no genealogy", a usual given without explanation: "How are the 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?." 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." 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.
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