  The bulk of Butler's defense of this ambivalence derives from her discussion of the life and death of Venus Xtravaganza, a light skinned Latina, and self-identified pre-operative transsexual woman. Xtravaganza dreams of a happy, suburban, heterosexual life but works as a prostitute and is ultimately killed. On the one hand, Butler sees the murder as the effect of the dominant order to annihilate that which subverts its (in this case, Xtravaganza's “in-between” body and gender incongruence) (1993, 131). On the other hand, Butler sees the murder of Xtravaganza as flowing from her “tragic misreading of the social map of power” where her hopes to live a happy life in the suburbs are shattered when she is treated in the way in which women of color are treated (1993, 131). While Butler sees Xtravaganza's life is genuinely subversive of dominant regulations of gender, she also raises worries about the nature of Xtravaganza's desire for gender realness as a middle-class, heterosexual woman (133) . In Butler's view, this desire is primarily an attempt to transcend race and class through gender transformation (130).