First, renaming. No food, Jesus said, was unclean (Mark 7:14-23); division into clean and unclean foods creates false boundaries that unnecessarily separate people. The flow of blood from a woman’s body is not unclean (Mark 5:25-34, implicitly); the laws of purity for women are false boundaries that marginalize them.58 Put more abstractly, by the simple act of renaming, Jesus offset the stark binary logic that regulates so much of social life:
