Always impressed by the number of people who’ve read Gender Trouble cover to cover and found it a clear summary of a particular argument worth recommending to others, given how Judith Butler writes.
And since I’m sure this will get pounced on by lurkers concluding “haHA! Those silly mummies on MN don’t think anyone’s smart enough to read Judith Butler!” - no, I’m sure you’re smart enough to read Judith Butler. I’m sure you’re also smart enough to have clocked after Gender Trouble if you hadn’t before that Butler writes in a purposefully dense and convoluted style even for a theorist, to the point where she’s rather famous in academia for it.
Wherever you stand on the “this means she’s a genius” vs “this means she’s a bad writer” take on Butler’s style, it is pretty weird if you have read Butler to suggest people in discussions about girls’ sports on a parenting discussion board just go and read Butler because that’ll clear it up for them. It won’t clear it up for anybody. It might confuse a few people into thinking they understand less than they do and should just nod along, though.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote a great piece on Butler’s style a few years ago: faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Nussbaum-Butler-Critique-NR-2-99.pdf Think this bit is relevant:
To whom, then, is Butler speaking? It would seem that she is addressing a group of young feminist theorists in the academy who are neither students of philosophy, caring about what Althusser and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders, needing to be informed about the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This implied audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of Butler's text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.