Last Saturday, as I was sitting in the park sipping a cup of joe, courtesy of Marc Horowitz (that's him you see in the photo, stretching out 1250 ft. of extension cord to achieve Coffee in the Park), I ran into a bloke from Oxford who was anxious to get to Berkeley so that he could hobnob with Judith Butler.
So, naturally, we discussed whether or not Butler's writing style is impenetrable, and the related question: if it is impenetrable, is it necessarily so (because of the complexity of her ideas) or is it a matter of academic grandstanding?
My view shades toward the later. I slogged through an awful lot of Gender Trouble before realizing that I wasn't learning in proportion to the labor I was performing. My interlocutor's argument was that Butler is dense, but it's because she has extremely difficult things to say and because of the fact that the way we talk about things like gender is an ingrained habit that affects and even defines the thing itself, in our minds.
I've heard this argument many times before and, quite frankly, I don't accept it in the case of Judith Butler.
Not that our use of language doesn't affect the construction of gender and things like it—just that this is no excuse for writing the way she does.
I was engaged and inspired by her essay, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." which I believe is a difficult but more or less lucid and compelling argument (more on which here) to the effect that gender identity is something we all perform, and that butch/femme gay identities only underscore the performance of gender and uproot the naturalness of gender. That's an argument that you can respond to, and the outcome of which might affect your life.
But in Gender Trouble, she devotes a good half the book to wrestling with very particular concepts that come mostly from famous psychoanalytic thinkers. Now, you may or may not agree with me that psychoanalysis is hogwash, that its intellectual vanguards are charlatans whose main role in life is to get rich doing shrink sessions with rich folk, while lending the patina of intellectual progress to their clients' lives—but even if that's not the case, Butler's writing bears mostly on the intellectual underbrush that has grown up in the academy around the idea of gender, and works to pull up weeds that have grown there without any reference to the nourishing soil of observations and experiences.
What's worse, I believe that in Gender Trouble, Butler avoids direct criticism mostly by laying out a series of dense statements, each of which is a tautly constructed proposition in its own right, but taken together don't lead toward a mass of thinking that can be responded to. There's a lot of "hence" and "therefore" and in too few cases do I feel that the coming statement follows persuasively from the last. The experience of reading Trouble, for me, is one of bearing with Butler, hoping she'll get to the point, so that I can work backwards and interpret the statements in context. I never find the context, so I never come face to face with the import of the words, and so I can respond to none of it, and therefore learn nothing from it.
To my mind, a very forceful argument has been made for the naturalness of heterosexuality and for the unnaturalness of homosexuality: namely the organism's evolutionary drive to reproduce. The conflict to be had is between Butler's argument in "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" and Richard Dawkins' in The Selfish Gene, where it begins to seem as if the only cause for human existence—the final answer for all questions of why, perhaps—is as shepherds for our genes, which are the true stars of this film we're living.
Lots of interesting evidence destabilizes the naturalness of heterosexuality, but not the things Butler cites. Lots of interesting theory, or philosophy, needs to be written, about why survival and reproduction are not the motive forces of human lives (if that is the case)—but none of the academic queer theorists are doing it.