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This is probably one of the worst books I've ever read. Butler's significance as a theorist is equivalent to attributing intricacy to a random pattern generator, and indeed, to nepotism within the academic community. Incoherent, needlessly abstruse, and inaccessible.

This is everything I was worried academic writing would be. I've read some theory at this point, and frankly, their reputation is undeserved. Just because people stare at their work for a long time and come up with insightful and intelligible points does not mean that the original work deserves its status.

Particularly invoking my ire was the repeated rhetorical use of opposition and contrast between the trans and intersex communities. First of all, trans intersex people exist. Second, intersex is not a gender in and of itself. Intersex people have many genders.

Butler delights in little rhetorical contrasting couplets and gotchas, and they're a cheap trick dressed up in the crinolines of intricate sentence structure.

They also keep gesturing to global inequality and then retreating to the comfortable fortress of Spinoza and Hegel when discussing personhood and what it means to lack it. Is Butler allergic to Black philosphers? Their (Butler's) bibliography, as far as I read, was painfully white, and it showed in the intellectual distancing over all that personhood talk. Personhood ain't so theoretical when someone's ancestors only counted as three fifths of a human being.

Maybe it's time to reexamine their prominence as a theorist.