The butler did it

I'm currently flicking through the wikipedia article on Judith Butler with, it has to be said, great admiration.

Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse.[12] The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a “natural” and unquestioned “fact,” is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, unavoidably more cultural in their appearance...

I am honestly in awe. You need chutzpah to burn just to suggest such a thing seriously; you'd need to be some kind of straight-up philosophical genius to actually convince anyone of it. (Does she think that the phallus and the yoni are social constructions? How about X and Y chromosomes? It would increase my admiration greatly if she did, and could coherently argue it. I want to read this stuff now...)

Less commendably, she apparently has an impenetrable writing style. She even justifies this on the grounds that sometimes you need to use different language to undermine what people call "common sense". Granting the point, it's hard to see what purpose is served by making yourself so totally incomprehensible - maybe so then it's only people sympathetic to your views who'll read you; which, ideally, creates a situation where all the people who understand you agree with you, and all the people who disagree with you can be dismissed because they don't read you.

(Me, I'm with Alan Sokal, who "never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class"; and also with Chesterton, who thought that too much polysyllabic jargon dulls the brain, and it's a good exercise to occasionally rephrase all your opinions in words of one syllable, to force yourself to actually think.)