PhilosophyMemes

I "resort[ed] to vaguery" because I was writing a comment on a website not an essay for gender studies.

But sure, I have the day off so I'll do the exegesis you avoided.

material process - This tells us that the process affects the physical world and/or has real importance or great consequences

power - legal or official authority, capacity, or right, physical might. This is both legitimized violence by the state, actions by doctors, parents, community leaders etc.

Applied to the body carries both of the relevant definitions of material. It has real importance and great consequences on your life depending on which gender is applied to your body. Some of those consequences are physical ones, such as what medical care you are allowed to receive or refuse. Two examples of this are involuntary genital surgeries on intersex infants and bans on abortion for people who can get pregnant.

Your allegations: "It’s not trying to say anything" "It’s trying to appear to say something profound so that the paycheques keep arriving."

I demonstrated that the quote is saying something. Saying that sex is not a pre-existing foundation for culturally constructed gender but rather is imposed on the body by power is an incredibly profound and necessary thing to say. Gender studies and feminist literature is commonly used as an example of a "worthless" degree. You've not provided any proof for this assertion and I can't find any with some basic research so I conclude that you made that up. But enough of me, I'll let Judith explain their position in their own words:

I actually teach in a voice that is for the most part very different from the written voice in Gender Trouble. I have also probably written in ways that are not quite as difficult as that voice was. You make an apt point, though, since when I wrote that book, I had no idea that there might be an audience for it. Indeed, I was surprised by the audience that it has assumed.

I think it is important for pedagogical reasons, especially for a theorist, to know how to shift registers. But I also think it is important not to underestimate the intelligence of lay readers, readers from various backgrounds and educational privilege. I certainly did write that book for an academic audience, but what is strange is that, despite its obvious difficulty, it was read rather widely outside of the academy. I take it that there was something there that people wanted to read, and though I did hear from people who found it difficult, I heard from those who also felt that something was at stake in that theoretical work that made the reading worthwhile.

I don’t know exactly how this can be taught. But I think it is important that critical teaching and critical writing not only seek to be communicable, and reach people where they live, but also pose a challenge, and offer a chance for readers to become something different from what they already are. It is not just that some readers want the chance to understand something new and difficult, but that the received meanings that we have about gender are so entrenched in our everyday way of talking that it won’t make sense to try to change the meaning of gender without critically assessing everyday language. If one were to offer that critical assessment within everyday language, then we would, to some extent, be reaffirming the very language that we seek to subject to critical scrutiny. This doesn’t mean that one should strive to become obscure. In fact, I think intellectuals are under a double obligation to both speak to people where they live, in the language in which understanding is possible, but also to give them the critical point of departure by which they might risk a certain destabilization of that familiar language, become exposed to the new, and begin to imagine the world otherwise.

From “There Is a Person Here”: An Interview with Judith Butler