In defending the ‘difficultness’ of her prose, Butler offers this defense:

Both critics and friends of Gender Trouble have drawn attention to the difficulty of its style. It is no doubt strange, and maddening to some, to find a book that is not easily consumed to be ‘popular’ according to academic standards. The surprise over this is perhaps attributable to the way we underestimate the reading public, its capacity and desire for reading complicated and challenging texts, when the complication is not gratuitous, when the challenge is in the service of calling taken-for-granted truths into question, when the taken for grantedness of those truths is, indeed, oppressive.

But it’s this question I find to be her most-strongest defense of a difficult-yet-not-gratuitously-difficult style  :

Who devises the protocols of ‘clarity’ and whose interests do they serve?

awesomest rating: NA