So Travis gets knocked for calling Biddy Martin “obscure … and theory-laden.”

Well, here is a sample of her prose from the very first piece I came across in looking up her work. It’s from a 1994 article in diacritics entitled “Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias.” This comes just a few paragraphs into it:

The evacuation of interior essences and normative, disciplinary assumptions of gender cores and consistencies has been critical to the shift in postmodern queer theories from biological and psychological determinisms to analyses of social norms and their complex roles in the formation of gendered identities. At the theoretical level, our efforts to clear away foundationalisms and evacuate interior essences have left us with an expanded vocabulary for talking about discursive and social complexities. I will argue here, however, that lesbian and gay work fails at times to realize its potential for reconceptualizing the complexities of identity and social relations, at moments when, almost in spite of itself, it at least implicitly conceives gender in negative terms, in the terms of fixity, miring, or subjection to the indicatively female body, with the consequence that escape from gender, usually in the form of disembodiment and always in the form of gender crossings, becomes the goal and the putative achievement (p. 105).

This is thinking right out of Laputa.