Holy icon Batman, these people speak a language unknown on this planet!

You, too, can speak or write po-mo. Just put a bunch of words like "hegemony" in a paper bag, shake it up, spill it out, and string them together with connecting words. Be sure your end product makes no fucking sense whatsoever, but sounds important.

Made the mistake of following the Butler link. This is clearly a person who firmly believes that words structure reality, and not the other way around. While it may be true that culture shapes the permitted expression of sex (consider Burkas, for example) the innate hormones and desire between the sexes and the hormonal responses of bonding resulting from sex are not "constructed". By her account, animals must have complex societies also with cultural norms and blah blah. Which is crazy. She sounds like an alien with no personal experience of sexual desire (and her photo looks like it also).

I don't think that most Americans realize that 'continental philosophy' (aka post modernism / post structuralism, deconstructionism ) was just a fad in Europe that died out in the 80's. People like Derrida were seen as something akin to intellectual performance artists.

But it became instutionalized in the US and some other Anglo countries, and so persists today as the dominant system in many areas.

People have wondered why, being that it's not cogent or useful for anything.

The best answer I've found is that post structuralism and critical theory provided a sheen of academic respectibility at at time when the various Identity studies areas were emerging. And it allowed those people to justify themselves by arguing that it is impossible to capture their perspective with traditional analysis and criticism - you HAD to use a 'situated and critical' post structuralism and deconstruction to even approach the problem.

"secular fundamentalists are just dour and angry"

you might be interested in this account by a young man who was active in this culture and left once he realized the damaging it was to his relationships and well being.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/11/sad-radicals/

"The best answer I've found is that post structuralism and critical theory provided a sheen of academic respectibility at at time when the various Identity studies areas were emerging."

I spent some time last summer trying to make an honest effort to discover the philosophical roots of post-modernism. Sufficiently fortified, I read some articles and writings by some post-modernist academics. This was all I could come up with: Post-modernism is a critique of modernism. The critique is: modernism isn't perfect, therefore it is worthless. That's it.

Post-modernism rejects modernism without offering a coherent alternative. As such, it's essentially a nihilistic philosophy. And my critique of nihilism is: By nihilism's own rules, the phrase "nihilism sucks" is irrefutable.