Ok it's Judith so it goes without saying this is a difficult text but even by their standards Bodies That Matter is a challenge. There's plenty of prep reading to do here, including one of the most difficult works of contemporary philosophy - Žižek's Sublime Object of Ideology . I don't think it's essential to read every text that JB has a chapter on here but certainly I think BTM asks for a level of Lacanian understanding and a competency with Derrida, who is especially present in the first half of the text. At the least watch Paris is Burning .

Foucault Nietzsche Kristeva Irigaray Laclau Freud Kripke & bell hooks are others to have solid grasp of and I don't claim to possess this for all.

It's a text that exists, in part, to tighten some of the screws of Gender Trouble , and I think it succeeds in that as well as developing new areas which seem even more fruitful than GT. will be coming back