The latest book I've been reading in my continuing efforts to remind myself how to think like a critical theorist is Judith Butler's Undoing Gender. Butler is probably the theorist I'd most recommend the non-theorist read -- particularly the non-theorist who is hostile to theory -- both to get a good handle on what's going on in gender theory and to maybe blow their minds a little bit. She's also a very crisp and clear, approachable writer, her notorious award for bad writing notwithstanding.

Undoing Gender is the followup to Gender Trouble, which is a well-known classic of theory essentially arguing that all the manifestations of masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality we uncritically take for granted are merely elaborate performances we enact so that we don't have to confront what's non-normative inside ourselves.

I couldn't find an essay I wanted to link to, but here's a good Salon review of another recent book of hers, which I linked to back in the day. There are also two good semi-recent letters from her online at the London Review of Books, one eulogizing Jacques Derrida and another attacking the old canard that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.

And if you are really aching to get theoretical, here's a link to one of the chapters in Undoing Gender, "Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?"