Yeh I'm agree you're correct on his relevance in gender studies. Not to say that this doesn't have something to do with certain merits of his method or at least how it has or could be applied to gender, but I think this shows more an extrinsic, contingent weakness of dialectical materialists, rather than dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialists had far too slow. Part of this has to do with genuine class reductionism (thinking here of both certain Trotskyist groups) and also, tbh, the fact that most of the mainstream Marxist-Leninists aligned with the USSR or the PRC adopted these places views on these topics, which were unfortunately regressive. The broader and deeper historical reasons for why we've been so slow it definitely someting I need to educate myself more on though.

I don't know to what extent this kind of stuff if being done in anglolands, as I haven't encountered it, but in Europe, more specifically in France, there's currently a new wave of materialist feminism and materialist trans gender theory which is being pretty actively developed right now and a lot of it is very impressive. This work, in my opinion, is superior to the post-Butler, post-structuralist, e.g. derrideans critiques of the concept, for example deconstructionist ones, because it more explicitly analyzes gender and trans identity in materialist terms.

Yh I think alot of it has to do with what you want out of theory, which is why if someone finds themself getting something valuable out of Derrida for literary analysis then, yh, no worries, God bless.

Edit: If everyone proves me wrong by doing a Spivak and applying deconstruction within materialist analysis then that'd be dope.

What worries me is how his thought is really presented as essential to engaging in modern philosophy at all in many areas. It's moreso the overemphasis I think its been given and how most uses of deconstruction, biopolitics, genealogy or schizo-analysis has been garbage once it left the hands of its pioneers. Edit: I struck me that has something to do with the nature of deconstruction itself.

Why are liberals happy to deal with Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault and let their research students write theses on them? They are not really doing to the same extent with Gramsci or other forgotten Marxist thinkers like Tran Duc Thao [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tran_Duc_Thao], or, just to stick with French thinkers, the members of the French Historical Epistemology movement (Cavaillès, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Vuillemin, Poincaré)?

While on the topic of taking whats good and rejecting the bad from different traditions, purely for the normally indulgent purpose of doing philosophy, I think there are syntheses to be done where good work in Analytic philosophy of science, French Historical Epistemology and contemporary critical theory would be integrated into Historical Materialism.