1. If someone wanted to challenge gender roles in our society through public discourse, what might be ways to go about it?
The short answer: Speak Up! If there are gender stereotypes that you do not personally conform to, don't accept them. This is the only way anyone accomplishes anything. Amelia Earhart didn't need a social constructionist theory of gender. She didn't even need feminism. She needed to fly.
As a Libertarian, I am opposed to grand schemes of restrucuring society. While I have no nostalgia for 50's-style prescriptive sex-roles and applaud the achievement of legal equality for women, I am dubious of the notion that all of our ideas about masculinity and femininity are socially constructed, and therefore that it would be desirous or even possible (through language, at least) to eliminate them.
In her masterful study of male and female as both physical reality and imaginative principle in Western art and culture, Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia writes: "Androgyny, which some feminists promote as a pacifist blueprint for sexual utopia, belongs to the contemplative rather than active life. It is the ancient perogative of priests, shamans, and artists. Feminists have politicized it as a weapon against the masculine principal. Redefined, it now means men must be like women and women can be whatever they want. . . . Prescriptions for the future by bourgeois academics and writers carry their own bias. The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage."
I heartily recommend this book. Where Paglia sees ideas rooted in physical reality, even as they strain to transcend it, current academic theory sees only an endless concatenation of words imposing disembodied power relations.
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I appreciate your sentiments, although I would say that I disagree a significantly large portion of them.
My lack of access to resources, and the limits of time, do not permit to launch a lengthy critique against what you have written; however, I will say this, libertarian or not, I think that Paglia misses the boat by creating this binary opposition between ideology and material reality, which later authors have gone to great lengths to dispose with.
I wouldn't advocating "grand schemes" either - see Jean-Francois Lyotard for more on my perception of this.
Finally, I think that Paglia's thinking is outmoded, and in the worst case scenario, reflects a limited scope of understanding which she applies in macroscopic ways. Then again, I haven't read her work, so my statements are only applicable to the observations of her writing you have recorded here.
Just a few critical (as in critique, not essential) thoughts.
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