Rubin, Gayle

Gayle Rubin (b. 1949) has been writing articles that have energized gender studies and feminist theory since the 1960s. Her research is pivotal to studies in queer theory, and her essays continue to be republished, translated, cited, and referenced. While studying at the University of Michigan in the late 1960s, she constructed a major in women's studies by taking advantage of the open-ended honors program. The thesis she worked on for this major later became the often cited essay, “The Traffic in Women: [Page 659]Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” She earned her PhD in anthropology and continues to teach and write. She is also a longtime activist in gay and lesbian politics.

Rubin's (1975) essay, Traffic, examines Levi-Strauss' kinship models and shows how women have been constructed as commodities to be traded and owned by husbands, brothers, and fathers. She extensively analyzes what Adrienne Rich describes with the concept “compulsory heterosexuality.” In arguing that “kinship systems do not merely exchange women. They exchange sexual access, genealogical statuses, lineage names and ancestors, rights and people—men, women, and children—in concrete systems of social relationships” (Rubin 1975:177), she makes concrete the economic and political oppressions that women face historically and currently on a daily basis. Furthermore, Traffic examines the way that Freudian and Lacanian binary theoretical models support the political institutions and power structures that are born from these oppressive kinship relations. Her purpose here, as well as in much of her work, is to deconstruct how these power inequities and underlying assumptions continue to shape and codify the way we build our social and, thus, sexual selves.

“Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (1984) continues to examine how sexuality and sexual identity is constructed. In contrast to her previous work, this essay is more focused on how deviance and difference is constructed and legally maintained. Here, she roots sexual oppression in historical contexts and, in the tradition of Michel Foucault, shows how medical and legal institutions construct and maintain sexual difference for political ends. In particular, this essay is useful for its discussion of the concept of sexual essentialism. Sexual essentialism is the idea that our sexual selves and our experience of sexual difference are innate and biologically determined. Sexual essentialism tends to demonize those who reject the hegemonic model of acceptable sexual practices. Finally, it maps out a sex hierarchy, or what Rubin (1984) refers to as the “charmed circle” and “the outer limits.” In this hierarchy, acceptable sexual practices are those that are “heterosexual, married, monogamous, procreative, non-commercial, in pairs, in a relationship, same generation, in private, no pornography, bodies only, vanilla” (p. 13).

Rubin is an advocate for the sexual others who are marginalized and criminalized in our current heterosexist culture. Furthermore, Rubin examines how feminist theory and gay and lesbian activists themselves have contributed to this marginalization in their attack on sadomasochism, pornography, sex professionals, pedophiles, and transsexuals and transgendered persons. Her essay “Of Catamites and Kings” (1992) takes up the oppressive practices that exist within feminism and lesbian feminism when those who self-identify as butch/femme are attacked. Here, she brings voice and agency to those who typically are vilified and in doing so traces the history by which these voices have been silenced. She illustrates how “playing with” dominant categories of sexual identities can actually disrupt the very premises that these identities rely on for their continued legitimation. More generally, she shows that the ongoing attacks from both the dominant culture and the feminist and lesbian communities maintain the oppressive forces that work to constrain all persons.

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