Gayle Rubin

Gayle Rubin is an American anthropologist and cultural theorist whose two major essays — “The Traffic in Women” (1975) and “Thinking Sex” (1984) — laid groundwork for feminist and queer theory by analyzing, respectively, the sex/gender system that organizes kinship and the hierarchical valuation of sexual acts that structures moral and legal regulation.

Core ideas

• The sex/gender system: in “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (1975), Rubin drew on Lévi-Strauss and Marx to argue that kinship systems are organized through the exchange of women between men. The “sex/gender system” names the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sex into products of human activity and satisfies those needs — converting biological females into domesticated women. This analysis connected gender to the material organization of kinship, labor, and exchange.
• Thinking sex: in “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (1984), Rubin argued that feminism cannot automatically produce a theory of sexuality — that the oppression of sexual minorities requires its own analytical framework. She mapped the “charmed circle” of sanctioned sexuality (heterosexual, married, monogamous, reproductive, non-commercial) against the “outer limits” of stigmatized sexuality, showing that the hierarchical valuation of sexual acts is a system of power in its own right.

Notable works

• “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (1975)
• “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (1984)
• Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (2011)

Related

• Feminist queer theory — the tradition her work grounds
• Judith Butler — who extends and contests Rubin’s sex/gender distinction
• Compulsory heterosexuality — a related feminist analysis of sexual regulation
• Social reproduction — the labor organized through the sex/gender system