I *heart* Gayle Rubin

For most of the afternoon, I've been reading Rubin's well-known 1975 essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex." Rubin is fabulous; she has even inspired a new item in my post taxonomy, "People I *heart*." In case you're wondering, "heart" used in this way means you like the person a lot, but you wouldn't say "I love Gayle Rubin," unless of course you and Rubin have a meaningful relationship, so you say you heart them instead. I'm going to post some initial responses to this essay--quotations mostly, like a commonplace book--while it's fresh in my mind. Here are the questions I was asked to consider for class discussion on Tuesday:

"How does Rubin in 'Traffic' articulate the relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality?"

"Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes. It is a product of the social relations of sexuality," Rubin writes. She uses Lévi-Strauss' theories of kinship to point out trends in human sexuality: "the incest taboo, obligatory heterosexuality, and an asymmetric division between the sexes. The asymmetry of gender [...] entails the constraint of female sexuality." At this point, it is difficult for me to tell if Rubin is arguing that any one item--sex, gender, and sexuality--logically or temporally precedes the others. I did find this point useful: "Gender is not only an identification with one sex; it also entails that sexual desire be directed toward the other sex." Rubin's illumination here helps me to understand exactly why "gender studies" is thought to be more inclusive than "women's studies" when it comes to studies of sexuality, especially queer theory. Yeah, it was probably obvious to the rest of you, but I needed that sentence from Rubin for my own edification.

"How and why does she lean heavily on Lévi-Strauss and a Lacanian reading of Freud to develop her concept of the sex/gender system?"

How: Lévi-Strauss is talking a lot about kinship and marriage. He highlights the exchange of women between families to seal political deals, hold communities together, etc. Freud discusses how sexual rules and roles are "engraved" into a child's development. Freud describes women's psychological condition but does not make the connection that systematic social oppression (what Lévi-Strauss describes) might create personality traits thought to be "feminine." Freud recognizes the implications of his theory for society's code of sexual morals. He says, "We can demonstrate with ease that what the world calls its code of morals demands more sacrifices than it is worth, and that its behavior is neither dictated by honesty nor instituted with wisdom." The reason I heart Rubin is that she, with her keen eye, says that Freud does not make a similar statement about sex roles, something to the effect of, "We can demonstrate with ease that what the world calls femininity demands more sacrifices than it is worth." Rubin defines the sex/gender system as "a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention and satisfied in a conventional manner, no matter how bizarre some of the conventions may be." Structural anthropology provides the systematic aerial view, and psychoanalysis tries to account for how the sex/gender system gets reproduced at the developmental level.

Why: Hmm. Rubin says that Marx develops a good systematic account of how society works, but that he doesn't integrate sexuality into his analysis as well as he could have. Lévi-Strauss and Freud both study sexuality, so she takes their work as a point of departure into her own analysis. The work of these two theorists "enables us to isolate sex and gender from 'mode of production,' and to counter a certain tendency to explain sex oppression as a reflex of economic forces."

She says that her reading of Freud is Lacanian, and that Lacan's interpretation of Freud is "heavily influenced by Lévi-Strauss." I'm not sure why she foregrounds that Lacanian lens, because I don't know my Lacan, but Lacan could be considered a link between Lévi-Strauss and Freud, which would lend coherence to Rubin's endeavor.

"How does Rubin's notion of the sex/gender system articulate the sex/gender distinction and the relationship of that distinction to sexuality?"

Again, I come back to this point: "Gender is not only an identification with one sex; it also entails that sexual desire be directed toward the other sex." I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this question, and dang it! It's Saturday night, almost 9:00. I'm calling it a day.