Gayle S. Rubin (born 1949) is a cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and influential theorist of sex and gender politics. She has written on a range of subjects including feminism, sadomasochism, prostitution, pedophilia, pornography and lesbian literature, as well as anthropological studies and histories of sexual subcultures, especially focused in urban contexts.
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Rubin first rose to prominence through her 1975 essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex", in which she attempts to discover historical social mechanisms by which gender and compulsory heterosexuality are produced, and women are consigned to a secondary position in human relations. In this essay, Rubin coined the phrase "sex/gender system", which she defines as "the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied". She takes as a starting point writers who have previously discussed gender and sexual relations as an economic institution (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) which serves a conventional social function (Claude Lévi-Strauss) and is reproduced in the psychology of children (Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan). She argues that these writers fail to adequately explain women's oppression, and offers a reinterpretation of their ideas. Rubin addresses Marxist thought by identifying women’s role within a capitalist society.[1] She argues that the reproduction of labor power depends upon women’s housework to transform commodities into sustenance for the worker. The system of capitalism cannot generate surplus without women, yet society does not grant women access to the resulting capital. Rubin argues that historical patterns of female oppression have constructed this role for women in capitalist societies. She attempts to analyze these historical patterns by considering the sex/gender system. According to Rubin, “Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes.”[2] She cites the exchange of women within patriarchal societies as perpetuating the pattern of female oppression, referencing Marcel Mauss’ Essay on the Gift[3] and using his idea of the “gift” to establish the notion that gender is created within this exchange of women by men in a kinship system. Women are born biologically female, but only become gendered when the distinction between male giver and female gift is made within this exchange. For men, giving the gift of a daughter or a sister to another man for the purpose of matrimony allows for the formation of kinship ties between two men and the transfer of “sexual access, genealogical statuses, lineage names and ancestors, rights and people”[4] to occur. When using a Marxist analysis of capitalism within this sex/gender system, the exclusion of women from the system of exchange establishes men as the capitalists and women as their commodities fit for exchange. She ultimately hopes for an “androgynous and genderless” society in which sexual difference has no socially constructed and hierarchical meaning.[5]
In 1978 Rubin moved to San Francisco to begin studies of the gay male leather subculture. On June 13 of that year, Rubin, together with Patrick Califia and 16 others founded the first known lesbian SM group, Samois. The group disbanded in May 1983, and Rubin was involved in founding a new organisation, "the Outcasts", the following year.
Rubin became a prominent "pro-sex activist" in the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s, giving a now-classic paper at the volatile 1982 conference at Barnard College in New York City.
In her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex", Rubin interrogated the value system that social groups — whether left- or right-wing, feminist or patriarchal — attribute to sexuality which defines some behaviours as good/natural and others (such as pedophilia) as bad/unnatural. In this essay she introduced the idea of the "Charmed Circle" of sexuality, that sexuality that was privileged by society was inside of it, while all other sexually was outside of, and in opposition to it.
She served on the Board of Directors of the Leather Archives and Museum from 1992 to 2000.
In 1994, Rubin completed her PhD in anthropology at the University of Michigan, with a dissertation titled The Valley of the Kings: Leathermen in San Francisco, 1960 - 1990. She is currently an associate professor of anthropology at the university.