Contextualizing Gender
4.3 Thinking Gender and Homosexuality in Gayle Rubin
Prof. Rashmi Gaur
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Roorkee
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“Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of
Sexuality” (1984)
• The essay has seven parts. The outline is as given:
Section 1- The Sex Wars
Section 2- Sexual Thoughts
Section 3- Sexual Transformation
Section 4- Sexual Stratification
Section 5- Sexual Conflicts
Section 6- The Limits of Feminism
Section 7- Conclusion
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• Rubin begins the essay by stating that sexuality is not a frivolous
diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease,
racism, or nuclear annihilation.
• Rather it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the
possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to
become dangerously crazy about sexuality. She further comments Gayle Rubin featured in
that the contemporary conflicts over sexual values and erotic The New Yorker
Source: Isa.umich.edu
conduct have “much in common with the religious
disputes of earlier centuries.”(143)
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• Rubin believes that the consequences of those nineteenth-century moral
paroxysms have left a deep imprint on society’s attitudes about sex, medical
practice, child-rearing, parental anxieties, police conduct, and sex law.
• She refers to Judith Walkowitz, a British historian, who emphasised on the vast discrepancy
between lurid journalistic accounts and the reality of prostitution; and described how public
discourse on prostitution redefined sexuality in the late nineteenth century.
• Another period of sex panic was the 1950s where major shifts in organisation of
sexuality took place. Earlier, there were two perceived sexual perversions:
homosexuality and the “sex offender.”
• The meaning of sex offenders kept on changing gradually:
“sometimes it applied to rapists, sometimes to ‘child
molesters’, and eventually functioned as a code for
homosexuals”(145).
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• These sex panics are often defended, Rubin notices, by appealing
to the need to protect children. The motto of the Dade County
campaign was “Save Our Children,” with the image of gay people
trying to recruit and pervert schoolchildren.
• In many instances of “sex hysteria,” the image of an innocent
child needing to be protected from the evils of sexuality is
actually used to police the actions of adults.
• Commenting that for over a century, no tactic for stirring up
erotic hysteria has been as reliable as the appeal to protect
children, Rubin says that the success of the anti-gay
campaign sparked an extensive movement to compress
the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior.
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• The queer theorist Lee Edelman, in his book No Future, has
argued that in American society, politics always organizes
around “saving the children.”
• The resultant stringent ideologies and laws mandated new
restrictions on abortion, sex education and homosexuality.
• Rubin cites the Family Protection Act (FPA)/Teen Chastity Lee Edelman
Source:
Pittsburghphilosophy
Program, which was introduced in Congress in 1979. It was
considered as a broad assault on feminism, homosexuals,
non-traditional families, and teenage sexual privacy
(Brown, 1981), providing incentives to girls for chastity,
also for heterosexuality!
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• In the second section of the essay, “Sexual Thoughts,” Rubin
theorizes common principles underlying the set of historical sex
panics.
• She wants a “radical theory of sex” that can “identify, describe,
explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual
oppression”(149).
• In the last five years according to Rubin, historical and theoretical Jeffrey Weeks
Source: Notches
scholarship has challenged sexual essentialism.
• Gay history, particularly the work of gay activist and
historian Jeffrey Weeks, “has led this assault by showing
that homosexuality as we know it is a relatively modern
institutional complex” (Rubin, 1984).
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• Rubin argues that Michel Foucault’s The History of
Sexuality (1978) has been the most persuasive and
exemplary text of the new scholarship on sex.
• Foucault “argues that desires are not pre-existing
biological entities”, rather, they are constituted “in the
course of historically specific social practices”(149).
• He emphasizes the generative aspects of the social Source: Michel Foucault
organization of sex, rather than its oppressive Vintage Source: Alexis Duclos
elements by pointing out that new sexualities are
constantly produced.
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• Sexual essentialism is an “ideological formation,” i.e., a system of ideas that
influences the ways sexuality is perceived (150). Rubin analyses five other
ideological formations that police sexuality.
• These are: sex negativity, the fallacy of misplaced scale, the hierarchical valuation
of sex acts, the domino theory of sexual peril, and the lack of a concept of benign
sexual variation.
1. Sexual Negativity: Sex is basically bad, dangerous and inherently sinful. It may be
redeemed if performed within marriage for procreative purposes and if the
pleasurable aspects are not enjoyed too much.
2. The Fallacy of Misplaced Scale: A corollary of sex negativity.
It overreacts to sex; heretical sexual acts are punished in
the harshest manner.
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3. Hierarchical System of Sexual Value: Refers to how some sexual acts are
perceived as “good, normal, and natural”, while others are perceived as “bad,
abnormal, and unnatural.”
• Rubin comments that the modern western societies appraise sex acts according
to a hierarchical system of sexual value. Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are
alone at the top of erotic pyramid.
• Religious institutions, psychiatric institutions, and popular culture all work
together to create this hierarchy.
• Rubin demonstrates that popular culture is “permeated
with ideas that erotic variety is dangerous, unhealthy,
depraved, and a menace to everything from
small children to national security”(152).
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• Rubin offers two representations of
“The Sex Hierarchy.”
• The first figure is a set of concentric
circles in which the inner circle (The
Charmed Circle) represents “Good,
Normal, Natural, Blessed Sexuality”.
• The outer circle (The Outer Limits)
represents “Bad, Abnormal,
Unnatural, Damned Sexuality.”
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• The second figure describes The
Struggle Over Where to Draw the
Line. It offers a spectrum of sexual
acts (also types of people).
• It views certain acts as good sex
(Normal, Natural, Healthy, Holy),
and others as bad sex (Abnormal,
Unnatural, Sick, Sinful, Way Out).
• Rubin identified the multiple ways in which these hierarchies
worked, approving or proscribing behaviours and sexualities
according to a set of binary oppositions.
• In drawing a “line” between good and bad sex, American society
also adopts a “domino theory of sexual peril”(163).
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4. The domino theory of sexual peril: Rubin's
discussion of these models assumes a domino
theory of sexual peril.
• Besides playing games, another use of domino
– People feel a need to draw a line between good and tiles is the domino show, which involves standing
bad sex as they see it standing between sexual order them on end in long lines so that when the first
tile is toppled, it topples the second, which
and chaos. There is a fear that if certain aspects of topples the third, etc., resulting in all of the tiles
"bad" sex are allowed to cross the line, horrifying falling.
acts will also move across. • By analogy, the phenomenon of small
events causing similar events leading to
5. Lack of a concept of benign sexual variation: eventual catastrophe is called the domino
One of the most prevalent ideas about sex is effect.
that there is one proper way to do it. Society
lacks a concept of benign sexual variation.
– People fail to recognize that just because they do
not like to do something, does not make it
repulsive.
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• Such a politics would separate the impossibility of leading a life of virtuous
normality or absolute queerness from the possibility of broadly challenging
hierarchies of sexual value, regardless of the extent to which one’s own identity is
queer or normal.
• Further it will create possibility of working on specific sexual agendas, such as the
legal status of particular sexual acts, the recognition of bisexuality, HIV/AIDS
activism, the bullying of kids perceived to be ‘queer’ ,the rights of sex workers, or
the rights of same-sex couples.
• Rubin points out to numerous empirical
research that incorporate a positive
concept of sexual variation. Alfred
Alfred Kinsey
Kinsey, John Gagnon and William Simon
Source: Britannica
John Gagnon
have incorporated a positive concept of
Source: The New
York Times sexual variation.
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• This notion of a single ideal sexuality characterizes most systems of thought
about sex.
-- For religion, the ideal is procreative marriage.
-- For psychology, it is mature heterosexuality.
• Although its content varies, the format of a single sexual standard is continually
reconstituted within other rhetorical frameworks, including feminism and
socialism.
• Rubin comments that it is just as objectionable to insist that everyone should be
lesbian, non-monogamous, or kinky, as to believe that
everyone should be heterosexual or married.
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Sexual Transformations
• This section deals with how the different sex panics discussed
in the previous part of the essay have formed a system and/or
hierarchy of sex.
• Rubin focuses on the writings of nineteenth-century sexology.
• She is particularly interested in what she calls “erotic
speciation.” Homosexuality is its best example. Source: The Conversation
• Rubin illustrates how homosexual behaviour was always
present among humans.
• However, in different societies and epochs they may be
rewarded or punished, required or forbidden, treated as a
temporary experience or a life-long vocation.
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• Prostitution has undergone similar changes. Rather than
an activity some women might participate in for
temporary employment, women started to become
identified as “prostitutes,” as if this employment
completely defined them.
• “Prostitution began to change from a temporary job to a
more permanent occupation as a result of nineteenth-
century agitation, legal reform, and police
Source: Giovanni Boldini
persecution”(165).
• The result of both forms of speciation was that
homosexuality and prostitution stopped looking like
activities people engaged in and started to look like
categories of people, permanently defined.
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Sexual Stratification
• This section explores the means through which this grouping has been developed.
Rubin comments that the industrial transformation of Western Europe and North
America brought new forms of social stratification.
• The most important means for it has been the law. Obscenity laws worked to
reinforce a sexual hierarchy, because they turned sex into a taboo.
• What is particularly fascinating, Rubin argues, is that the obscenity laws also limit
commerce in a capitalist society; as sex law incorporates “a very strong
prohibition against mixing sex and money, except
via marriage”(166).
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• In a capitalist society, such a prohibition on trade is rare.
• Capitalist societies rarely place blanket prohibitions on exchanging
money for a particular kind of good.
• The fact that a capitalist society would limit trade for sexual
commodities, therefore limiting its economy, is one sign of how
deep the taboo of sex goes in that society.
• Beyond the law, society also polices sexual activity in everyday
"Pyramid of the Capitalist
System”, a Socialist Poster.
Source: University of
interactions and social institutions. Pittsburgh
• Getting a job is still difficult for Gay people. Because of the
stigma attached to homosexuality, gay people may also be
less likely to pursue public office or political representation,
for fear of a “sex scandal.” This limits the agency of sexual
minorities.
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• A kind of sexual conformity is also enforced through families.
• Rubin remembers countless stories of homosexuals and sex workers who have
been ostracized by their families when they confessed their sexual activities or
had them discovered. This cuts people off from a vital source of psychological
and economic support.
• Rubin concludes the section by arguing that sex is a vector of oppression.
• “The system of sexual oppression cuts across other modes of social inequality,
sorting out individuals and groups according to its own
intrinsic dynamics”(167)
• A theory of sex needs to take this into account, to see how
sexual oppression cuts across other kinds of oppression
and can compound and multiply them.
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Sexual Conflicts
• In this section Rubin primarily explores what she calls
“territorial and border wars.” These conflicts are related
with sexual minorities, including homosexuals and sex
workers, fighting for space in which to live their lives.
• “According to the mainstream media and popular
prejudice, the marginal sexual worlds are bleak and
dangerous. They are portrayed as impoverished, ugly, Source: CanStock Photo
and inhabited by psychopaths and criminals”(168)
• Gay pioneers occupied neighbourhoods that were
centrally located but rundown. Her own work on leather
sub-culture in San Francisco testifies it.
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• The most important and consequential kind of sex conflict
according to Rubin is what Jeffrey Weeks has termed as the
“moral panic”.
• Popularly understood as exaggerated outbursts of public
concern over the morality or behavior of a group in society,
moral panics are the “political moment” of sex, in which Mexican-American kids
stripped and beaten by US
diffuse attitudes are channelled into political action, and from servicemen during Los Angeles’
Zoot Suit Riot. Associated Press
there into social change (71). Source: https://historycollection.com/panic-
outbreaks-that-shaped-history-and-controlled-the-
masses/15/
• A moral panic is when sex starts to bear the anxieties of other social
problems. Sex might be blamed for something that has nothing to do
with sex. As a result, a sexual minority is scapegoated and targeted.
• Rubin gives the examples of the white-slavery hysteria of the 1880s,
the anti-homosexual campaigns of the 1950s, and the
child-pornography panic of the late 1970s as typical moral panics.
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• Rubin discusses two contemporary moral panics. The first,
perpetuated by feminists in her opinion, is the moral panic
about sadomasochism.
• According to some feminists, consensual sexual acts that
include domination or pain, such as bondage and whipping,
are dangerous and hurt women.
Secretary, a 2002 American
• In this case sadomasochism is being blamed for patriarchy, . erotic black comedy romantic
drama, based on a short
perpetuating the subordination of women. But in the process, story by Mary Gaitskill
Source: pastemagazine
women who enjoy it are being further oppressed and
marginalized.
• The second moral panic is related to the AIDS epidemic.
AIDS, which disproportionately affects gay men, is used as
an excuse to criminalize, rather than help, gay men.
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The Limits of Feminism
• This section continues some of Rubin’s complex discussions about the relation
between feminism and sexual liberation. She begins by observing two trends in
feminist thought.
1. Those who advocate sexual liberation and see the liberation of sex as a means
to the liberation of women, whose sexuality is often policed.
2. Those who are associated with an anti-pornography movement in feminism,
and think that sex is a means through which women are oppressed.
– Rubin comments that proponents of this viewpoint have condemned
virtually every variant of sexual expression as anti-feminist. Within
this framework, monogamous lesbianism that occurs within
long-term, intimate relationships and which does not involve playing
with polarized roles, has “replaced married, procreative
heterosexuality at the top of the value hierarchy”.
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• According to Rubin this so-called feminist discourse recreates a very conservative
sexual morality.
– “For over a century, battles have been waged over just how much shame, distress, and punishment
should be incurred by sexual activity. The conservative tradition has promoted opposition to
pornography, prostitution, homosexuality, all erotic variation, sex education, sex research,
abortion, and contraception”(172).
• These two sides led to what has been called the feminist “sex wars” of the 1980s,
which caused a rift in feminism between the pro-sex and the anti-pornography
camps.
• Rubin notes a more recent “middle position,” but she is
sceptical of this position, too. Sceptically she comments
that whenever there is polarization, there is an unhappy
tendency to think the truth lies somewhere in between.
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• She quotes the American essayist and feminist, Ellen Willis, to
support her point-of-view, who has sarcastically remarked
that "the feminist bias is that women are equal to men and
the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior. The
unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in
between”(85). Ellen Willis at the Village Voice
offices in the late 1970s.
• Rubin thinks that the new “sexual moderates” tend to
Source: NonaWA
condescend to sexual minorities.
• They seem to think that anyone who enjoys
sadomasochism or pornography has been brainwashed,
and should perhaps be pitied rather than criminalized.
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Conclusion
• Rubin concludes by arguing that the end of sexual oppression cannot be brought
about by feminism alone.
• Feminism has learned how to theorize gender oppression. But that does not mean it knows how
to think about the oppression of sex. Feminism is no more capable than Marxism of being the
ultimate and complete account of all social inequality
• These critical tools were fashioned to handle very specific areas of social activity. Other areas of
social life, their forms of power, and their characteristic modes of oppression, need their own
conceptual implements
• Rubin argues for separating sexuality and gender
analytically.
• It means developing a theory of sexuality, separate from a theory of
gender, in order to provide a more holistic sense of the ways in which
sex and sexuality are regulated in our society.
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Reception
• In 2011, on the 25th anniversary of the original essay, the
influential academic journal GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies published a special issue titled “Rethinking Sex.”
• The issue began with Rubin’s reflections on the essay and
presented articles from a number of leading theorists of Heather Love
gender and sexuality who have learned from and advanced Source: ICI Berlin
Rubin’s thoughts.
• The special issue attests to the continued vitality of the
essay a quarter century later.
• Heather Love in the Introduction to the journal declared
that the essay “set the terms for feminist and queer
scholarship”(2).
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Thank You
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References
• Meyerowitz, J. (2011). Thinking sex with an androgyne. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies, 17(1), 97-105.
• Rubin, G. (2011). Blood under the bridge: Reflections on “Thinking Sex”. GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies, 17(1), 15-48.
• Rubin, G. S. (2002). Thinking sex. In Sexualities II: Some elements for an account of the
social organisation of sexualities (pp. 188-202). Routledge, London.
• Rubin, G., & Butler, J. (1994). Sexual traffic. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 6(2).
• Rubin, G. (2011). Deviations: A Gayle Rubin reader. Duke University Press.
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