Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women” Toward Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 157-210.
🙂 To what extent is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble the natural heir to Gayle Rubin’s landmark 1975 essay? Butler wrote her book 15 years later and in it she gave explicit recognition to Rubin’s crucial and innovative theory of the sex/gender system. That is before Butler then proceeds to ‘jump off’ from where Rubin leaves off. But perhaps this metaphor is misplaced. Butler did not jump off from Rubin’s end point and proceed to enlarge upon her argument. Butler’s early theoretical intervention owes much to Rubin in that it allows Butler a clear platform to articulate a deconstructive strategy that enables her to expose the clear lines of an argument regarding ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ that she would go on then to dismantle and that would produce the concept of “performativity” which gave a generation of social and political theorists a way out of a post-Althusserian quandary of thinking the materiality of subjectivity and ideology in a innovative and theoretically productive ways.
But now Butler herself, 15 or so years on after her landmark intervention is facing a number of challenges of her own. Are Rubin’s roots in a Marxist problematic that Butler exorcised returning, as ziz would say, in the real, to haunt Butler? This is not to argue an argument maintaining that Butler’s straying from a Marxist paradigm is coming back to haunt her. Such calls for orthodoxy are not what is needed given what is required in political theory in the 21st C.
She starts with what is ‘the’ cause of women’s oppression, doesn’t dismiss a sole cause out of hand but states, ‘Instead, I want to sketch some elements of an alternate explanation of the problem.” 158 She begins with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud. Because reading these works enables one to begin to understand within their social apparatus how it takes females as ‘raw materials and fashions domesticated women as products.” She mentions the necessity of women in the sphere of reproduction of labor, domestic duties in order to maintain the health of the workers. But makes the important point that “Capitalism has taken over, and rewired, notions of male and female which predate it by centuries. No analysis of the reproduction of labour power under capitalism can explain foot-binding, chastity belts … … the analysis of reproduction of labor power does not even explain why it is usually women who do domestic work in the home rather than men. 163 Rubin quotes Marx regarding the fact that along with human biology and physical conditions, what also factors into the equation with regards to a clear understanding of what is required to reproduce the working class is a historical and moral element. And finishes her part on Marx by stating, “Only be subjecting this “historical and moral element” to analysis can the structure of sex oppression be delineated (164).
“Sex is sex, but what counts as sex is equally culturally determined and obtained. Every society also has a sex/gender system – a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention … ”
It is this sex/gender system that Rubin targets as ripe for analysis, like the mode of production was for Marx. In fact Rubin’s analysis so far draws many analogies and even a homology to Marxist analysis. Just as Marxists begin with the an understanding of how material life of society is reproduced, Rubin looks at the way in which all societies “will have some systematic ways to deal with sex, gender, and babies.” But she states, “it is important … to maintain a distinction between the human capacity and necessity to create a sexual world, and the empirically oppressive ways in which sexual worlds have been organized.” In order for Rubin to properly study sex/gender system she must turn to the study of kinship systems. To this end Rubin sees herself as taking up where Engels left off in his study “The Origins of Family, Private Property and the State.” And she starts with Claude Lévi-Strauss whose The Elementary Structures of Kinship in Rubin’s mind is a bold attempt to conceive of kinships as “an imposition of cultural organization upon the facts of biological procreation.” 170-171
[T]he incest taboo imposes the social aim of exogamy and alliance upon the biological events of sex and procreation. The incest taboo divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of permitted and prohibited sexual partners. Specifically, by forbidding unions within a group it enjoins marital exchange between groups. … [T]he taboo on incest results in a wide network of relations, a set of people whose connections with one another are a kinship structure 174.
But here Rubin drills down a bit further and asks, if it is women, along with yams, pigs, mats and shells etc. that are being exchanged, and these exchanges create and organization. Who is being organized. It is the men who exchange the women, who give and take the women who are linked, “the women being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it.” 174
“Exchange of women” is a shorthand for expressing that the social relations of a kinship system specify that men have certain rights in their female kin, and that women do not have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin. In this sense, the exchange of women is a profound perception of a system in which women do not have full rights to themselves. 177
“Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes” 179 “Far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities” 180
“Moreover the incest taboo presupposes a prior, less articulate taboo on homosexuality. 180
In summary, some basic generalities about the organization of human sexuality can be derived from an exegesis of Lévi-Strauss’s theories of kinship. These are the incest taboo, obligatory heterosexuality, and an asymmetric division of the sexes. The asymmetry of gender -the difference between exchanger and exchanged-entails the constraint of female sexuality. 183
But there is an “economics” of sex and gender, and what we need is a political economy of sexual systems. We need to study each society to determine the exact mechanisms by which particular conventions of sexuality are produced and maintained. The “exchange of women” is an initial step toward building an arsenal of concepts with which sexual systems can be described. 177