[Music] so [Music] good morning dear friends and welcome to this module in the previous module we had discussed some of the key concepts and terms associated with the queer theory in this module we will look at the contribution of gail rubin she is a cultural anthropologist and theorist of the politics of gender and sexuality whose writings have helped shape the trajectory of gender studies since the 1970s we shall discuss two major essays written by her the first is her 1975 essay the traffic in women notes on the political economy of sex and the second is her 1984 essay thinking sex notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality we will discuss both essays thoroughly in two modules gail rupin has written on a wide range of subjects ranging from her ethnographic and historic research on gay male leather fetishists as a part of her phd dissertation to the politics of homosexuality pornography and bdsm which she considers as a valid form of expression for female sexuality instead as a woman hating violence like some other feminists for example andrea durkin and susan griffin bdsm as a term originated in early 1990s it is interpreted as a combination of the abbreviations bd that is bondage and discipline ds that is dominance and submission and sm is the dismal messages bdsm is now used as a catch-all phrase covering a wide range of activities forms of interpersonal relationships and distinct subcultures in addition to her academic work rubin has been an important figure in social activism in 1978 she co-founded semoys the world's first lesbian sm organization sm stands for sexual minority and remained with the group until it was disbanded in 1983. rubin had completed her phd in 1994 in cultural anthropology at the university of michigan her dissertation entitled the valley of kings leatherman in san francisco 1960 to 1990 is held as the most authoritative history of gay men's leather in san francisco reuben had been conducting research on leather culture and history since the late 1970s and has been deeply involved in the preservation of leather archives and artifacts her dissertation discusses prominent figures events and subcultural trends in the heyday of san francisco men's leather leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this culture self-consciously distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures many participants associate leather culture with bdsm practices and its many subcultures for some it is an erotic fashion that expresses heightened masculinity or the appropriation of sexual power love of motorcycles and independence n or engagement in sexual king or leather fetishism leather represents a symbol that distinguishes predominantly homosexual white males who came and stuck together following the end of the second world war since then it is considered as an expression of sm and leather sex linked with masculinity rough sex and leather fetishism throughout the history of the leather subculture a variety of traditions have been observed most or all are based on military protocols and rituals as time has progressed and bdsm has become more mainstream the traditions of leather have adapted today the leather subculture is one of the many facets to semi-organized alternative sexuality though the leather community residents are primarily gay white males it is a pansexual community that includes lesbians bisexuals and transgender individuals ethnic minorities and heterosexuals have also been physically or socially involved but their presence is smaller in number leatherman had blended obvious homosexual habits and over clothing with explicitly masculine behavior within leather communities and subcultures gay bars became a central meeting place an important institution where leather folk like their gay and lesbian counterparts could socialize and interact in gail rubin's analysis of leatherman bars texts and maps were equally essential more gentle gay men gathered at sweater bars lesbians met in feminist book stores romance maps reveal that san francisco subcultures used specific places to affirm sexual orientation she found that leather bars were located in walking class enclaves near the docks or where maritime traits gravitated the idea that the symbolism of black leather has consistently changed over the course of decades since the second world war is showcased best by joseph bean who remarks that wearing leather in 1959 was to be considered an outsider of a relatively extreme sort but this was less the case in 1969 it was hardly relevant in 1979 and not true to any stigmatized extent in 1989 and it was this constant redefining of leather symbols and the attitudes and clothing styles of dress that made the leather community socially acceptable within the gay community and outside also in the larger general heteronormative society in the next slide we have a rare interview of gail rubin where she talks about the rise and fall of leather community what what a healthy leather scene locally needs is capital uh quality control and i think it was it's real estate yeah space space yeah and real estate has been that's anything i'm going to talk about maybe i should just do the talk but actually the the other big process and i'll say this at the end of the talk is that south of market used to be one of the cheapest neighborhoods in the city this was to use the monopoly of the monopoly board this was essentially baltic avenue and baltic avenue was turning into park place and the kinds of spaces that leather has managed to use to thrive in major cities has been mostly the baltic avenues it's been industrial they've been abandoned industrial neighborhoods like this one um the in new york it was the dock strip which was really along the old crumbling piers of new york these were cheap places and as they become replaced by these really massive uh massive capital intensive developments they they go away and uh that really began uh the big issue the big start in south america's deterioration as another neighborhood i think started in in 1978 when the ground was broken from the moscone center moscone center then opened in 1981 which was the same year that people started to well it was a senior that tony tavarosi suddenly died of pneumocystis um and was one of the first hiv hiv deaths in the in the group of people that i knew at the time who were involved in leather he had been involved in the atlantic community for decades so it was sort of a perfect storm because aids and hiv hit right around the same time that this wave of real estate revaluation started to fall through this data this video explores the impact of de-industrialization on queer urban location through the case of san francisco's gay male leather population five decades of relentless urban renewal and large-scale redevelopment transformed this formerly industrial and working class residential neighborhood into areas of luxury housing and capital intensive commerce making it increasingly precarious for gay and leather presence ruben became a prominent figure in the sex walls of the late 1970s and 1980s as a sex positive activist advocating greater permissiveness of sexual variation and also a more nuanced analysis of the ways gender sexuality and power work together obedience writers associated with the queer theory have put forward arguments for theorizing sexuality independently from gender gail rubin's work has been influential in the development of such arguments in the early 1980s she argued that although connected gender and sexuality are not synonymous with each other opposed to the view that sexuality can be adequately understood as causing gender reuben offered in a student account of what she termed as a sex gender system in which she separates sexility and gender she challenged the basic assumptions about sex gender and sexuality including the oppositions between heterosexual and homosexual biological sex and culturally determined gender and man and women feminists also found it useful to distinguish sex and gender this enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and therefore changeable rubin argued that gender was not the inevitable outcome of biological sex differences and that sexility is not a consequence of gender as euro-american thinking had supposed instead she suggested that sexuality is constructed through a system of sexual stratification in which forms of sexility are differently valued this differential evaluation creates a hierarchy legitimating some expressions of sexuality such as married heterosexuality while persecuting others such as homosexuality transsexualism fetishism and sadomasochism rubin argues that this sex gender evaluation system is encoded in law enforced by the state and policed by medical professionals and popular ideas about appropriate and inappropriate sexual behavior now we shall discuss ruben's first major essay entitled the trafficking women notes on the political economy of sex which was published in 1975. this essay introduced the concept of historically and geographically varying sex gender systems it is grounded in rubin's innovative combination of insights from anthropology and psychoanalysis the success of the essay catapulted ruben into the academic limelight at a time when she was a graduate student in anthropology is still at the university of michigan in order to explain the foundations of the operations of women in capitalist societies ruben brings together the analytical frameworks of marxist historical materialism freudian psychoanalysis and levi's drossian structuralism in this process she introduces the concept of the sex gender system she locates the structural operation of women in the kinship systems that create gender division and compulsory heterosexuality she begins the essay with a big question that second wave feminists had been trying to resolve in the 1970s how do we account for women's operation and social subordination the essay has had a pervasive impact and continues to influence new generations of feminist thinkers even today rejected biologically essentialist sexuality in favor of the social organization of sexuality imagining a utopian elimination of obligatory heterosexuality and she questions and i quote from her what is a domesticated woman a female of this species the one explanation is as good as the other a woman is a woman she only becomes a domestic a wife a shettle a playboy bunny a prostitute or a human dicta phone in certain relations drawn from these relationships she is no more the helpmate of men than gold in itself is money and so on what then are these relationships by which a female becomes an oppressed woman in order to answer this question she analyzes the works of riot and levy straws and offers a detailed account of how systematic social mechanism shapes domesticated women she tries to find the genesis of sexual inequality in order to form a sexually egalitarian society in future prior and levy straws as ruben has argued offer conceptual frameworks for explaining the social structures which allow for the discrimination of women structures which have been termed by rubin as the sex gender system she has employed this system to articulate that part of social life which is the locus of the operation of women describing gender as the socially imposed division of the sexes she validates the need for such a concept by discussing the failure of marxism to fully explain sexual operation she believes that marxism as a theory of social life is relatively unconcerned with sex unlike marx fryout and levy straws provide a deep understanding of sexuality and emphasize on the profound differences between the social experiences of different genders the essay follows a strictly social constructionist line and her model of sexual constructivism has instituted paradigms that would come to constitute queer theory's critique of feminism let us look at rubin's critique of marxism marxism locates the operation of women within the capitalist dynamics by pointing to the relationship between housework and the reproduction of labour reuben argues that the reproduction of labor power depends on 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 explaining why women are essential for capitalism does not account for why they are oppressed by it noting that women are oppressed in various forms of societies capitalist as well as those societies which are not necessarily capitalist she notes that it is precisely at this point that the analysis of capitalism ceases to explain very much about women and their oppression she also says that analyzing the reproduction of labor power does not explain why women have to take the responsibility of domestic chores instead of men and emphasizes on the historical and moral element which enabled capitalism to present a cultural heritage of divided labor and sexual operation she stresses on the exploitation of women even before capitalism came to exist in europe although marxism acknowledges the operation of women with the presentation of females as raw materials infections domesticated women as products its argument is that the operation of women lies entirely within society's capitalist structure thus ruben argues if this were the case a socialist revolution would eliminate the operation of women but herein lies the key to rubin's push for a feminist revolution as opposed to a socialist one the root of the operation of women cannot be condensed to merely women's usefulness to the capitalist surplus value women oppressed by capitalism are a product of the operation of women as a whole and not the origin of it reuben also refers to the argument which has been presented by frederick engels that societies do not only have to meet their immediate material needs but also the needs of reproducing themselves any satisfaction of material needs is achieved by means of a socio-cultural formation which includes the sex gender system which is different for every society driven comments that angles see sex operation is part of capitalism's heritage from prior social forms and he integrates sex and sexuality into his theory of society ruben finds his book the origin of the family rather unsatisfying even though she acknowledges that it provides certain insights engels has emphasized on the idea that relations of sexuality can be distinguished from the relations of production each society according to both marx and engels has needs of sexuality and procreation as a result each society has a sex gender system defined as a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human and social intervention and satisfied in a conventional manner no matter how bizarre some of the conventions may be the system assists in discrimination oppression and trafficking of women according to ruben gender identity sexual desire and fantasy and also the concepts of childhood are all social products all societies have their own ways of dealing with sex gender and children and they insist on fulfilling their desires of procreation ruben also clarifies that sex gender system goes by several alternate names including mode of reproduction and patriarchy unlike most of the radical feminists of the time though rubin is rather wary of the term petrarchy the term was introduced by feminists to distinguish the forces for maintaining sexism from other social forces such as capitalism rubin observes that the term capitalism is useful precisely because it distinguishes between different systems of political economy reuben also notes that not all countries have capitalist economic systems and she says that the power of the term lies in its implication that in fact there are alternatives to capitalism petrarchy however tends to mask the very different ways in which sexual worlds have been organized and ruben prefers the term sex gender system because while we can assume that all societies will have some kind of sex gender system in place this term allows for differences and indicates that operation is not inevitable within that domain but is rather the product of the specific social relations which organizes it following marxism's inability to locate the genesis of operation of women rubin continues with an exploration into anthropology specifically the analysis of kinship systems the system of capitalism cannot generate surplus without women yet women are not granted any access to the resulting capital reuben argues that historical patterns of female operation have constructed this role for women in capitalist societies and she attempts to analyze these historical patterns by considering the sex gender system in order to describe the working of a sex gender system she moves to examine the working of kinship systems which also serve to reproduce concrete forms of socially organized sexuality at this point ruben refers to levy straws and his analysis of how kinship is the cultural organization of biological reproduction she refers to his work the elementary structure of kinship which was published in 1949. in kinship systems lie are key to understanding what ruben calls the sex gender system she makes it clear that kinship systems are not formulated out of biology or genetics and borrows this idea from levy straws that they are rather socio-cultural categories and statuses she further applies levy straw's understanding of the emergence of the incest debut and his concept of gift to explain the exchange of women in societies these concepts are employed in order to understand how kinship is related to gender inequality levy stross had borrowed these ideas from a 1925 essay of the french sociologist marcel moss the title of this essay is the gift forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies it was mos who first theorized the significance of one of the most striking features of primitive societies that is the extent to which giving receiving and reciprocating gifts dominate social intercourse martha moss has theorized that gift giving and gift receiving is the dominating force in social intercourse it expresses affirms or creates a social link between the partners of an exchange ruben then adds levy straw's understanding of the insist debut in this idea and he states that in a culture in which gift giving is fundamental to social relationships marriage can be seen as a critical form of gift exchange in these exchanges it is women who are the gifts and men who do the exchange referencing marcel moss she argues that women are born biologically female but they 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 although both moss and navy straws emphasize the solitary aspects of gift exchange the other purposes served by gift giving only strength to the point that it is a pervasive and universal means of social commerce levy straws had also suggested that a gift is a basic form for establishing special relations between individuals families and cleanse etc marriages in his opinion are one of the basic forms of gift exchange and he claims that the taboo on insist is the mechanism which ensures that such trade relation will be performed between families or other units as a means of grounding alliances the alliances are between men with women serving as the means for establishing them if one were to marry the women in his family there would be no gift to exchange it is this exchange that rubid refers to as the traffic of women women are the gifts that are transferred from one group to the next and thus are the ones who allow the men the exchangers to receive social power ruben notes that the concept of the exchange of women situates their operation in the realm of society and not biology she argues that kinship systems do not exchange just women but also sexual access genealogical statuses dynasty names rights in people men women and children the kinship system which is tied with the sex gender system allocates certain rights to men and others to women and it also denies women the right to choose their own destiny women's operation is not the source of social organization but the product of it if it is the women who are being transacted then it is the men who give and take them who benefit from the social exchange in such a system women cannot have full rights to themselves a gift of a woman is more profound than the result of other gift transactions because the relationship thus established is not just one of reciprocity but one of kinship exchange of women expresses that the social relations of a kinship system is specified 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 according to ruben the social system of kinship therefore necessitates the creation of gender division and the institution of compulsory heterosexuality it should be made clear that sex gender systems themselves are not inherently good or bad rather it is the formation of the current sex gender system that should be critiqued and changed to have a new sex gender system to examine the formation of sex and gender rubin also approaches the theories of psychoanalysis and specifically she refers to the edible complex rubin attempts to rehabilitate segment freud's understanding of psychoanalysis despite women's and gay movements rejecting them ruben feels that the implications of freyan theory have been radically repressed far as psychoanalysis rationalizes female subordination it must be critiqued however ruben insists that psychoanalysis contains a unique set of concepts for understanding men women and sexuality it is a theory of sexuality in human society most importantly psychoanalysis provides a description of the mechanisms by which the sexes are divided and deformed of how bisexual androgenous infants are transformed into boys and girls friar's theorization of the electra complex was built on the assumption that children were biologically heterosexual and that a child's masculinity and femininity is innate to his or her corresponding sex the girl's electra was meant to be the counterpart to the boy's edible however with the discovery of the pre-edible phase it was found the children of both sexes were psychically indistinguishable which meant that their differentiation into masculine and feminine children had to be explained rather than assumed thus ruby feels that in the discussions of triad gender presentation and sexual preference were not inherited rather formed in early childhood because the mother is the primary caretaker both young girls and boys see the mother as the object of sexual desire rubin argues that triad was not the biological determinist some people believed him to be instead fried's theory was about language and the cultural meanings imposed upon anatomy pandas and we stems not from the desire to possess the genitalia itself but the social and cultural meanings applied to the penis freud's explanation of the electra complex can also be understood through non-biological means without forced heterosexuality the girl would never have felt that she is less equipped to satisfy the mother rubin then turns to lacan to support her arguments about riot lacan sees kinship as the mediating system through which biological sexuality is transformed in the process of entering the cultural order through kinship systems the child learns his place and the world and his allowed objects of desire lacan takes the idea of the phallus and uses it to add to the edible complex theory with the castration complex the possession of the phallus evokes differences in status for men and women for it asserts male dominance in the pre-edible stage the child is without a defined sexuality but after resolving his edible complex his gender identity is in line with the cultural conventions lacan offers a theory of the workings of kinship terms which serve to define the role of each agent or object in the edible drama with symbolic features assigned to objects such as the fellas the phallus with its symbolic meanings distinguishes men from women and bears the meaning of male dominance the boy desires his mother but gives her up in exchange for the fellas passed on to him from his father the girl however realizes the importance of the palace and denies herself from desiring her mother or any other woman because she sees that only those who possess the fellas have a right to do so she turns therefore her desires to her father who she hopes will give her the fearless he never does and she realizes that the only way she can receive it is through intercourse or a child both are given to her by a man and that her castration is a prerequisite to attaining the fellas when she recognizes and exceeds to this idea she has been interpolated into a folic exchange network riot according to ruben asserts that femininity heterosexuality and desire for motherhood are not innate in women but the result of psychological elements that form in early childhood reuben thinks that both prior and lacan addressed the way cultural stereotypes have been mapped onto the genitals she also notes that psychoanalysts see the creation of femininity in women as an act of psychic brutality based largely on pain and humiliation reuben seeks the development of a political economy of sexuality systems that is to investigate the mechanism which creates and preserves sexual conventions in society the notions of levy straws about the family are an additional step being the manifestation of an artificial division of labor aimed at ensuring heterosexual marriage gender for gail rubin is a coerced social distinction between sexes it is the product of sexual social she contains that kinship and marriage are always parts of total social systems and are tied into economic and political arrangements kinship relations are based on marriage and they therefore turn males and females into men and women each an incomplete half that can only be completed by uniting with the other stressing difference and suppressing resemblance ruben concludes the essay by emphasizing the mutual interdependence of sexuality economics and politics we can say that the s's central impulse is to ask the questions of the connections between sex and politics and to learn something about the nature of gender theory itself in the next module we will look at the second essay of gail rubin thinking sex in detail thank you [Music] bye [Music] you