Gayle Rubin


Gayle S. Rubin is an American cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and 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. Her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex" is widely regarded as a founding text of gay and lesbian studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory. She is an associate professor of anthropology and women's studies at the University of Michigan.

Biography

Early life

Rubin was raised in a middle-class white Jewish home in then-segregated South Carolina. She attended segregated public schools, her classes only being desegregated when she was a senior. Rubin has written that her experiences growing up in the segregated South has given her "an abiding hatred of racism in all its forms and a healthy respect for its tenacity." As one of the few Jews in her Southern city, she resented the dominance of white Protestants over African-Americans, Catholics, and Jews. The only Jewish child in her elementary school, she was punished for refusing to recite the Lord's Prayer.

College, early activism, and early writing

In 1968 Rubin was part of an early feminist consciousness raising group active on the campus of the University of Michigan and also wrote on feminist topics for women's movement papers and the Ann Arbor Argus. In 1970 she helped found Ann Arbor Radicalesbians, an early lesbian feminist group.
Rubin first rose to recognition through her 1975 essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex", which had a galvanizing effect on feminist theory.

San Francisco

In 1978 Rubin moved to San Francisco to begin studies of the gay male leather subculture, seeking to examine a minority sexual practice neither from a clinical perspective nor through the lens of individual psychology but rather as an anthropologist studying a contemporary community.
Rubin was a member of Cardea, a women's discussion group within a San Francisco BDSM organization called the Society of Janus; Cardea existed from 1977 to 1978 before discontinuing. A core of lesbian members of Cardea, including Rubin, Pat Califia, and sixteen others, were inspired to start Samois on June 13, 1978, as an exclusively lesbian BDSM group. Samois was a lesbian-feminist BDSM organization based in San Francisco that existed from 1978 to 1983, and was the first lesbian BDSM group in the United States. In 1984 Rubin cofounded The Outcasts, a social and educational organization for women interested in BDSM with other women, also based in San Francisco. That organization was disbanded in the mid-1990s; its successor organization The Exiles is still active.
In the field of public history, Rubin was a member of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, a private study group founded in 1978 whose members included Allan Berube, Estelle Freedman and Amber Hollibaugh. Rubin also was a founding member of the GLBT Historical Society, established in 1985. Arguing the need for well-maintained historical archives for sexual minorities, Rubin has written that "queer life is full of examples of fabulous explosions that left little or no detectable trace.... Those who fail to secure the transmission of their histories are doomed to forget them".
She became the first woman to judge a major national gay male leather title contest in 1991, when she judged the Mr. Drummer contest. This contest was associated with Drummer magazine, which was based in San Francisco.
The San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley consists of four works of art along Ringold Alley honoring the leather subculture; it opened in 2017. One of the works of art is a black granite stone etched with, among other things, a narrative by Rubin. Rubin was an important member of the community advisory group that was consulted to develop the designs of the works of art.

Academic career

In 1994, Rubin completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan with a dissertation entitled The valley of kings: Leathermen in San Francisco, 1960–1990.
In addition to her appointment at the University of Michigan, she was the 2014 F. O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University.
Rubin serves on the editorial board of the journal Feminist Encounters and on the international advisory board of the feminist journal Signs.

Other

Rubin is a sex-positive feminist. The 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality is often credited as the moment that signaled the beginning of the feminist sex wars; Rubin gave a version of her work “Thinking Sex” as a workshop there. “Thinking Sex” then had its first publication in 1984, in Carole Vance’s book Pleasure and Danger, which was an anthology of papers from that conference. "Thinking Sex" is a sex-positive piece which is widely regarded as a founding text of gay and lesbian studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory.
Rubin served on the Board of Directors of the Leather Archives and Museum from 1992 to 2000.
The San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley, which opened in 2017, consists of four works of art along Ringold Alley honoring the leather subculture; one of the works of art is a black granite stone etched with, among other things, a narrative by Rubin. Rubin was an important member of the community advisory group that was consulted to develop the designs of the works of art.

Thought

"Thinking Sex"

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 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. The binaries of this "charmed circle" include couple/alone or in groups, monogamous/promiscuous, same generation/cross-generational, and bodies only/with manufactured objects. The "Charmed Circle" speaks to the idea that there is a hierarchical valuation of sex acts. In this essay, Rubin also discusses a number of ideological formations that permeate sexual views. The most important is sex negativity, in which Western cultures consider sex to be a dangerous, destructive force. If marriage, reproduction, or love are not involved, almost all sexual behavior is considered bad. Related to sex negativity is the fallacy of the misplaced scale. Rubin explains how sex acts are troubled by an excess of significance.
Rubin's discussion of all of these models assumes a domino theory of sexual peril. People feel a need to draw a line between good and bad sex as they see it standing between sexual order and chaos. There is a fear that if certain aspects of "bad" sex are allowed to move across the line, unspeakable acts will move across as well. One of the most prevalent ideas about sex is 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. Rubin points out that we have learned to value other cultures as unique without seeing them as inferior, and we need to adopt a similar understanding of different sexual cultures as well.

Legacy of "Thinking Sex"

Rubin's 1984 essay "Thinking Sex" is widely regarded as a founding text of gay and lesbian studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory.
The University of Pennsylvania hosted a "state of the field" conference in gender and sexuality studies on March 4 to 6, 2009, titled "Rethinking Sex" and held in recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the essay "Thinking Sex." Rubin was a featured speaker at the conference, where she presented "Blood under the Bridge: Reflections on ‘Thinking Sex,’" to an audience of nearly eight hundred people. In 2011 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies published a special issue, also titled "Rethinking Sex," featuring work emerging from this conference, and including Rubin's piece "Blood under the Bridge: Reflections on ‘Thinking Sex’”.

Awards and honors