Gayle Rubin is 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, pornography and lesbian literature, as well as anthropological studies and histories of sexual subcultures.

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 Levi-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 an reinterpretation of these ideas.

In 1978 Rubin moved to San Francisco to begin studies of the gay male leather culture. On June 13 of that year, Rubin, together with Pat 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.

Califia and Rubin became prominent "pro-sex activists" in the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s, famously giving a 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 attribute to sex and gender — whether left- or right-wing, feminist or patriarchal — which defines some behaviours as good/natural and others as bad/unnatural.

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 assistant professor of anthropology at the university.

Awards

• 2000 Leather Archives and Museum "Centurion"
• 2000 National Leather Association Lifetime Achievement Award
• 1992 Pantheon of Leather Forebearer Award
• 1988 National Leather Association Leather Woman of the Year Award

Publications

• Deviations: Essays in Sex, Gender, and Politics, forthcoming.

• "Samois", in Marc Stein, ed., Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in America, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003). PDF download
• "Studying Sexual Subcultures: the Ethnography of Gay Communities in Urban North America", in Ellen Lewin and William Leap, eds., Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002)
• "Sites, Settlements, and Urban Sex: Archaeology And The Study of Gay Leathermen in San Francisco 1955-1995", in Robert Schmidt and Barbara Voss, eds., Archaeologies of Sexuality, (London: Routledge, 2000)
• "The Miracle Mile: South of Market and Gay Male Leather in San Francisco 1962- 1996", in James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy Peters, eds., Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998)
• "From the Past: The Outcasts" from the newsletter of Leather Archives & Museum No. 4, April 1998
• "Music from a Bygone Era", in Cuir Underground, Issue 3.4 - May 1997. online text
• "Elegy for the Valley of the Kings: AIDS and the Leather Community in San Francisco, 1981-1996", in Martin P. Levine, Peter M. Nardi, and John H. Gagnon, eds. In Changing Times: Gay Men and Lesbians Encounter HIV/AIDS (University of Chicago Press, 1997)
• "Of catamites and kings: Reflections on butch, gender, and boundaries", in Joan Nestle (Ed). The Persistent Desire. A Femme-Butch-Reader. Boston: Alyson. 466 (1992)
• "The Catacombs: A temple of the butthole", in Mark Thompson, ed., Leatherfolk — Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice, (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991).
• Misguided, Dangerous and Wrong: An Analysis of Anti-Pornography Politics.
• "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality, in Carole Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger'', (Routledge & Kegan, Paul, 1984)
• "The Leather Menace", Body Politic, 82(34). (1982)
• "Sexual Politics, the New Right, and the Sexual Fringe" in The Age Taboo, Alyson, 1981, pp. 108-115.
• "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex", in Rayna Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women, New York, Monthly Review (1975); anthologized in Second Wave: A Feminist Reader.
• "Thinking Sex" is anthologized in Abelove, H.; Barale, M. A.; Halperin, D. M.(eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader(New York: Routledge, 1994).

External links

• "Charges of Exclusion & McCarthyism at Barnard Conference" by Tacie Dejanikus, off our backs 12(6), June 30, 1982.
• "Lesbian Sex Mafia ('L S/M') Speakout" by Fran Moira, off our backs 12(6), June 30, 1982.

Gayle Rubin

Living people | Feminist scholars