Sex/Gender System
섹스/젠더 체계
A concept coined by the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin in her 1975 essay “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”: 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. Holding that Marxism could explain women’s usefulness to capitalism but not the genesis of their oppression, Rubin took up the project Engels had abandoned and used Lévi-Strauss’s kinship theory and the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan to analyse the exchange of women and the making of gender.
In depth
Rubin wrote the essay from several drafts of a term paper for a course she was taking with the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and it reached a wide audience when Rayna Reiter published it in the 1975 feminist anthology Toward an Anthropology of Women. At university she took part in New Left reading groups steeped in Marxist theory and its critiques, and through the New Left Review she met the analyses of Marxism by Lacan and Althusser. Rubin called the sex/gender system “that part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women” and defined gender as a “socially imposed division of the sexes”.
The starting point was a critique of Marxism. The analysis in which men’s surplus value from wage labour becomes the ruling class’s profit while women work at home to sustain and reproduce that labour is useful, Rubin granted, but “to explain women’s usefulness to capitalism is one thing. To argue that this usefulness explains the genesis of the oppression of women is quite another.” Women’s oppression thrives where there is no capitalism, as in the New Guinea highlands or the Amazon valley, and pre-capitalist Europe was not free of it either. So she argued that “we need to pursue the project that Engels abandoned” in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Looking back, Rubin said that Marxism enabled people to pose a whole set of questions that it could not satisfactorily answer.
Rubin’s material was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship, above all the “gift exchange” of women and the incest taboo. By forbidding certain marriages between kin, the taboo promotes exchanges of women between families, and it is chiefly men who control the giving and receiving. Rubin called this “exchange of women” an “initial step toward building an arsenal of concepts with which sexual systems can be described”. But the incest taboo is not as universal as Lévi-Strauss thought, so kinship exchange alone cannot explain how gender arises and attaches to particular bodies. She therefore turned to Freud’s Oedipus complex and to Lacan’s analysis of the symbolic exchange of the phallus: girls and women cannot give the phallus, only receive it “as a gift from a man”, and it is by coming to terms with that lack that they recognise themselves as women.
In her conclusion Rubin argued that “there are other questions to ask of a marriage system than whether or not it exchanges women”, and called for research into what the exchange is for in different societies. As feminism’s aim she named a “genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love”.
In “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism” (1979) Heidi Hartmann quoted Rubin’s definition and credited the concept with greatly increasing our ability to identify the patriarchal element of social structures. We are born female and male, biological sexes, she wrote, but are created woman and man, socially recognised genders, and how we are so created is the second aspect of the mode of production of which Engels spoke, “the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species”. Rubin had said that a sex/gender system could in theory be female dominant, male dominant or egalitarian, while declining to label known systems or periodise history; Hartmann chose to call the present sex/gender system patriarchy.
Rubin herself regarded her 1982 “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” as a “corrective” to some of the essay’s arguments. Judith Butler already cited Rubin in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” (1988) and has called the essay key to their own work on gender and sex. The concept of heteronormativity, popularised by Michael Warner in 1991, also has its roots in Rubin’s sex/gender system and Adrienne Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality”. Criticism has mostly targeted Rubin’s psychoanalysis: Laura Kipnis asked in 2006 whether it led to an overly deterministic view of women’s lives, and Joan W. Scott, in “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”, doubted that it could help historians interpret historical actors.