Gayle Rubin

Gayle S. Rubin (born January 1, 1949) is an American cultural anthropologist, theorist and activist, best known for her pioneering work in feminist theory and queer studies.

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.

Her essay "The Traffic in Women" (1975) had a lasting influence in second-wave feminism and early gender studies, by arguing that gender oppression could not be adequately explained by Marxist conceptions of the patriarchy.

She was also a graduate worker in 1975, when the Graduate Employees' Organization 3550 was formed at the University of Michigan.

At the time, she and Anne Bobroff, a fellow graduate student, wrote and distributed a leaflet titled "The Fetishization of Bargaining", which argued that bargaining alone is not enough to convince management.

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.

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.

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.

A core of lesbian members of Cardea, including Rubin, Pat Califia (who identified as a lesbian at the time), 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 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.

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" (see below) as a workshop there.

Her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex" is widely regarded as a founding text of gay and lesbian studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory.

She has written on a range of subjects including the politics of sexuality, gender oppression, sadomasochism, pornography and lesbian literature, as well as anthropological studies of urban sexual subcultures, and is an associate professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan.

Rubin was raised in a white middle-class 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 claims she was punished for refusing to recite the Lord's Prayer.

In 1984 Rubin cofounded The Outcasts, a social and educational organization for women interested in BDSM with other women, also based in San Francisco.

"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 also is a founding member of the GLBT Historical Society (originally known as the San Francisco Bay Area Gay and Lesbian 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".

That organization was disbanded in the mid-1990s; its successor organization The Exiles is still active.

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.

Rubin served on the board of directors of the Leather Archives and Museum from 1992 to 2000.

Rubin is on the Board of Governors for the Leather Hall of Fame.

In this essay, Rubin devised 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 which serves a conventional social function (Claude Lévi-Strauss) and is reproduced in the psychology of children (Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan).

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 2012, The Exiles in San Francisco received the Small Club of the Year award as part of the Pantheon of Leather Awards.

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.

Rubin is a sex-positive feminist.

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.