Gayle Rubin's "Thinking Sex" is the opening essay of Abelove and company's Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. And with good reason: it's crucial and multiply canonized. I must have had to read it twice before, once in "Gay and Lesbians Studies class" as an undergrad and at least one more time in law school in "Feminist Legal Theory." Re-reading it for studying for comps, it's forthrightness about the political dimension of the sex act (not just identities) and prescient critique of the ways we continue to arbitrarily value some sex acts above others is really surprising.
Rubin performs a quick historical gloss to illustrate the ways sex acts are politicized, and hierarchized, her battle cry: “It is time to recognize the political dimensions of erotic life” (35) and her thesis: “a radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression.” (9) Sexual oppression is constituted and enabled by sex negativity, sexual essentialism, and the misplaced scale of sex acts where “small differences in value or behavior are often experienced as cosmic threats.” (11) The idea of misplaced scale, for Rubin, explains why in some jurisdictions, at the time of her writing (1984), consensual sodomy still carried twenty year prison sentences. This concatenation of ideological forces, Rubin famously offers, creates an arbitrary hierarchy of sex acts where married, reproductive, monogamous heterosexual sex, from the top, looks down upon homosexual, promiscuous, commercial and S&M sex. She provides two classic graphic images to illustrate this concept: first, the "moving line" that demarcates good from less good to bad sex and, second, "the charmed circle."
And . . .
Just kidding! Gayle Rubin didn't create CHARMED, silly!!! She's important; but not THAT important! Ok . . .
Ok, I'm still fucking with you. That's not it either. Here we go . . .
Ok, that's really it. Honest. Anyways . . .
The
weakness of Rubin’s formulation, on her own and De Lauretis’ view, is that it
sunders sex acts from gender identity, thus acting coy as to the identity
politics that informs the hierarchization of sex acts. For instance, male
homosexuality and female homosexuality are almost never legally sanctioned
equally. In the modern era, sodomy between males got tougher criminal sentences
than females, in the Middle Ages, vice versa. The disparity in legal response
to the same sex acts performed by different kinds of subjects suggests that sex
acts are not themselves politicized without reference to the social positions
that perform them. Rubin anticipated this critique and responds to it in a
footnote. In her defense, perhaps her article is so important precisely because it attempts to look at acts
independent of identity, even if that separation potentially results in paradox
i.e. an “act of homosexual sodomy,” in our regime of sexuality, references a
“homosexual identity”
Rubin,
from what I remember, is struggling against Second Wave Feminists (especially
my favorite snitty-kitty, Catharine Mackinnon) and Conservative social forces,
which she counter-intuitively but perspicaciously links in their sex negative
ideologies. This said, I can't help but think that Rubin's focus on acts as opposed to identities creates a wider lens with which to see the politics of sex. Not limited to focusing on "suspect classes," Rubin's theoretical focus can hone in on all the arbitrary politicizations of sex that plague not only minorities but white, heterosexual monogamists, like video-ed sex.
Her other, more explicit theoretical moves? Rubin
confronts sexual essentialism with Foucaudian constructionism (History of Sexuality Vol. 1, though not
included in the anthology, citationally asserts its centrality to the field on
page 10). But Rubin has to square her personal bogey man, “sex negativity” with
Foucault’s potentially contradictory “repressive hypothesis.” Rubin says there
isn’t a contradiction at all. “Because of his emphasis on the ways sexuality is
produced,” she remarks, “Foucault has been vulnerable to interpretations that
deny or minimize the reality of sexual repression . . . Foucault makes it
abundantly clear that he is not denying the existence of sexual repression so
much as inscribing it within a larger dynamic.” (10) And, having read a lot of
Foucault interviews, I am inclined to agree with her.
It’s
worth noting that misappropriations of Foucault are a genre of theory in and of
itself. In Medieval studies, in Getting Medieval,
Carolyn Dinshaw repeatedly repeals over-simplified, hyper-specified,
rigidifications of Foucault’s ideas, namely, the Foucaudian New Historicist’s
insistence that the human subject, and all its psychological depth, is
historically specific to the Modern Era, and that humans before that time
didn’t, you know, identify as people or think of themselves as individuals or
something. In point of fact, though his rhetoric in the Archeology of Knowledge is a little
. . . melodramatic, Foucault doesn’t quite maintain so rigid a claim.
But
– to return to Rubin – reading this foundational, career defining article in
2013, I couldn’t help but marvel how prescient it is about our society's abiding arbitrary moralism in regards to sex acts as demonstrated by our culture’s
obsession with “sex tapes.” Indeed, twenty nine years ago, Rubin identified sex
involving communications technology as arbitrarily oppressed. On page 7 of the
anthology, she bemoans overzealous child pornography laws that would imprison
someone caught with “a nude snapshot of a 17-year-old lover.” And then, through
a chain of association with better known sex oppressions, cites the taboo surrounded video-ed sex as a form of discrimination: “Whether sex acts are gay or straight, coupled or
in groups, naked or in underwear, commercial or free, with or without video, should not be ethical concerns.” It was
reading that that I realized how influential and foundational Rubin’s essay is for me personally; it both conceptually and, apparently specifically, provides
the framework for my own thoughts on the intersection of communications
technology and sex as I expressed them here last year. Reading it over, some of
the ideas and phrases, the attention to the arbitrariness of the sex taboo,
seem unquestionably Rubin.
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