The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex

Article regarding theories of the oppression of women. Rubin argued against the
Marxist conceptions of women’s oppression—specifically the concept of “patriarchy”
—in favor of her own concept of the “sex/gender” system. It was by arguing that
women’s oppression could not be explained by capitalism alone as well as being an
early article to stress the distinction between biological sex and gender that Rubin’s
work helped to develop women’s and gender studies as independent fields. The
framework of the article was also important in that it opened up the possibility of
researching the change in meaning of this categories over historical time. Rubin
used a combination of kinship theories from Lévi-Strauss, psychoanalytic theory
from Freud, and critiques of structuralism by Lacan to make her case that it was at
moments where women were exchanged (principally through marriage acts) that
bodies were engendered and became women. Rubin’s article has been republished
numerous times since its debut in 1975, and it has remained a key piece of feminist
anthropological theory and a foundational work in gender studies.