Gayle%20Rubin,%20Gilbert%20and%20Gubar

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Gayle Rubin, Gilbert and Gubar

• Q A Rubin Outline

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Rubin

• How does Rubin use and critique Marx (pp. 536,
  538), Levi Strauss (pp. 544 - 549 ) and Freud
  (548 550-51)? (See also p. 551 for a general
  critique.)
• How does Rubin define sex/gender system (538)?
  What are the major operation principles of this
  system in patriarchal society? How do they
  function and who are at the receiving end of all
  these social mechanisms?
• What are the contemporary examples of the
  Traffic in Women when bridewealth, dowry and
  arranged marriage may not be no longer used?

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Gilbert and Gubar

• What is the anxiety of authority which G G
  sees in female writers (2028)? In all the
  female writers or just 19th century female
  writers?
• How is femininity defined in 19th century
  Victorian society? How is it related to
  contemporary female diseases? And today? Give
  concrete examples of specific cultural fields.
• What does Dickinson means by infection in the
  sentence? How about G G(2028-29)?
• What are the tropes used to describe female
  creativity and femininity?

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General Questions

• How are the two articles related to each other?
  Rubin criticizes psychoanalysts definition of
  femininity as passivity, while GG sees this as
  womens conditions in the 19th century. Are they
  contradictory to each other?
• Are both of them American radical feminists?

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Gayle RubinThe Traffic in Women Notes on the
Political Economy of Sex

• Evelyn Sung 2003/10/21

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Outline

• Introduction
• Marx
• Englel
• Levi-Strauss
• Extension of Levi-Strauss theory of kinship to
  sex/gender system
• Psychoanalysis and Its Discontent
• Conclusion

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Introduction

• Purpose by analysis of the causes of womens
  oppression and see what can be changed in order
  to achieve a society without gender hierarchy
• Marx Levi-Strauss Freud
• fail to notice women as raw materials and
  
• domestic tools in a systematic social
  apparatus
• but provide conceptual tools for the
  locus of
• womens oppression in sex/gender system
• the need for sex/gender system define
• sex/gender system

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Marx

• Class oppression women are a reserve labor force
  for capitalism
• Housework v.s. reproduction of labor
• food, clothing, housingetc needs
• additional labor to be turned into people.
• no wage paid for housework labor of
• women is added to the surplus value.

Total value ????
Wage for labor
Capital ???? ??
Surplus value
Labor of women (housework) is added into surplus
value
Housework is unpaid
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Engel economy v.s. sexuality

• (the production of means of existence) human must
  do more than apply its activity to reshaping the
  natural world in order to clothe, feed, and warm
  itself? economy
• (the production of human themselves) human must
  also reproduce itself from generation to
  generation? the needs of sexuality and
  procreation
• food and sex is culturally determined and
  obtained
• Sex/gender system (Mode of reproduction)
  (patriarchy)

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Kinship socially organized sexuality(1)

• Socially defined statuses take precedence over
  biology
• Gift exchange as essence in the primitive
  societies for establishing a social link
• Marriage as the most basic form of gift exchange
  women are the most precious of gifts.
• Incest taboo as a mechanism to insure that such
  exchanges take place between families and between
  groups
• Organized gift/ organizer giver

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Kinship socially organized sexuality (2)

• Incest taboo constitutes the origin of culture
  ?No exchange of women, no culture?
• exchange of women as part of social
  relationships of kinship system, specify that men
  have right in women, but women dont have the
  same right in men
• Subordination of women as a product of sex/gender
  system

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Kinship sexual division of labor

• All manifest forms of sex and gender are seen as
  being constituted by the imperatives of social
  systems
• Gender women, men, as two exclusive categories,
  repress their personalities
• Obligatory heterosexaul Institutionalized
  homosexuality, bridewealth-oriented,
  transvesticism
• Constraint of female sexuality preferred female
  sexuality, respond to desire, not actively desired

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Psychoanalysis and Its Discontent

• Contradiction in Levi-Strauss and Freuds
  concepts
• Levi-Strauss women as sign / value
• Freud challenge conventional morality
• /double standard
• Problems when assimilate into feminist theory
• sexism
• isolate sex and gender from mode of
• production
• Analogous to working-class movement androgynous
  and genderless society

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Conclusion

• Economics and politics obscure the concept of
  exchange of women
• no equivalent e.g. Kuma? debts
• with equivalent e.g. bridewealth
• Sexual system cannot be understood in complete
  isolation
• e.g. marriage in Trobriands? form the basis
• of chiefly power
• mutual interdependence of sexuality,
  economics and politics.