An Analysis Of Gayle Rubin's The Traffic In Women

In her 1975 book The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, anthropologist, activist and theorist of sex and gender politics, Gayle Rubin attempts to illustrate the origins and causes of female oppression. She does so by examining the social relations responsible for doing so as well as offering a detailed account of her social structure she refers to as the "sex/gender system” which she explains 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.”(159) Rubin believes that this structure is assisting in the discrimination, oppression, and trafficking of women. Rubin begins by pointing out the shortcomings …show more content…
Rubin explains that Engles “sees sex oppression as the part of capitalism’s heritage from prior social forms” and “integrates sex and sexuality into his theory of society.”(164) Rubin explains that all societies have their own different ways of dealing with “sex, gender, and babies” and that the desires of sexuality and procreation must be fulfilled. In addition, Rubin clarifies that the sex/gender system goes by several alternate names including “mode of reproduction” and “patriarchy.” However, the sex/gender system is different because it is a neutral expression that “indicates that oppression is not inevitable…but is the product of the specific social relations which organize …show more content…
Borrowing a bit from Mauss’s Essay on the Gift, it is explained that a gift is a basic form for establishing special relations between individuals, families, clans etc. Marriage, Lévi-Strauss argues, is one of the basic forms of gift exchange. He claims that the taboo on incest is the mechanism which insures that such trade relation will be performed between families or other units as a means of grounding alliances between men, with women serving as the means for establishing