CAS WS 101 Lecture 4: Gayle Rubin

• School: Boston University
• Department: Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
• Course: CAS WS 101
• Professor: Karen Warkentin

Document Summary

Gayle rubin"s trafficking women and the origins of sex/gender system using examples from higuchi"s child"s play. She is an anthropologist, so she took an anthropological approach. Anthropology: uses a comparative approach to study social structures. Rubin took a masculinist disciple and developed feminist techniques for studying and interpreting different sexual cultures. We have learned to cherish different cultures as unique expressions of human inventiveness rather than as inferior or disgusting habits of savage. We need a similar anthropological understanding of different sexual cultures . Sex/gender system: set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, in which these transformed sexual needs are satis ed. Example: biological females are considered as domesticated women. All societies have a system of political economy: the way a society organisms and provisions itself, produces goods from raw materials and develops economic class. The domestication of women: rubin"s alternate explanation of the problem of women"s oppression.