Rubin has said that one of aspects she is most proud of in “Thinking Sex” is its “protoqueerness.” That means the essay provided a prototype or model for much of the thinking that would come a few years later under the umbrella of “queer theory.” The year 1990, six years after “Thinking Sex,” is often seen as a watershed in this line of thinking. That year was when two groundbreaking works—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble—denaturalized the ways in which people think about sex and sexuality, moving away from the essentialist position Rubin attacks. Sedgwick’s book bears particularly striking similarities with Rubin’s essay. Epistemology of the Closet begins with six “axioms” about sex and sexuality, and they resonate with the “notes” Rubin provides in “Thinking Sex.”
The first two axioms of Sedgwick are worth discussing at some length. Axiom #1 is “People are different from each other.” In this surprisingly simple statement, Sedgwick is trying to argue for something similar to what Rubin would call a “benign concept of variation.” Sedgwick’s idea is that people have a lot of different kinds of sexual preference, and there is so much variation that we couldn’t name all the possibilities. However, Sedgwick lists a few of the different categories of difference, similar to how Rubin compares an inner and outer circle of shame in her “Charmed Circle” of the sexual hierarchy: gender identity, kink, casual/monogamous, etc. The point is that there is no reason why one sexual activity or preference should be considered better or worse than others. Both Sedgwick and Rubin, in their different ways, advocate for a concept of benign variation.
Sedgwick’s Axiom #2 is “The study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender; correspondingly, anti-homophobic enquiry is not coextensive with feminist enquiry. But we can’t know in advance how they will be different.” This is remarkably similar to Rubin’s conclusion in “Thinking Sex.” There, Rubin argues that feminism can’t by itself create a radical theory of sex, because feminism theorizes the oppression of gender, and the oppression of sex is independent of gender. Like Rubin, Sedgwick keeps room open for feminism and pro-sex positions to work together in the future. But both think that the first task is to give theorists of sexuality room to theorize on their own. Then, they can talk about possible integrations with feminism and the study of gender.
In these two ways, Sedgwick and Rubin show a deep affinity of thought. Although Rubin is not often cited as a creator of queer theory, her essay from a few years before the advent of queer theory provides many of the same ideas, especially in relation to feminism.
