Summary of Sections 3–4
Section 3 is called “Sexual Transformations,” and it deals with how the different sex panics discussed in the previous chapter have formed a system or hierarchy of sex. Again, Rubin’s starting point is the late 19th century, and she is particularly interested in what she calls “erotic speciation.” Here, she draws on the work of Michel Foucault, whose vastly influential History of Sexuality was published in 1978. “Speciation” means turning the production of a new identity, or species. For instance, some people might prefer not to eat meat; calling that person a “vegetarian” makes this preference into an identity. Foucault argued that, similarly, same-sex sex has occurred throughout history. But in the late 19th century, this behavior became a species: “the homosexual.” Society started to talk about sexual behavior as an identity.
The same happened with prostitution, according to Rubin. Prior to the 19th century, women might have on occasion exchanged sex for money or resources. It was an on-again, off-again form of employment. But in the late 19th century, prostitution, too, underwent speciation. Rather than an activity some women might participate in for temporary employment, women started to become identified as “prostitutes,” as if this employment completely defined them. The result of both forms of speciation was that homosexuality and prostitution stopped looking like activities people engaged in and started to look like categories of people. In turn, the people of these categories could be grouped, segregated, and punished.
Section 4, “Sexual Stratification,” explores the means through which this grouping developed. The most important is the law. As we saw in Section 1, throughout the past century, the United States has developed more and more laws criminalizing sodomy, prostitution, obscenity, and other sexual activities. As we saw in Section 2, there is often a “misplaced scale” when it comes to these activities. Rubin notices that, in some states, oral sex between consenting adults is punished as severely as rape and murder. This kind of harsh punishment makes sex look dangerous, and at the very least provides a means of persecuting those caught doing it.
Obscenity laws also work to reinforce a sexual hierarchy, because they turn sex into a “taboo,” something that no one is allowed to talk about. What is particularly fascinating, Rubin argues, is that obscenity laws limit commerce. You can’t buy commodities related to sex, just like you can’t buy sex itself. In a capitalist society, such a prohibition on trade is rare. Capitalist societies rarely place blanket prohibitions on exchanging money for a particular kind of good. The fact that a capitalist society would limit trade for sexual commodities, therefore limiting its economy, is one sign of how deep the taboo of sex goes in that society.
Rubin notes that these harsh laws and limitations don’t have to be actively prosecuted for them to still have an effect policing social activity. Remember that the point is that, today, people perceive their sexual activities as constituting membership in a larger group. Homosexual behavior is not just a personal matter; people who desire sex with the same sex also see themselves as part of a larger community with similar desires. That means that when one member of that community is prosecuted for illegal activity, the rest of the community can be terrorized. Simply having the law on the books, and minimally enforcing it, can create an atmosphere of fear in which people experience erotic repression and oppression.
Beyond the law, society also polices sexual activity in everyday interactions and social institutions. Gay people may experience job discrimination, for instance. Because of the stigma attached to homosexuality, gay people may also be less likely to pursue public office or political representation, for fear of a “sex scandal.” This limits the agency of sexual minorities. A kind of sexual conformity is also enforced through families. Rubin remembers countless stories of homosexuals and sex workers who have been ostracized by their families when they confessed their sexual activities or had them discovered. This cuts people off from a vital source of psychological and economic support.
Rubin concludes section 4 by arguing that “sex is a vector of oppression.” By “vector,” Rubin means a particular axis or dimension of oppression. For instance, race and gender are other vectors of oppression. People can be oppressed for the color of their skin or for their gender identity. Sex is just like these other vectors, according to Rubin. The kind of sex people have or desire to have can be a form of discrimination, rejection, and criminalization. Moreover, this vector is not reducible to others. That means sexual oppression can act independently of racial and gender oppression. A theory of sex needs to take this into account, to see how sexual oppression cuts across other kinds of oppression and can compound and multiply them.
Analysis of Sections 3–4
The impact of Michel Foucault on theories of sex and sexuality cannot be overstated. His History of Sexuality is one of the most widely cited books in cultural study, and its impact was already being felt at the time Rubin wrote “Thinking Sex.” Foucault also had a particularly iconic status in the communities that Rubin studied and defends. For instance, he participated in the gay leather scene in San Francisco that Rubin studied for her Ph.D. dissertation in anthropology. He belongs to a marginalized community that is impacted by the very sexual hierarchy Rubin theorizes. In this way, there is a kind of symbiosis. Rubin has learned history from Foucault, and she directs this knowledge into a political theory with real effects for people like Foucault.
Section 3 is titled “Sexual Transformations,” but this is a bit misleading. On the one hand, Rubin is indeed discussing a transformation in the way sex was thought about, which is the transformation of sex into sexuality that Foucault describes. This means that what once looked like mere behaviors start to look like a core identity that someone has. Rubin thinks this is the foundation of sexual hierarchy, because you have to have different groups of people in order to claim some are better than others. But Rubin is also discussing a sort of stagnation. Hierarchy itself doesn’t transform; it stays constant. It is a recurring pattern in American history. Thus, this section about sexual transformation is also about the stability of sexual hierarchy.
That means these sections are also not about how to transform this hierarchy. We saw in the last sections that Rubin joins a recent tradition of sexual activists, including the gay liberationists of the 1970s. But that kind of activism is not discussed in these sections. Rubin is still focusing on the problem: sexual hierarchy. Solutions to this problem are deferred until later, because she thinks the most important task is getting a clear and detailed sense of what, exactly, the problem is.
This is what motivates Rubin’s turn to thinking about sex as a vector of oppression. Remember the ferment of social movements that had emerged in the previous generation, including the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s. Each of these movements isolated a vector of oppression and politicized it, which means they used that vector to organize people to protest and overturn state laws and social policies. Thus, civil rights tackled the vector of race, and feminism tackled the vector of gender. Rubin wants that same kind of focused attention on sex. One reason this makes sense, according to Rubin, is because sex cuts across other vectors of oppression. Feminism shows that women are oppressed regardless of their race; the vector of gender cuts across the vector of race. Similarly, Rubin argues that people are oppressed because of the kind of sex they have or desire to have, and this happens across races and genders.
Rubin’s argument for a unique vector of sexual oppression is what makes her essay a “radical” theory. In everyday language, “radical” means extreme, but that’s not exactly what it means in this context. Rather, Rubin has in mind the same meaning that was attached to “radical feminism” during her generation. In this context, “radical” means looking for the root cause of something. (The word "radical" derives from the Latin radix, meaning root.) Radical feminists argued that the oppression of women is caused, at base, by patriarchy. What made them radical is their insistence that this is the fundamental cause of oppression. Similarly, Rubin is trying to discover the fundamental cause of oppression of people including gay men and sex workers. Her argument is that the root of this oppression is a distinct sexual system of hierarchy. Just like, according to radical feminism, patriarchy causes the oppression of women, in Rubin's radical theory of sex, a sexual hierarchy causes sexual oppression.
