Toward an Anthropolog f women dited by rayna r reiter Monthly R New York and London
156 Paula Webster 下moa△ m Artthrapolgy 0um.Ea尺以y心、 munity. I would not encourage women to confuse myth with history or exchange vision for science, for the creative energy that each affords the other should not be lost. Thus, even if Gayle Rubin feminists reject the existence of matriarchy on empirical and/ or theoretical grounds, we should acknowledge the impor- The Traffic in Women tance of the vision of matriarchy and use the debate for furthering the creation of feminist theory and action Notes on the“ Political Economy"” of Sex The literature on women-bo of women's oppression and social subordination. The ques- tion is not a trivial one, since the answers given it determine our visions of the future, and our evaluation of whether or importantly, the analysis of the causes of womens oppression forms the basis for any assessment of just what would have to be changed in order to achieve a society without gender hierarchy. Thus, if innate male aggression and dominance are at the root of female oppression, then the feminist program would logically require either the extermination of the character. If sexism is a by-product of capitalisms relentless appetite for profit, then sexism would wither away in the advent of a successful socialist revolution if the world histor of how much this free persons: Tom Anderson and Arlene gorelick, with whom I co-authored the paper from which this one evolved; Rayna Reiter, Larry Shields Ray Kelly, Peggy While, Norma Diamond, Randy Reiter Studies 340/004, for my initiation into teaching; Sally Brenner, fo heroic ty ping Susan Lowes, for incredible patience; and Enma Gold
158 Gayle Rubin ical defeat of women occurred at thc hands of an armed The Traffic in Women 159 patriarchal revolt, then it is time for Amazon guerrillas to this, see Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 11-69). Freud and Levi start training in the Adirondacks Strauss are in some sense analogous to Ricardo and Smith It lies outside the scope of this They see neither the implications of what they are sayi ained critique of some of the currently popular explanation of the genesis of se hor the implicit critique which their work can generate when eqtality-theories such as the pop lar evolution exemplified by The Imperial Animal, the alleged subjected to a feminist eye. Nevertheless, they provide con ceptual tools with which one can build descriptions of the overthrow of prehistoric matriarchies, or the attempt to e part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of tract all of the phenomena of social subordination from the women, of sexual minorities, and of certain aspects of human first volume of CapitaL. Instead, I want to sketch some ele ersonality within individuals. I call that part of social life ments of an alternate explanation of the problem the"sex/gender system, "for lack of a more elegant term. As a preliminary definition, a"sex/gender system"is the set of lack race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexual- He only becomes a slave in certain rela- tions. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cot- ity into products of human activity, and in which these trans- formed sexual needs are satisfied ton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from The purpose of this essay is to arrive at a more fully devel- lese relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is oped definition of the sex/gender system, by way of a some- money or sugar is the price of sugar"(Marx, 1971b: 28 ).One what idiosy ncratic and exegetical reading of Levi-Strauss and might paraphrase: What is a domesticated woman? A female Freud. I use the word"exegeTical"deliberately. The diction of the species. The one explanation is as good as the other. a ary defines"exegesis"as a"critical explanation or analysi woman is a woman. She only becomes a domestic, a wife, a especially, interpretation of the Scriptures. At times, my chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dicta- reading of Levi-Strauss and Freud is freely interpretive, mov- phone in certain relations. Torn from these relationships, sh ing from the explicit content of a text to its presuppositions is no more the helpmate of man than gold in itself is money and implications. My reading of certain psychoanalytic texts te,What then are these relationships by which a female is filTered through a lens provided by Jacques Lacan, whose becomes an oppressed woman? The place to begin to unravel own interpretation of the Freudian scripture has been heavil the system of relationships by which women become the prey of men is in the overlapping works of Claude Levi will return later to a refinement of the definition of a Strauss and Sigmund Freud. The domestication of women. sex/gender system. First, however, I will try to demonstrate under other names, is discussed at length in both of Lh oeuvres. In reading through these works, one begins to have a sense of a systematic social apparatus which takes up female a certain clash of episteme es. In particul as raw materials and fashions domesticated women as prod ucts. Neither Freud nor Levi-Strauss sees his work in this from which worms crawl out all over the epistemological map. Rather light, and certainly neither turns a critical glance processes he describes. Their analyses and descriptions must cestors of the contemporary French intellectual revolution(see F be read, therefore, in something like the way in which Marx ault, 1970). It would be fun, interesting, and, if this were fran read the sical political economists who preceded him(on essential, to start my argument from the center of the structuralist maze and work my way out from t along the lines of a"dialectical
160 Gayle Rubin The Traffic in Women 161 the need for such a concept by discussing the failure of classi and expansion of capital. Whereas other modes of production cal Marxism to fully express or conceptualize sex oppression This failure results from the fact that Marxism, as a theory of might find their purpose in making useful things to satisfy social life is relatively unconcerned witl human needs, or in producing a surplus for a ruling nobility. in Ma of the social world n beings are workers, peasants, or or in producing to insure sufficient sacrifice for the edifica Ism is a capitalists; that they are also men and women is not seen as set of social relations-forms of property, and so forth-in very significant. By contrast, in the maps of social reality which production takes the form of turning money, things drawn by Freud and Levi-Strauss, there is a deep recognition and people into capital. And capital is a quantity of goods or of the place of sexuality in society, and of the profound money which, when exchanged for labor, reproduces and differences between the social experience of men and augments itself by extracting unpaid labor, or surplus value from labor and into itself e result of the capitalist ass is neither Marx roduct(use-value) nor a commodily, that is, a use vaiue whis There is no theory which accounts for the oppression of has exchange value. Its resull, its product, is the creation of sur- women-in its endless variety and monotonous similarity. pius-value for capital, and consequently the actual transforma tion of money or commodily into capital.. (Marx, 1969: 399; cross-culturally and throughout history-with anything like in sion. Therefore, it is not surprising that there have been The exchange between capital and labor which produces sur- numerous attempts to apply marxist analysis to the question plus value, and hence capital, is highly specific. The worker of women. There are many ways of doing this. it has been gets a wage: the capitalist gets the things the worker has made argued that women are a reserve labor force for capitalism during his or her time of employ ment. If the total value of that women's generally lower wages provide extra surplus the things the worker has made exceeds the value of his or her wage the aim of capitalism has been achieved The capi talist consumerism in their roles as administrators of family talist gets back the cost of the wage, plus an increment consumption, and so forth surplus value. This can occur because the wage is determined However, a number of articles have tried to do somethi not by the value of what the laborer makes, but by the value ch more ambitious-to locate the oppression of women in of what it takes to keep him or her going-to reproduce h e heart of the capitalist dynamie by pointing to the rela- or her from day to day, and to reproduce the entire work tionship between housework and the reproduction of labor force from one generation to the next. Thus, surplus value is (see Benston, 1969; Dalla Costa, 1972; Larguia and the difference between what the laboring class produces as a Dumoulin,1972; Gerstein, 1973: Vogel, 1973; Secombe hole, and the amount of that total which is recycled into 1974: Gardiner, 1974: Rowntree, M.& J, 1970). To do this is to place women squarely in the definition of capita The capital given in exchange for labour power is converted into the process in which capital is produced by the extractie necessaries, by the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, urplus value from labor by capital es, and brains of existing labourers are reproduced, and new Bricfly, Marx argued that capitalism is distinguished from the individual consumption of the I other modes of production by its unique aim: the creation bourer, whether it proceed within the w op or outside it
The Traffic in Women 163 whether it be part of the process of production or not, forms therefore a faclor of the production and reproduction of capital by the capitalist. But to explain women's usefulness to capi machinery does. ..(Marx, 1972: 572) alism is one tiing. To argue that this usefulness explains the genesis of the oppression of women is quit Given the individual, the production of labour-power consists in precisely at this point that the analysis of capitalism ceases to is reproduction of hinself or his maintenance. For his nain explain very much about women and the oppression of nance he requires a given quantity of the means of sub- nce,.. Labour-power sets itsclf in action only by working Women are oppressed in societies which can by no stretch etc, is wasted, and these require to be restored..(Ibid.: 17 of the imagination be described as capitalist. In the Amazon valley and the New Guinea highlands, women are frequently a, The amount of the difference between the reproduction of kept in their place by gang rape when the ordinary mecha. or power and its products depends, therefore, on the d isms of masculine intimidation prove insufficient. "We tame Termination of what it takes to reproion on the basis of the ur women with the banana, "said one Mundurucu man Marx tends to make that determin (Murphy, 1959: 195). The ethnographic record quantity of commodities-food, clothing, housing, fuel with practices whose effect is to keep women "in their place which would be necessary to maintain the health, life, and nen's cults, secret initiations, arcane male knowledge, etc strength of a worker. But these commodities must be con- nd pre-capitalist, feudal Europe was hardly a society in sumed before they can be sustenance, and they are not imme- which there was no sexism. Capitalism has taken over, and diately in consumable form when they are purchased by Lhe wired, notions of male and female which predate it by age. Additional labor must be performed upon these things centuries. No analysis of the reproduction of labor power efore they can be turned into people. Food imust be cooked under capitalism can explain foot-binding, chastity belts, or clothes cleaned, beds made, wood chopped, etc. Housework any of the incredible array of Byzantine, fetishized indig is therefore a key element in the process of the reproduction ties, let alone the more ordinary ones, which ha of the laborer from whom surplus value is taken. Since it is inflicted upon women in various times and places. TI usually women who do housework, it has been observed that ysis of the reproduction of labor power does no it is through the reproduction of labor power that women are why it is usually women who do domestic work in the home, rticulated into the surplus value nexus which is the sine qua non of capitalism. It can be further argued that since no In this light it is interesting to return to Marxs discussion wage is paid for housework, the labor of women in the home of the reproduction of labor. What is neccssary to reproduce contributes to the ultimate quantity of surplus value realized he worker is determined in part by the biological needs of the human organism, in part by the physical conditions of work has cen the place in which it lives, and in part by cultural tradition tion of whether or not housework is "predutctiv is not ordinarily "productive"in Marx observed that beer is necessary for the reproduction of se of the term(I. Gough, 1972; Marx, 1969: 387-413) the English working class, and wine necessary for the French the number and extent of his (the worker'sI may not be productive, in the sense of directly producing surplus value: and capital, and yet be a crucial element in the production of modes of satisfying them, are themselues surplus value and capit the product of historical development, and depend therefore to a great extent on the degree of civilization of a country,more