Gayle Rubin ,.Ay A The Traffic in Women: 6F UDomen (New York Notes on the“Political Economy"of Sex Prs,>pp157-309 The literature on women-both feminist and anti-feminist-is a long rumination on the question of the nature and genesis 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 not it is realistic to hope for a sexually egalitarian society.More importantly,the analysis of the causes of women's 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 offending sex,or else a eugenics project to modify its character.If sexism is a by-product of capitalism's relentless appetite for profit,then sexism would wither away in the advent of a successful socialist revolution.If the world histor- Acknowledgments are an inadequate expression of how much this pa- per,like most,is the product of many minds.They are also necessary to free others of the responsibility for what is ultimately a personal vision of a collective conversation.I want to free and thank the following 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 White,Norma Diamond,Randy Reiter,Frederick Wyatt,Anne Locksley,Juliet Mitchell,and Susan Harding,for countless conversations and ideas:Marshall Sahlins,for the revelation of anthro. pology:Lynn Eden,for sardonic editing:the members of Women's Studies 340/004.for my initiation into teaching:Sally Brenner,for heroic typing:Susan Iowes,for incredible patience:and Emma Giold. man,for the title. 157
158 Gayle Rubin ical defeat of.women loccurred at'the hands of an armed this,see Althusser and Balibar,1970:11-69):Freud and Levi- patriarchalrevoll,thenit is time for Amazon gueras to Strauss are in some sense analogous to Ricardo and Smith: start training in the Adirondacks. They.see neither the implications of what they are saying, tliesoutside the scope of this paper to conductasus .nor the implicit critique which their work can generate when tained critique of some of the currently popular explanations subjected to a feminist eye Nevertheless,they provide con- of the genesis of sexual inequality-theories such as the popu- ceptual tools with which one can build descriptions of the lar evolution exemplified by The Imperial Animal,the alleged part of social life whieh is the.locus of the oppression of overthrow of prehistorie matriarchies,or the attempt to ex- women,of sexual minorities;and of certain aspects of human tract all of the phenomena of social subordination from the personality within individuals.I call that part of social life first volume of Capital.Instead,I want to sketch some ele- the "sex/gender system,"for lack of a more elegant term.As ments of an alternate explanation of the problem. a preliminary definition,a "sex/gender system"is the set of Marx once asked:"What is a Negro slave?A man of the arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexual- black race.The one explanation is as good as the other.A ity into products of human activity,and in which these trans- Negro is a Negro.He only becomes a slave in certain rela- formed sexual needs are satisfied. tions.A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cot. .The purpose of this essay is to arrive at a more fully devel- ton.It becomes capital only in certain relations.Torn from oped definition of the sex/gender system,by way of a some- these relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is what idiosyncratic and exegetical reading of Levi-Strauss and money or sugar is the price of sugar"'(Marx,1971b:28).One Freud.I use the word "exegetical"deliberately.The diction- might paraphrase:What is a domesticated woman?A female ary defines"exegesis"as a"critical explanation or analysis; of the species.The one explanation is as good as the other.A especially,interpretation of the Scriptures."At times,my woman is a 'woman.She only becomes a domestic,a wife,a reading of Levi-Strauss and Freud is freely interpretive,mov- chattel,a playboy bunny,a prostitute,or a human dicta- ing from the explicit content of a.text to its presuppositions phone in certain relations.Tom from these relationships she and implications.My reading of certain psychoanalytic texts is no more the helpmate of man than gold in itself is money is filtered through a lens provided by Jacques Lacan,whose ..etc.What;then,are these relationships by which a female own interpretation of the Freudian scripture has been heavily becomes an oppressed woman?The place to begin to unravel influenced by Levi-Strauss. the;system ofrelationships by which women become the I will return later to a refinement of the definition of a prey of men is in the overlapping works of Claude Levi sex/gender system.Firsthowever,I will try to demonstrate Strauss and Sigmund Freud.The domestication ofwomen under other"names,is discussedat length in both'of their oeuures.Inreading through these works,one begins to have a Moving between Marxism,structuralism;and psychoanalysis produces a certain clash of epistemologies:In particular,structuralism is a.can sense of a systematic social apparatus which takes up females. from which worms crawl out all over the epistemological map.Rather as raw materals and fashions domesticated women as prod- than trying to cope with this problem,I have more or less ignored the ucts.Neither"Freud nor Levi-Strauss sees his work in this fact that Lacan and Levi-Sirauss.are among the foremost living an- light,and certainly neither turns a critical glance upon the cestors of the contemporary French intellectual revolution (see.Fou processes he describes.Their analyses and descriptions must cault,1970).It would be fun,interesting,and,if this were France, be read,therefore,in something like the way,in which Marx essential,to start myargument from.the center of the structuralist maze and work.my way out from there,along the lines of a"dialectical read the classical political economists who preceded him (on theory of signifying practices"(see Hefner,1974)
60 The Fraffic in Women 16 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 unconcemed with sex.In Marx's map human needs,or in producing a surplus for a ruling nobility, orin producing to insure sufficient sacrifice for the edifica: of the social world,human beings are workers,peasants,or tion of the gods,capitalism produces capital.Capitalism 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 4 augments itself by extracting unpaid labor,or surplus value, women. from labor and into itself. .The result of the capitalist production process is neither a mere Marx product (use-value)nor a commodity,that is,a use-value which has exchange value.Its result,its product,is the creation of sur. There is no theory which accounts for the oppression of women-in'its endless variety and monotonous similarity, plus-value for capital,and consequently the actual transforma- tion of money or commodity into capital...."(Marx,1969:399; cross-culturally and throughout history-with anything like italics in the original) the explanatory power of the Marxist theory of class oppres- 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 employment.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 to a capitalist.employer,that women serve the ends of capi- 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 something not by the value of what the laborer makes,but by the value much more ambitious-to locate the oppression of women in of what it takes to keep himor her going-to reproduce him the heart of the capitalist dynamic 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, whole,and the amount of.that total which is recycled into 1974;Gardiner,1974;Rowntree,M.J.,1970).To do this maintaining the laboring class. is to place women squarely in the definition of capitalism, The capital given in exchange for labour power is converted into the process in which capital is produced by the extraction of necessaries,by the consumption of which the muscles,nerves, surplus value from labor by capital. bones,and brains of existing labourers are reproduced,and new. Briefly,Marx argued.that capitalism is distinguished from labourers are begottenthe,individual consumptionof the all other modes of production by its unique aim:the creation labourer,whether it proceed within the workshop or outsideit
2 Gayle Rubin The Traffic in Women 163 1 whetherit be part of the process of production or not,forms by the capitalist.But to explain women's usefulness to capi- therefore afactor of the production and reproduction of capital; talism is one thing.To argue that this usefulness explains the just as cleaning machinery does....(Marx,1972:572) genesis of the oppression of women is quite.another.It is Given the individual,the production of labour-power consists in precisely at this point that the analysis of capitalism ceases to his reproduction of himself or his maintenance.For his main. explainvery much about women and the oppression of tenance herequires a given quantity of the means of sub. women. sistence..Labour-power sets itself in action only by working. Women are oppressed in societies which can by no stretch But thereby a definite quantity of human muscle,brain,nerve, of the imagination be described as capitalistIn the Amazon etc.,is wasted;and these require to be restored.(Ibid.:171) valley and the New Guinea highlands,women are frequently of the ifferenb kept in their.place by gang rape when the ordinary mecha. bor powerandits products depends,thereforeon the de nisms of masculine intimidation prove insufficient."We tame 4× our womenwiththe banana,said one Mundurucu man termination of what it takes to reproduce that labor power. Marx tends to make that determination on the basis of the (Murphy 1959195)Theethnographicrecord is littered 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 men's cults,secret initiations,arcane male knowledge,etc. 警 And pre-capitalist,feudal Europe was hardly asociety in which there was no sexismCapitalism has taken over,and diately in consumable form when they are purchased by the rewired,notions of male and female which predate it by wage.Additional labor must be performed upon these things centuries.No analysis of the reproduction of labor power before they cam be tumed into people.Food must 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 nities,.let alone the more,ordinary ones,which have been is therefore a key element in the process of the reproduction of the laborer from whom surplus value is taken.Since it is inflicted upon women in various times and places.The anal- usually women who do housework,it has been observed that ysis of the reproduction of labor power does not even explain why it is usually women who do domestic work in the home, it is through the reproduction of labor power that women are rather than men. articulated into the surplus value nexus which is the sine qua In this light it is interesting to return to Marx's discussion non of capitalism.*It.can be further argued.that since no of the reproduction of labor:What is necessary to reproduce wage is paid for housework,the labor of women in the home the worker is determined in part by the biological needs of contributes to the.ultimate quantity of surplus value realized the human organism,in part by the physical conditions of *A lot of the'debate on women and housework has centered around the place in which it lives,and in part by cultural tradition. the question of whether or not housework is "productive"labor. Marx observed that beer is necessary for the reproduction of Strictly.speaking,housework is not ordinarily"productive"in the tech- the English working class,and wine necessary for the French. nical sense of:the term(I.Gough,1972;Marx,1969:387-413).But this distinction is irrelevant to the main line of the argument.Housework ..the number and extent of his the worker's/so-called neces may not be "productive,"in the sense of directly producing surplus sary wants,as also the modes of satisfying them,are themselves value and capital,and yet be a crucial element in the production of the product of historical development,and depend therefore to a surplus value and capital. great extent on the degree of civilization of.a country,more
Gayle Rubin 光： particularlyon the conditions under which,and consequently on duction of immediate life.This again,is of a twofold character: thehabits and degree of comfort in which,the class of free on the one hand,the production of the means of existerice,of labourers has been formed.In contradistinction therefore to the food,clothing,and sheltersand the tools necessary for that pro- case fother commodities,there enters into the determination of duction;on the other side the production of himan beings them- theoalue of labour-power a historical,and moral element. selves,the propagation of the species The social organization (Max 1972:171,my italics) under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined byboth kinds of pro- Itis precisely this "historical.and moral element"which duction:by the stage of development of labor on the one hand, determines that a"wife"is among the necessities of a and of the family on thetother..:(Engels,:1972:71-72;my workerthat women rather than men do housework,and that italics) capitalism is heir to a long tradition in which women do not inherit,in which women do not lead,and in which women do This passage indicates"an important recognition-.that a not:talksto god:It is:this "historical and moral element" human group must do more than apply its activity to reshap- which presented capitalism with a cultural heritage of forms ing the natural world in torder to:clothe,feed,and warm of masculinity and femininity.It is within this"historical and itself.We usually call the system by which.elements of the H moral,element"that the entire domain of sex,sexuality,and natural.world are transformed into objects of human con- sexoppression is subsumed.And the briefness of Marx'scom- sumption the "economyBut the needs which are satisfied ment only serves.to emphasize the vast area of social life by economic activity even in the richest,Marxian sense,do whichsit covers and leaves unexamined.Only by subjecting not exhaust fundamentalhuman.requirements.A human this"historical and moral element?to analysis can the struc- group must also reproduce itself from generation to genera- ture of sex oppression be delineated. tion:The needs of sexuality and procreation must be satisfied as:much as the need to eat,and one of the most obvious deductions which:can be made from the data of anthro- Engels pology is that these needs are hardly ever satisfied in any In The Origin of the Family,Private Property,and the naturalform,any more than are the needs for food. .State,Engels sees sex oppression as part of capitalism's heri Hunger is hunger,but what counts as food is culturally deter- tage from prior social forms.Moreover,Engels integrates sex mined and obtained.Every society has some form of organ- and sexuality into his theory of society.Origin is a frustrating ized economic activity.Sex is sex,but what counts as sex is book.Like the nineteenth-century tomes.on the history of equally culturally.determined and obtained.Every society marriage and the family which it echoes,the state of the also has a sex/gender system a set of arrangements by which evidence in Origin renders it quaint to a reader familiar with the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is more recent developments in anthropology.Nevertheless,it is shaped by human,social intervention and satisfied in a con- a book whose considerable insight should not be over- ventional manner,no matter how bizarre some of the conven- shadowed'by its limitations.The idea that the "relations of tions may be. sexuality"can and should be distinguished from the "rela. tions of production"is not the least of Engels'intuitions: That some of them are pretty bizarre,from our point of view,only demonstrates the point that sexuality is expressed through the inter. According.to the materialistic conception,the determining fac- vention of culture (see Ford and Beach;1972).Some examples may be tor in history is,in the final instance,the production and repro- chosen from among the exotica in which anthropologists delight