Rubinnnn

Thank you Gayle Rubin, thank you for writing stuff I can actually understand, wooo! Rubin starts off by expressing her opinion on women’s oppression. She states that other theorists have pushed this concept aside and left it to be overlooked. The term “sex/gender system” then takes shape. On 1665 she describes this as “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.” From this concept, we get the ideas of Marx, Engels and Levi-Strauss. Marx argues that “women are a reserve labor force for capitalism, that women’s generally lower wages provide extra surplus to a capitalist’s employer, that women serve the ends of capitalist consumerism in their roles as administrators of family consumption, and so forth.” (1665) This relates to the idea of wages. A worker provides labor and receives wages in return which is brought up on 1666. In this same page, there was an area that I was a little confused on. “Addition labor must be performed upon these things before they can be turned into people.” wait wait, is this saying, products eventually turn into people? hmmm, I’m lost. The whole idea of kinship kind of threw me off a little. As I read it, I understood it but at the same time I didn’t take much away from it. I found it interesting how women were seen as a “gift”. Although I don’t generally agree with this, I thought it was interesting how it was expressed here. Another thing I don’t really agree with is the idea of obviously women being of a lower status being compared to men but it’s stated that women are basically missing something if they don’t have men in their life (well, that’s what I got from it). It says that women aren’t “whole” without men, huh? Maybe it’s just because I’m a female, but I’m sure a lot of other people will agree, to me, it just doesn’t make very much sense.

All in all, I thought this was easy to read and was written well which helped me understand it. I guess kinship is my biggest question here, just because I didn’t grasp a full definition of the concept and found it hard to follow.  Also I had a little question on the statement “we tame our women with the banana”?  haha whhhaattt?  I thought this was pretty interesting and I liked how it had a lot of the theorists’ ideas throughout the piece.

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