Gayle Rubin

Gayle Rubin is an American cultural anthropologist, theorist and activist, born in South Carolina in 1949, and an associate professor of anthropology and women's studies at the University of Michigan. Her 1975 essay The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex introduced the concept of the sex and gender system, the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into the products of human activity, and argued that gender oppression could not be adequately explained by Marxist accounts of patriarchy alone; the essay became highly influential in second-wave feminism. Her 1984 essay Thinking Sex, which introduced the charmed circle model of how societies rank sexual behaviors as good or bad, is regarded as a founding text of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory.