by Jonathan Campbell

Created on: June 27, 2008

In 1975 Gale Rubin coined the phrase "sex-gender system" in her essay entitled "The Traffic in Women." Still considered a revolutionary idea this system borrows from Marxist theory, as well as some of Levi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud's ideas. However I would like to focus on the relationship between her beliefs and the Marxist ideas that she incorporates in her essay. Rubin attempts to explain, through reason, her belief that a system has control over a society's sex-gender relations. She believes that this system is apparent in every society, although it may appear to differ from one to the next. The system works to consign women to a secondary position in human relations.

Rubin calls the sex-gender system "a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention and satisfied in a conventional manner, no matter how bizarre some of those conventions may be" (32). In the same essay she explains that the system in mind could have been called a number of different titles, but that the one she chose was most adequate. Other possible names that she mentions are "mode of reproduction", which she considers to take away from the richness of both systems, and also "patriarchy", which she says, "obscures other distinctionsanalogous to using capitalism to refer to all modes of production" (33).
Marx's theory of capitalism was applied in order to better understand this idea of systematic control. Rubin believes that women contribute to the quantity of surplus value that any one capitalist society realizes. She says that they accomplish this through housework. This idea can be explained through the fact that housework is an unpaid and generally under-appreciated task. Women who perform such work are providing food and shelter for those who can then contribute to society through production and consumerism. Rubin reiterates a Marxist belief that in order to maintain a worker's ability to produce commodities for society, that worker must also consume certain commodities, food, health and clothing among others which must be first be prepared. This preparation is then dependant on the role of women in the home as "houseworkers." Through this example she justifies her claim that women indirectly contribute to a capitalist society and that their contribution is equally as important as any physical laborer on an actual payroll.
However as a result of the sex-gender system women are not only understood as an essential part of society but as the inevitable "homemaker." She remarks that "to explain women's usefulness to capitalism is one thing. To argue that this usefulness explains the genesis of the oppression of women is quite another" (30). For Rubin this is where Marxism fails to explain said oppression and becomes much less useful for her studies.
As can be seen today and around the world the effects of the sex-gender system are still very obvious. Men, on average, are still paid more than women with equal or surpassing ability. The news is littered with stories of abuse and rape that are usually targeted against women. Although, as Rubin states in her essay: "(it) is not immutably oppressive and has lost much of its traditional function. Nevertheless, it will not wither away in the absence of opposition (54). With this she calls for women, as well as any other historically oppressed group, to take a stand. The controlling powers behind the sex-gender system may never be completely quelled, but through her words I believe that Gayle Rubin has attempted to inform and also warn the world of the dangers of its perversion.

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