Gayle Rubin

Gayle S. Rubin
Gayle Rubin speaking at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco, June 7, 2012.
Born	1949 (age 67–68)
Awards	Association for Queer Anthropology Ruth Benedict Book Prize (2012)
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Michigan
Thesis title	The Valley of the Kings: Leathermen in San Francisco, 1960–1990
Thesis year	1994
Academic work
Discipline	Cultural anthropology
Institutions	University of Michigan

Gayle S. Rubin (born 1949) is an American cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and theorist of sex and gender politics. She has written on a range of subjects including feminism, sadomasochism, prostitution, pedophilia, pornography and lesbian literature, as well as anthropological studies and histories of sexual subcultures, especially focused in urban contexts. She is an associate professor of anthropology, women's studies, and comparative literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

In 1968 Gayle Rubin was part of an early feminist consciousness raising group active on the campus of the University of Michigan and also wrote on feminist topics for women's movement papers and the Ann Arbor Argus. In 1970 she helped found Ann Arbor Radicalesbians, an early Lesbian Feminist group.

Rubin first rose to recognition through her 1975 essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex", in which she attempted to discover historical social mechanisms by which gender and compulsory heterosexuality are produced, and women are consigned to a secondary position in human relations. The paper's argument that there is a difference between gender and sex has become central to women's studies.

In 1978 Rubin moved to San Francisco to begin studies of the gay male leather subculture, seeking to examine a minority sexual practice neither from a clinical perspective nor through the lens of individual psychology but rather as an anthropologist studying a contemporary community. On June 13 of that year, Rubin, together with Patrick Califia and sixteen others, founded the first known lesbian SM group, Samois. The group disbanded in May 1983, and in 1984 Rubin was involved in founding a new organization, "The Outcasts". Rubin became a prominent "pro-sex activist" in the feminist sex wars of the late 1970s and 1980s, delivering a now-classic paper at the volatile 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality in New York City.