No Sex Please, We're American

Abstract

There is an open secret about sex: most queer theorists don't like it. Three decades after anthropologist Gayle Rubin inaugurated what would become known as Queer studies by announcing “[t]he time has come to think about sex,” the field remains deeply conflicted about its object of study (267). Not just a question of methodological differences and debates (one expects nothing less in an interdisciplinary field), this issue concerns fundamental disagreements over what the basic object of research in Queer studies is or should be. Rubin's aim in 1984 had been to develop a conceptual framework for thinking critically about erotic practice, without assuming heterosexuality as the paradigm and without relying on the often heterosexualizing lens of feminist analysis. “I want to challenge the assumption that feminism is or should be the privileged site of a theory of sexuality,” she argued. “Feminism is the theory of gender oppression. To automatically assume that this makes it the theory of sexual oppression is to fail to distinguish between gender, on the one hand, and erotic desire, on the other” (307). Coming out of lesbian feminism, with its intensely polarizing debates around pornography and sadomasochism, Rubin yearned for a critical discourse capable of approaching human sexuality, in all its variation, with the customary prejudices and moralisms set aside. Her gambit of differentiating sex and sexuality from wholesale determination by the categories of gender—albeit still controversial among feminists—was a field-defining gesture that retrospectively conferred upon “Thinking Sex” the status of urtext.

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