Music

Hello and welcome back to the new Discourses Podcasts.

We're doing a little series to read through Gail Rubens' 1984 essay called

Thinking Sex. Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality.

The reason we're reading through this is because it's the first queer theory paper.

So we've spent a lot of time talking about critical race theory. Everybody now is very aware of

so-called gender ideology, trans ideology, trans genderism has lots of names.

I like gender Marxism and queer Marxism, frankly. Some of us are becoming familiar and comfortable

with the words queer theory. And so it's good to look at the roots. And so in the previous

episode of the podcast and in the series, we read the first a little more than a third of this essay.

And we saw the roots of queer theory. The roots of queer theory include Gail Rubens giving

kind of peculiar defenses for things like child pornography. It's an odd thing to defend.

Communism. Yet another odd thing to defend in a paper about a radical politics of sexuality.

Man boy love or she calls it cross generational encounters, which we also uncovered is very clearly,

by the way, that she says that people treat them is very clearly a euphemism for pedophilia.

Because even where you have like a Hugh Hefner character with his 20-year-old bunnies as in his 80s,

you don't get the level of revulsion that she indicates. And certainly not where you would have

like a 40 or a 50-year-old cross generationally meeting up with a 20-something. People might think it's

inappropriate. People might even think it's a gross. But what you don't have is the kind of reaction

that she describes, which involves words like horror. I'll see if I can find that again very quickly

where she says that. It's trying to scroll up. Unmodulated horrors, incapable of involving

affection, love, free choice, kindness, or transcendence. Nobody believes that there is a 24-year-old

...