The Queer Subversion of Feminism: Gayle Rubin's "Thinking Sex" Part 3

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4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2022

⏱️ 109 minutes

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 81 Thinking Sex Series, Part 3 of 3 In the previous two episodes of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay reads through the first two thirds of Gayle Rubin's shocking 1984 essay, "Thinking Sex" (https://sites.middlebury.edu/sexandsociety/files/2015/01/Rubin-Thinking-Sex.pdf), widely regarded as the first essay in Queer Theory. In it, as Rubin's subtitle indicates, "Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," she takes feminism (especially sex-negative radical feminism) to task for being insufficiently radical as a politics of sexuality. In fact, she accuses it (not entirely wrongly) of being resoundingly conservative with regard to sex and sexuality. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James walks you through this most tedious portion of the essay where the seeds of subverting feminism itself are planted. Within just a couple of decades from this point, the Queer Marxist movement will have used Rubin's call for a "radical theory of the politics of sexuality" to completely undermine the women's movement and basically kill it and the category of "woman" itself. Join him to understand how it started. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses https://newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses © 2022 New Discourses. All rights reserved. Image usage: Gerard Koskovich, CC BY 3.0 [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gayle_Rubin.jpg], via Wikimedia Commons

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello again and welcome back to the new Discourses Podcast.
0:23.8	This is James Lindsay.
0:26.0	As you might recall, we are working our way through the first
0:29.9	queer theory paper thinking sex notes for a radical theory of the politics of
0:35.5	sexuality by Gail Rubin. This was a paper written in 1984.
0:41.6	We're now on the third part of this series. We've already kind of covered, in my
0:44.8	opinion, the interesting parts of this paper where we see what queer
0:47.8	theories really about. I don't want to spend a lot of time summarizing this. I
0:51.8	kind of just want to rip through it. To be honest with you, we've already spent a
0:54.4	lot of time talking about Gail Rubin in this stupid paper. But to kind of
0:59.2	summarize, queer theory, Gail Rubin has framed out, is a, like she says, a
1:05.2	radical approach to the politics of sexuality. In fact, I say that it's queer
1:11.1	Marxism. It is, I should emphasize that otherwise, queer Marxism. It is using
1:16.4	the idea of normalcy, as we heard very, very clearly in the previous two episodes,
1:20.6	but especially the last one on this paper. It is using the idea of normalcy,
1:25.2	like a form of bourgeois private property that keeping with the communist
1:29.4	manifesto, which is also known as the communist confession of faith, must be
1:34.9	abolished. And so queer theory takes aim at abolishing the normal. We heard that
1:40.5	explicitly from a queer theorist in 2016, at the beginning of the last
1:45.2	episode. So it's not that I'm making this up. It's not that I'm even inferring
1:49.0	it from what's obviously in their writing. It's that their goal is to abolish
1:54.9	normal. We hear, we heard that the primary tool by which they do that is
	...

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