The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex

The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex is an article regarding theories of the oppression of women originally published in 1975 by feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin.^[1] In the article, Rubin argued against the Marxist conceptions of women's oppression—specifically the concept of "patriarchy"—in favor of her own concept of the "sex/gender" system.^[2][3] It was by arguing that women's oppression could not be explained by capitalism alone as well as being an early article to stress the distinction between biological sex and gender that Rubin's work helped to develop women's and gender studies as independent fields.^[4] The framework of the article was also important in that it opened up the possibility of researching the change in meaning of this categories over historical time.^[5] Rubin used a combination of kinship theories from Lévi-Strauss, psycho-analytic theory from Freud, and critiques of structuralism by Lacan to make her case that it was at moments where women were exchanged (principally through marriage acts) that bodies were engendered and became women. Rubin's article has been republished numerous times since its debut in 1975, and it has remained a key piece of feminist anthropological theory and a foundational work in gender studies.^[6][7]