Gayle Rubin Quotes

Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant "existing things" does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like “woman,” “butch,” “lesbian,” or “transsexual” are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism.

Queerness may be at its most visible when it defines romantic love, but it is also inscribed in our broader communities. Friendship is resistance to Gayle Rubin’s traffic in women and the very structures that built this system of traffic.

The American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, for instance – a key figure in the academic discipline of Queer Theory, which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s – would, I imagine, be unbothered by the chicken scenario, just as she is unbothered by unusual sexual behaviour in general.