Gayle Rubin ,.Ay A The Traffic in Women: 6F UDomen (New York Notes on the“Political Economy"of Sex Prs,>pp157-309 The literature on women-both feminist and anti-feminist-is a long rumination on the question of the nature and genesis of women's oppression and social subordination.The ques- tion is not a trivial one,since the answers given it determine our visions of the future,and our evaluation of whether or not it is realistic to hope for a sexually egalitarian society.More importantly,the analysis of the causes of women's oppression forms the basis for any assessment of just what would have to be changed in order to achieve a society without gender hierarchy.Thus,if innate male aggression and dominance are at the root of female oppression,then the feminist program would logically require either the extermination of the offending sex,or else a eugenics project to modify its character.If sexism is a by-product of capitalism's relentless appetite for profit,then sexism would wither away in the advent of a successful socialist revolution.If the world histor- Acknowledgments are an inadequate expression of how much this pa- per,like most,is the product of many minds.They are also necessary to free others of the responsibility for what is ultimately a personal vision of a collective conversation.I want to free and thank the following persons:Tom Anderson and Arlene Gorelick,with whom I co-authored the paper from which this one evolved:Rayna Reiter,Larry Shields. Ray Kelly,Peggy White,Norma Diamond,Randy Reiter,Frederick Wyatt,Anne Locksley,Juliet Mitchell,and Susan Harding,for countless conversations and ideas:Marshall Sahlins,for the revelation of anthro. pology:Lynn Eden,for sardonic editing:the members of Women's Studies 340/004.for my initiation into teaching:Sally Brenner,for heroic typing:Susan Iowes,for incredible patience:and Emma Giold. man,for the title. 157
158 Gayle Rubin ical defeat of.women loccurred at'the hands of an armed this,see Althusser and Balibar,1970:11-69):Freud and Levi- patriarchalrevoll,thenit is time for Amazon gueras to Strauss are in some sense analogous to Ricardo and Smith: start training in the Adirondacks. They.see neither the implications of what they are saying, tliesoutside the scope of this paper to conductasus .nor the implicit critique which their work can generate when tained critique of some of the currently popular explanations subjected to a feminist eye Nevertheless,they provide con- of the genesis of sexual inequality-theories such as the popu- ceptual tools with which one can build descriptions of the lar evolution exemplified by The Imperial Animal,the alleged part of social life whieh is the.locus of the oppression of overthrow of prehistorie matriarchies,or the attempt to ex- women,of sexual minorities;and of certain aspects of human tract all of the phenomena of social subordination from the personality within individuals.I call that part of social life first volume of Capital.Instead,I want to sketch some ele- the "sex/gender system,"for lack of a more elegant term.As ments of an alternate explanation of the problem. a preliminary definition,a "sex/gender system"is the set of Marx once asked:"What is a Negro slave?A man of the arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexual- black race.The one explanation is as good as the other.A ity into products of human activity,and in which these trans- Negro is a Negro.He only becomes a slave in certain rela- formed sexual needs are satisfied. tions.A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cot. .The purpose of this essay is to arrive at a more fully devel- ton.It becomes capital only in certain relations.Torn from oped definition of the sex/gender system,by way of a some- these relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is what idiosyncratic and exegetical reading of Levi-Strauss and money or sugar is the price of sugar"'(Marx,1971b:28).One Freud.I use the word "exegetical"deliberately.The diction- might paraphrase:What is a domesticated woman?A female ary defines"exegesis"as a"critical explanation or analysis; of the species.The one explanation is as good as the other.A especially,interpretation of the Scriptures."At times,my woman is a 'woman.She only becomes a domestic,a wife,a reading of Levi-Strauss and Freud is freely interpretive,mov- chattel,a playboy bunny,a prostitute,or a human dicta- ing from the explicit content of a.text to its presuppositions phone in certain relations.Tom from these relationships she and implications.My reading of certain psychoanalytic texts is no more the helpmate of man than gold in itself is money is filtered through a lens provided by Jacques Lacan,whose ..etc.What;then,are these relationships by which a female own interpretation of the Freudian scripture has been heavily becomes an oppressed woman?The place to begin to unravel influenced by Levi-Strauss. the;system ofrelationships by which women become the I will return later to a refinement of the definition of a prey of men is in the overlapping works of Claude Levi sex/gender system.Firsthowever,I will try to demonstrate Strauss and Sigmund Freud.The domestication ofwomen under other"names,is discussedat length in both'of their oeuures.Inreading through these works,one begins to have a Moving between Marxism,structuralism;and psychoanalysis produces a certain clash of epistemologies:In particular,structuralism is a.can sense of a systematic social apparatus which takes up females. from which worms crawl out all over the epistemological map.Rather as raw materals and fashions domesticated women as prod- than trying to cope with this problem,I have more or less ignored the ucts.Neither"Freud nor Levi-Strauss sees his work in this fact that Lacan and Levi-Sirauss.are among the foremost living an- light,and certainly neither turns a critical glance upon the cestors of the contemporary French intellectual revolution (see.Fou processes he describes.Their analyses and descriptions must cault,1970).It would be fun,interesting,and,if this were France, be read,therefore,in something like the way,in which Marx essential,to start myargument from.the center of the structuralist maze and work.my way out from there,along the lines of a"dialectical read the classical political economists who preceded him (on theory of signifying practices"(see Hefner,1974)
60 The Fraffic in Women 16 need for such a concept by discussing the failure of classi- and expansion of capital Whereas other modes of production cal Marxism to fully express or conceptualize sex oppression. .This failure results from the fact that Marxism,as a theory of might find their purpose in making useful things to satisfy social life,is relatively unconcemed with sex.In Marx's map human needs,or in producing a surplus for a ruling nobility, orin producing to insure sufficient sacrifice for the edifica: of the social world,human beings are workers,peasants,or tion of the gods,capitalism produces capital.Capitalism is a capitalists,that they are also men and women is not seen as set of social relations forms of property,and so forth in very significant.By contrast,in the maps of social reality which production takes the form of turning money,things, drawn by Freud and Levi-Strauss,there is a deep recognition and people into capital.And capital is a quantity of goods or of the place of sexuality in society,and of the profound money which,when exchanged for labor,reproduces and differences:between.the social experience of men'and 4 augments itself by extracting unpaid labor,or surplus value, women. from labor and into itself. .The result of the capitalist production process is neither a mere Marx product (use-value)nor a commodity,that is,a use-value which has exchange value.Its result,its product,is the creation of sur. There is no theory which accounts for the oppression of women-in'its endless variety and monotonous similarity, plus-value for capital,and consequently the actual transforma- tion of money or commodity into capital...."(Marx,1969:399; cross-culturally and throughout history-with anything like italics in the original) the explanatory power of the Marxist theory of class oppres- sion.Therefore,it is not surprising that there have been The exchange between capital and labor which produces sur- numerous attempts to apply Marxist analysis to the question plus value,and hence capital,is highly.specific.The worker of women.:There are many ways of doing this.It has been gets a wage;the capitalist gets the things the worker has made argued that women are a reserve labor force for capitalism, during his or her time of employment.If the total value of that women's generally lower wages provide extra surplus the.things the worker has made exceeds the value of his or to a capitalist.employer,that women serve the ends of capi- her wage,the aim of capitalism has been achieved.The capi- talist consumerism in their roles as administrators of family talist gets back the cost of the wage,plus an increment- consumption,'and so forth. surplus value.This can occur because the wage is determined However,a number of articles have tried to do something not by the value of what the laborer makes,but by the value much more ambitious-to locate the oppression of women in of what it takes to keep himor her going-to reproduce him the heart of the capitalist dynamic by pointing to the rela- or her from day to day,and to reproduce the entire work tionship between housework and the reproduction of labor force from one generation to the next.Thus,surplus value is (see Benston,1969;Dalla Costa,1972;Larguia and the difference between what the laboring class produces as a Dumoulin,1972;Gerstein,1973;Vogel,1973;Secombe, whole,and the amount of.that total which is recycled into 1974;Gardiner,1974;Rowntree,M.J.,1970).To do this maintaining the laboring class. is to place women squarely in the definition of capitalism, The capital given in exchange for labour power is converted into the process in which capital is produced by the extraction of necessaries,by the consumption of which the muscles,nerves, surplus value from labor by capital. bones,and brains of existing labourers are reproduced,and new. Briefly,Marx argued.that capitalism is distinguished from labourers are begottenthe,individual consumptionof the all other modes of production by its unique aim:the creation labourer,whether it proceed within the workshop or outsideit
2 Gayle Rubin The Traffic in Women 163 1 whetherit be part of the process of production or not,forms by the capitalist.But to explain women's usefulness to capi- therefore afactor of the production and reproduction of capital; talism is one thing.To argue that this usefulness explains the just as cleaning machinery does....(Marx,1972:572) genesis of the oppression of women is quite.another.It is Given the individual,the production of labour-power consists in precisely at this point that the analysis of capitalism ceases to his reproduction of himself or his maintenance.For his main. explainvery much about women and the oppression of tenance herequires a given quantity of the means of sub. women. sistence..Labour-power sets itself in action only by working. Women are oppressed in societies which can by no stretch But thereby a definite quantity of human muscle,brain,nerve, of the imagination be described as capitalistIn the Amazon etc.,is wasted;and these require to be restored.(Ibid.:171) valley and the New Guinea highlands,women are frequently of the ifferenb kept in their.place by gang rape when the ordinary mecha. bor powerandits products depends,thereforeon the de nisms of masculine intimidation prove insufficient."We tame 4× our womenwiththe banana,said one Mundurucu man termination of what it takes to reproduce that labor power. Marx tends to make that determination on the basis of the (Murphy 1959195)Theethnographicrecord is littered quantity of commodities food,clothing,housing.fuel- with practices whose effect is to keep women"in their place" which would be necessary to maintain the health,life,and men's cults,secret initiations,arcane male knowledge,etc. 警 And pre-capitalist,feudal Europe was hardly asociety in which there was no sexismCapitalism has taken over,and diately in consumable form when they are purchased by the rewired,notions of male and female which predate it by wage.Additional labor must be performed upon these things centuries.No analysis of the reproduction of labor power before they cam be tumed into people.Food must be cooked, under capitalism can explain foot binding.chastity belts or clothes cleaned,beds made,wood chopped,etc..Housework any of the incredible array of Byzantine,fetishized indig nities,.let alone the more,ordinary ones,which have been is therefore a key element in the process of the reproduction of the laborer from whom surplus value is taken.Since it is inflicted upon women in various times and places.The anal- usually women who do housework,it has been observed that ysis of the reproduction of labor power does not even explain why it is usually women who do domestic work in the home, it is through the reproduction of labor power that women are rather than men. articulated into the surplus value nexus which is the sine qua In this light it is interesting to return to Marx's discussion non of capitalism.*It.can be further argued.that since no of the reproduction of labor:What is necessary to reproduce wage is paid for housework,the labor of women in the home the worker is determined in part by the biological needs of contributes to the.ultimate quantity of surplus value realized the human organism,in part by the physical conditions of *A lot of the'debate on women and housework has centered around the place in which it lives,and in part by cultural tradition. the question of whether or not housework is "productive"labor. Marx observed that beer is necessary for the reproduction of Strictly.speaking,housework is not ordinarily"productive"in the tech- the English working class,and wine necessary for the French. nical sense of:the term(I.Gough,1972;Marx,1969:387-413).But this distinction is irrelevant to the main line of the argument.Housework ..the number and extent of his the worker's/so-called neces may not be "productive,"in the sense of directly producing surplus sary wants,as also the modes of satisfying them,are themselves value and capital,and yet be a crucial element in the production of the product of historical development,and depend therefore to a surplus value and capital. great extent on the degree of civilization of.a country,more
Gayle Rubin 光： particularlyon the conditions under which,and consequently on duction of immediate life.This again,is of a twofold character: thehabits and degree of comfort in which,the class of free on the one hand,the production of the means of existerice,of labourers has been formed.In contradistinction therefore to the food,clothing,and sheltersand the tools necessary for that pro- case fother commodities,there enters into the determination of duction;on the other side the production of himan beings them- theoalue of labour-power a historical,and moral element. selves,the propagation of the species The social organization (Max 1972:171,my italics) under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined byboth kinds of pro- Itis precisely this "historical.and moral element"which duction:by the stage of development of labor on the one hand, determines that a"wife"is among the necessities of a and of the family on thetother..:(Engels,:1972:71-72;my workerthat women rather than men do housework,and that italics) capitalism is heir to a long tradition in which women do not inherit,in which women do not lead,and in which women do This passage indicates"an important recognition-.that a not:talksto god:It is:this "historical and moral element" human group must do more than apply its activity to reshap- which presented capitalism with a cultural heritage of forms ing the natural world in torder to:clothe,feed,and warm of masculinity and femininity.It is within this"historical and itself.We usually call the system by which.elements of the H moral,element"that the entire domain of sex,sexuality,and natural.world are transformed into objects of human con- sexoppression is subsumed.And the briefness of Marx'scom- sumption the "economyBut the needs which are satisfied ment only serves.to emphasize the vast area of social life by economic activity even in the richest,Marxian sense,do whichsit covers and leaves unexamined.Only by subjecting not exhaust fundamentalhuman.requirements.A human this"historical and moral element?to analysis can the struc- group must also reproduce itself from generation to genera- ture of sex oppression be delineated. tion:The needs of sexuality and procreation must be satisfied as:much as the need to eat,and one of the most obvious deductions which:can be made from the data of anthro- Engels pology is that these needs are hardly ever satisfied in any In The Origin of the Family,Private Property,and the naturalform,any more than are the needs for food. .State,Engels sees sex oppression as part of capitalism's heri Hunger is hunger,but what counts as food is culturally deter- tage from prior social forms.Moreover,Engels integrates sex mined and obtained.Every society has some form of organ- and sexuality into his theory of society.Origin is a frustrating ized economic activity.Sex is sex,but what counts as sex is book.Like the nineteenth-century tomes.on the history of equally culturally.determined and obtained.Every society marriage and the family which it echoes,the state of the also has a sex/gender system a set of arrangements by which evidence in Origin renders it quaint to a reader familiar with the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is more recent developments in anthropology.Nevertheless,it is shaped by human,social intervention and satisfied in a con- a book whose considerable insight should not be over- ventional manner,no matter how bizarre some of the conven- shadowed'by its limitations.The idea that the "relations of tions may be. sexuality"can and should be distinguished from the "rela. tions of production"is not the least of Engels'intuitions: That some of them are pretty bizarre,from our point of view,only demonstrates the point that sexuality is expressed through the inter. According.to the materialistic conception,the determining fac- vention of culture (see Ford and Beach;1972).Some examples may be tor in history is,in the final instance,the production and repro- chosen from among the exotica in which anthropologists delight
::.；.人心 The Traffic in Women167 The realm of human sex,gender,and procreation has been Other names have been,proposed for the sex/gender subjected to,and changed by,relentless social activity for system.The most common alternatives aremode of repro- millenniaSex as we know it-gender identity,sexual desire duction and"patriarchy It may be foolish to quibble and fantasy;concepts of childhood-is itself a social product. about terms,but both of these can lead to confusion.All We need to understand the relations of its production,and three proposals have been made in order to.introduce a dis- forget,for awhile,about food,.clothing,automobiles,and tinction between "economic"systems and"sexual"systems, transistor radios.In most Marxist tradition,and even in and to indicate that sexual systems have a certain autonomy Engels book,the concept of the "second aspect of material and cannot always be explained in terms of economic forces. life"has tended to fade into the background,or to be incor- "Mode of reproduction,"for instance,has been proposed in porated into the usual notions of"material life."Engels'sug. oppositionto the more familiar "mode of production."But gestion'has never been followed up and subjected to the re- this terminology links the"economy"to production,and the finement which it needs.But he does indicate the existence sexual system to "reproduction."It reduces the richness of dof the domain of social life which I want to either system,since"productions"and "reproductions"take call the sex/gender system. place in both.Every mode of production involves reproduc- Among the Banaro,marriage involves several socially sanctioned sexual tion-of tools,labor,and social relations.We cannot relegate partnerships When a woman is married,she is initiated into intercourse all of the multi-faceted aspects of.social reproduction to the by the sib-friend of her groom's father.After bearing a child by this sex.system.Replacement of machinery is an example.of man,.she begins to have intercourse with her husband.:She also has an reproduction in the economy.On the other hand,we cannot institutionalized:parthership with the sib-friend of her husband.A limit the sex system toreproduction"in either the social or man's partriers include his wife,the wife of his sib-friend,and the wife of his sib-friend's son (Thurnwald,1916).Multiple intercourse is a more biological sense of the term.A.sex/gender system is not pronounced custom among the Marind Anim:At the time of marriage, simply the reproductive moment of amode of production." the bride has intercourse with all of the members of the groom's clan, The formation of gender identity is an example of produc- the groom coming last Every major festival is accompanied by a prac. tion in the realm of the sexual system.And a sex/gender tice:known asgtiv-bombari,in which semen is collected for ritual pur system involves more than the "relations of procreation," poses.A few women have intercourse with,many men,and the resulting semen is collected in coconut-shell buckets.A Marind male is subjected reproduction in the biological sense. to multiple homosexual intercourse during initiation (Van Baal,1966). .The term "patriarchywas introduced to distinguish the Among the Etoro,heterosexual intercourse is taboo for between.205 forces maintaining sexism from other social forces,such as and 260 days a year (Kelly,1974).In much of New Guinea,men fear capitalism.But the use ofpatriarchy"obscures other dis- copulation and think that it will kill them if they engage in it without tinctions.Its use is analagous to using capitalism to refer to magical precautions (Glasse,1971;Meggitt,1970).Usually,such ideas of feminine pollution express the subordination of women.But sym. all modes of production,whereas the usefulness of the term bolic systems contain internal contradictions,whose logical extensions "capitalismlies precisely in that it distinguishes between the sometimes lead to inversions of the propositions on which a system is different systems by which societies are provisioned and or- based.In New Britain,men's fear of sex is so extreme that rape appears ganized.Any society will have some system of "political to be feared by men rather than women.Women run after the men, economy."Such a system may be egalitarian or socialist.It who flee from them,women are the sexual aggressors,and it is bride- grooms who 'are reluctant (Goodale and Chowning,1971).Other in- may be class stratified,in which case the oppressed class may teresting.sexual variations can be found in Yalmon (1963)and K. consist of serfs,peasants,or slaves.The oppressed class may Gough(1959).· consist of wage laborers,in which case the system is properly
%e 得深 168 Gayle Rubin labeled"capitalist."The power of the term lies in its implica- when he located the subordination of women in a develop- tion that,in fact,there are alternatives to capitalism. ment within the mode of production.*To do this,we can Similarly,any society will have some systematic ways to imitate Engels in his method rather than in his results:Engels deal with sex gender,and babiesSuch a system may be approached the task of analyzing the:"second aspect of mater- sexuallyegalitarian,at least in theory,or it may be "gender ial life"by way of an examination of a theory of kinship stratified,as seems to be the case for most or all of the systems.Kinship systems are and do many things.But they knownexamples.But.it is important-even in the face of a are made up of,and reproduce,concrete forms of.socially depressing history-to..maintain a distinction between the organized sexuality.Kinship systems are observable and em- human capacity and necessity to create a sexual world,and pirical forms of sex/gender systems. the empincally oppressive ways in which sexual worlds have been organized Patriarchy subsumes both meanings into the Kinship same temgender system,on the other hand,is a neutral term which refers to the domain and indicates that oppres- (On the part played by sexuality sion is not inevitable in that domain,but is the product of 2 in the transition from ape to man" the specific social relations which organize it. To an anthropologist,a kinship.system is not a list of .Finally there are gender-stratified systems which are not biological relatives.It is a system of categories and statuses adequately described as patriarchal.Many New Guinea soci- which often contradict actual genetic relationships.There are eties (Enga,Maring,BenaBena,Huli,Melpa,Kuma,Gahuku- dozens of examples in which socially.defined kinship statuses Gama,Fore,Marind Anim,ad nauseum;see Berndt,1962; take precedence over biology.The Nuer custom of "woman Langness,1967 Rappaport,1975;Read,1952;Meggitt, marriage"'is a case in point.The Nuer define the status of 1970;Glasse;1971;Strathern,1972;Reay,1959;Van Baal, fatherhood as belonging to the person in whose name cattle 1966;Lindenbaum,1973)are viciously oppressive to women. bridewealth is given for the mother.Thus,a woman can be But the power of males in these groups is not founded on married to another woman,and be husband to the wife and their rolestas fathers or patriarchs,but on their collective father of her children,despite the fact that she is not the adult malenessembodied in secret cults,men's houses,war inseminator (Evans-Pritchard;1951:107-09). fare,exchange networks,ritual knowledge,and various initia- In pre-state societies,kinship is the idiom of social inter- tion procedures Patriarchy is a specific form of male domi- action,organizing economic,political,and ceremonial,as nance,and the use of the term ought to be confined to the well as sexual,activity.One's duties,responsibilities,and Old Testament-type pastoral nomads from-whom the term comes,o grops like them.Abraham wasa Patriarch-one Engels thought that men acquired wealth in the form.of herds and, wanting to pass this wealth to their own children,overthrew "mother old man whose absolute power over wives,children,herds, right"in favor of patrilineal inheritanceThe overthrow.of mother and dependerts was an.aspect of the institution of father- right was the world historical defeat of the female sex.The man took hood,as defined in the social group in which he lived. command in the home also;the woman was degraded and reduced to Whichever:term 'we use,what is important is to develop servitude;she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production.of children"(Engels1972:120-21;italics in original).As concepts toadequately describe the social organization of has been.often pointed out,women do not necessarily have significant sexuality and the reproduction of the conventions of sex and' social authority in societiespracticing matrilineal inheritance gender.We need to pursue the project Engels.abandoned (Schneider and Gough,1962). t
170 Gayle Rubin The Traffic in.Women171 privileges vis-a-vis others are defined in terms of mutual kin- biological procreation.It is permeated with an awareness of ship or lack thereof.The exchange.of goods and services, the importance of sexuality.in human society.It is a descrip- production and distribution,hostility and solidarity,ritual tion of society which doesnot assume an abstract,genderless and ceremony,all take place within the organizational struc. human subject.On the contrary,the human subject in Levi- ture of kinship.The ubiquity and adaptive effectiveness of Strauss's work is always either male or female,and the diver- kinship has led:many anthropologists to.consider its inven- gent social destinies of the two sexes can therefore be traced. tion,along with the invention of language,to have been the Since Levi-Strauss sees the essence of kinship systems to lie in developments which decisively marked the discontinuity be- an exchange of women between men,he constructs an im- tween semihuman hominids and human beings (Sahlins, plicit theory of sex oppression.Aptly,the book is dedicated 1960;Livingstone,1969;Levi-Strauss;1969) to the memory of Lewis Henry Morgan. While the idea of the importance of kinship enjoys the status of a first prineiple in anthropology,the internal work. ings of kinship systems have long been a focus for intense Vile and precious merchandise controversy.Kinship systems vary wildly from one culture to -Monique Wittig the next.They containall sorts of bewildering rules which govern whom one may or may not marry.Their interal The Elcmentr)S on the origin and nature of human society.It is a treatise on complexity is dazzling.Kinship systems have for decades pro- the kinship systems of approximately one-third of the ethno- voked the anthropological imagination into trying to explain graphic globe.Most fundamentally,it is an attempt to discern incest taboos,cross -cousin marriage,terms of descent,rela- the structural principles of kinship.Levi-Strauss argues that tionships of avoidance or forced intimacy,clans and sections, the application of these principles(summarized in the last taboos on names the diverse array of items found in descrip. chapter of Elementary Structures)to kinship data reveals an tions of actual kinship systems.In the nineteenth century, intelligible logic to the taboos and marriage rules which have several thinkers attempted to write comprehensive accounts perplexed and mystified Western anthropologists.He con- of the nature and history of human sexual systems (see Fee, structs a chess game of such complexity that it cannot be 1973)One of these was Ancient Society,by Lewis Henry recapitulated here.But two of his chess pieces are particu- Morgan It was this book which inspired Engels to write The larly relevant to women-the "gift"and the incest taboo, Origin of the Family,Private Property,and the State.Engels' whose dual articulation adds up to his concept of.the ex- theoryis based upon Morgan's account of kinship and mar- iage.季 change of women. The Elementary Structures is in part a radical glosson In.taking up Engels'project of extracting a theory 'of sex another famous theory of primitive social organization, oppression from the study of kinship,we have the advantage Mauss'Essay on the Gift (See also Sahlins,1972:Chap:4).It of the maturation of ethnology since the nineteenth century. was Mauss who first theorized as to the significance of one of We also have the advantage of a peculiar and particularly the most striking features of primitive societies:the extent to appropriate book,Levi-Strauss'The ElementaryStructures which giving,receiving,and reciprocating gifts dominates so- of Kinship.This is the boldest twentieth-century version of cial intercourse.In such societies,all sorts of things circulate the nineteenth-century project to understand human mar- in exchange-food;spells,rituals,words,names,ornaments, riage.It is a book in which kinship is explicitly conceived of tools,and powers. as an imposition of cultural organization upon the facts of
172 Gayle Rubin The Traffic in Women 173 Your own mother,your own sister,your own pigs,your own Levi-Strauss adds to the theory of primitive reciprocity the yams that you have piled up,you may not eat.Other people's idea that marriages are a most basic form of gift exchange,in mothers,other people's sisters,other people's pigs,other people's which it is women who are the most precious of gifts.He yams that they have piled up,you may eat.(Arapesh,cited in argues that the incest taboo;should best be understood as a Levi-Strauss,1969:27) mechanism to insure that such exchanges take place between In a typical gift transaction,neither party gains anything.In families and between groups.Since the existence ofincest the Trobriand Islands,each household maintains a garden of taboos is universal,but the content of their prohibitions vari. yams and each household eats yams.But the yams a house- able,they cannot be explained as having the aim of prevent- hold grows and the yams it eats are not the same.At harvest ing the occurrence.of genetically close matings.Rather,the time,a man sends the yams he has cultivated to the house; incest taboo imposes the social aim of exogamy and alliance hold of his sister;the household in which he lives is pro. upon the biological events of sex and procreation.The incest visioned by his wife's brother(Malinowski,1929).Since such taboo divides the universe of sexual choice into categories of a proceduresappears to be a useless one from the point of permitted and prohibited sexual partnersSpecifically,by view of:accumulation or trade,its logic has been sought else forbidding unions within a group it enjoins marital exchange where. Mauss proposed that the significance of gift giving is between groups. that it expresses,affirms,or creates a social link between the The prohibition on the sexual use of a daughter or a sister com- partners of an exchange.Gift giving confers upon its partici pels them to be given in marriage to another man,and at the same pants aspecial relationship of trust,solidarity,and mutual time it establishes a right to the daughter or sister of this other aid.Onecansolicit a friendly relationship in the offer of a man..The woman whom one.does not take is,for that very gift:acceptance implies awillingness to return a gift and a reason,offered up (Levi-Strauss;1969:51) confirmation of the relationship.Gift exchange may also be 5一 the idiom:of competition and rivalry.There are many ex- The prohibition of incest is less a rule prohibiting marriage with amples in which one person humiliates another by giving. the mother,sister,or daughter,than a rule obliging the mother, sister,or daughter to be given to others.It is the supreme rule of more than can be reciprocated.Some political systems,such het-bid:481的 ” as the Big Man systems of highland New Guinea,are based on: exchange which is unequal on the material plane.An aspiring The result of a gift of women is more profound than the Big Man wants to give away more goods than can be recipro- result of other gift transactions,because the relationship this cated.He gets his return.in political prestige. established is not just one of reciprocity,but one of kinship. Although bothMauss and Levi-Strauss emphasize the soli- The exchange partners have become affines,and their de dary aspects of gift exchange,the other purposes served by scendents will be related by blood:"Two people may meet in gift giving only strengthen the point that it is an ubiquitous friendship and exchange gifts and yet quarrel and fight in means of social commerce.Mauss proposed that gifts were later times,but intermarriage connects them in a permanent the threads of social discourse,the means by which such manner"'(Best,cited in Levi-Strauss,1969:481).As is the societies were held together in the absence of specialized case with other gift giving,marriages are not always so simply govermental institutions."The gift'is the primitive way of activities to make peace.Marriages may be highly competi- achieving the peace:that in civil society is secured by the tive,and there are plenty of affines who fight each other. state....Composing society,the gift was the liberation of Nevertheless,in a general sense the argument is that the culture'”(Sahlins,.1972:169,175). taboo on incest results in a wide network of relations,a set of
174 Gayle Rubin The Irafjic in women 175 people'whose connections withone.another are a kinship union,she precipitates or allows the exchange to take place,she structure.All other levels,amounts,and directions of ex- cannot alter its nature....(Levi-Strauss in.ibid.:115)* change-including hostile ones-are ordered by this structure. The marriage ceremonies recorded in the ethnographic litera- To enter into a gift exchange as a partner,one must have ture are moments in a ceaseless and ordered procession in something to give.If women are for men to dispose of,they are in no position to give themselves away. which women,children,shells,words,cattle names,fish,an- cestors,whale's teeth,pigs,yams,spells,dances,mats,etc., “What woman,”mused a young Northern Melpa man,“is ever pass from hand to hand,leaving as their tracks the ties that strong enough to get up and'say,Let:us make moka,let us find bind.Kinship is organization,and organization gives power. wives and pigs,let us give'our daughters to men,let us wage war, But who is organized? let us kill our enemies!No indeed not!...they are little rubbish If it is women who are being transacted,then it is the men things who stay at home'simply,don't you see?"(Strathem, 1972:161) who give and take them who are linked,the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it.*The What women indeed!The Melpa women of whom the young exchanige of women does not necessarily imply that women man spoke ean't get wives,they are wives,and what they get are objectified,in the modern sense,since objects in the are husbands,an entirely different matter.The Melpa women primitive world are imbued with highly personal qualities. can't give their daughters to men,because they do not have But it does imply a distinction between gift and giver.If the same rights in their daughters that their male kin have, women are the gifts,then it is men who are the exchange rights of bestowal(although not of ownership). partners.And it is the partners,not the presents,upon whom The "exchange of women"is a seductive and powerful reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social concept.It is attractive in that it places the oppression of linkage.The relations of such a system are such that women women within social systems,rather than in biology.More- are in no position to realize the benefits of their own circula- over,it suggests that we look for the ultimate locus of tion.As long as the relations specify that men exchange women's oppression within the traffic in women,rather than women,it is men who are the beneficiaries of the product of within the traffic in merchandise.It is certainly not difficult such exchanigesocial organization. to find ethnographic and historical examples of trafficking in The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is women.Women are given:in marriage,taken in battle,ex- not established between a man and a woman,but between two changed for favors,sent as tribute,traded,bought,and sold. groups of men,and:the woman figures only as one of the objects Far from being confined to the"primitive"world,these prac- in the exchange,not as one of the partners....This remains true tices seem only to become more pronounced and commer- even when the girl's feelings are taken'into consideration,as, cialized in more"civilized"societies.Men are of course also moreover,is:tsually:the case.In acquiescing to the proposed trafficked-but as slaves,hustlers,athletic stars,serfs,or as *"What,would.you like to marry your sister?What is the matter with you?Don't you want a brother-in-law?Don't you realize that if you This analysis of society as based.on bonds between men by.means of. marry another man's sister and another man marries your sister,you women makes the.separatist responses of the.women's movement will have at least two brothers-in-law,while if you marry your own thoroughly intelligible.Separatism can be seen as a mutation in social sister you will have none?With whom will you hunt,with whom will structure,as an attempt to form social groups based on unmediated you garden,whom will you go visit?"(Arapesh,cited in Levi-Strauss, bonds between women.It can also be seen as a radical denial of men's 1969:485j: "rights"in women,and'as a claim by women of rights in themselyes. …
