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)