Initiation Rites: “Thinking Sex” and the Feminist Theory Canon

This article considers the politics of feminist theory’s canonization by thinking through a question from my doctoral exam that asked me to assess the relative success or failure of Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” (1984) in anticipating the evolution of the field of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Through an examination of the essay’s citational sojourns in the last thirty-five years, I suggest that despite their seeming opposition, both success and failure narratives rely on a common account of the field’s trajectory in which “Thinking Sex” appears as a foundational threshold. While each Act adopts a different relation to the predictive potential of “Thinking Sex,” the article as a whole is concerned with the effects of canonical sedimentation.