On (the Impossibility of) Teaching Gayle Rubin

This essay explores the pedagogical challenges of designing a broad orientation to traditions of feminist theorizing, given both an entrenched progress narrative (in which the third wave overcomes the deficiencies of the second) and a tendency to conflate text-selection with value. In particular, the essay considers the responses of several graduate student cohorts to two well-known essays by Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women” and “Thinking Sex,” and the presentist political sensibility that seems to animate these responses. How might we teach “feminist theory” in a way that historicizes the production of theory and appreciates (rather than effaces) the difference between what a feminist intervention might accomplish in its own moment and in our present? Against the prevailing teleology, in which feminism overcomes its pasts, the essay argues for a genealogical approach to the urgencies, aspirations, profound limitations, and vexing complicities of earlier feminist projects.