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Gayle Rubin
(1949 - living) U.S.A.

Gayle Rubin

Anthropologist

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Gayle S. Rubin is a cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and theorist of sex and gender politics. She has written on a range of subjects including feminism, sadomasochism, prostitution, pedophilia, pornography and lesbian literature, as well as anthropological studies and histories of sexual subcultures, especially focused in urban contexts. She is an associate professor of anthropology, women's studies, and comparative literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor

In 1968 Gayle Rubin was part of an early feminist consciousness raising group active on the campus of the University of Michigan and also wrote on feminist topics for women's movement papers and the Ann Arbor Argus. In 1970 she helped found Ann Arbor Radicalesbians , an early Lesbian Feminist group.

Rubin first rose to recognition through her 1975 essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex", in which she attempted to discover historical social mechanisms by which gender and compulsory heterosexuality are produced, and women are consigned to a secondary position in human relations.

In the field of public history, Rubin was a member of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, a private study group founded in 1978 whose members included Allan Berube, Estelle Freedman and Amber Hollibaugh. Rubin also was a founding member of the GLBT Historical Society (originally known as the San Francisco Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Historical Society), established in 1985.

Gayle Rubin received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1994 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 2003. She is the author of a series of groundbreaking articles on the politics of sex and gender and an anthropological study of gay leathermen in San Francisco. Her teaching includes classes on "Sex Panics", "Sex and the City" and graduate seminars such as ";Sexological Theories: From Krafft-Ebbing to Foucault" and "The Feminist Sex Wars".

She served on the Board of Directors of the Leather Archives and Museum from 1992 to 2000. Arguing the need for well-maintained historical archives for sexual minorities, Rubin has written that "queer life is full of examples of fabulous explosions that left little or no detectable trace.... Those who fail to secure the transmission of their histories are doomed to forget them".

In 1994, Rubin completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan with a dissertation entitled The Valley of the Kings: Leathermen in San Francisco, 1960-1990 . In addition to her appointment at the University of Michigan, she was the 2014 F. O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University.

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - https://lsa.umich.edu/

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