You need to subscribe to watch this video
Video

The Queer Subversion of Feminism: Gayle Rubin's "Thinking Sex" Part 3

alt image
New Discourses   Jun 17th, 2022

Description

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 81

Thinking Sex Series, Part 3 of 3


In the previous two episodes of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay reads through the first two thirds of Gayle Rubin's shocking 1984 essay, "Thinking Sex," widely regarded as the first essay in Queer Theory. In it, as Rubin's subtitle indicates, "Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," she takes feminism (especially sex-negative radical feminism) to task for being insufficiently radical as a politics of sexuality. In fact, she accuses it (not entirely wrongly) of being resoundingly conservative with regard to sex and sexuality. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James walks you through this most tedious portion of the essay where the seeds of subverting feminism itself are planted. Within just a couple of decades from this point, the Queer Marxist movement will have used Rubin's call for a "radical theory of the politics of sexuality" to completely undermine the women's movement and basically kill it and the category of "woman" itself. Join him to understand how it started.