Gayle Rubin's Essay: The Traffic In Women

Kinship That Matters Since the inception of anthropology in the second half of the 19th century, kinship has been its buzzword. Scholars have studied kinship systems of distant cultures and proposed many definitions of it, yet, up to now there is no satisfactory definition that everyone would agree on. Moreover, being focused on studying and analyzing “others”, anthropologists turned their attention to themselves and to the “Western”1 world not so long ago—thus, a great deal of inquiries into the “Western” society were attempted by other disciplines, including but not limited to sociology, political science and philosophy. In this paper, building on Gayle Rubin's essay “The Traffic in Women” and on the chapter from Judith Butler's book “Undoing Gender” titled “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?”, I will briefly explore the category of kinship, its relation and significance for the contemporary societies. Trying to envision “genderless but not sexless society” (Rubin 1975:204) and to develop a refined concept of a “sex/gender system” (1975:159), Gayle Rubin traces the narratives of female oppression and subordination through the works of Marx, Engels, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, and Lacan. She calls her method exegesis, though warning the reader that sometimes her reading of a text is not strictly exegetical
On the contrary, her ideas on the equation of kinship with modern-day national culture are incredibly insightful and worthy of pursuing further. My reflections are rather of supplementary value in order to enhance and highlight the main claim of this paper and the claim of Butler's piece—kinship still matters in the contemporary world. However, it is indeed less visible and more difficult to track in the ways that anthropologists used to do