Overview
Deviations is the definitive collection of writing by Gayle S. Rubin, a pioneering theorist and activist in feminist, lesbian and gay, queer, and sexuality studies since the 1970s. Rubin first rose to prominence in 1975 with the publication of ""The Traffic in Women,"" an essay that had a galvanizing effect on feminist thinking and theory. In another landmark piece, ""Thinking Sex,"" she examined how certain sexual behaviors are constructed as moral or natural, and others as unnatural. That essay became one of queer theory's foundational texts. Along with such canonical work, Deviations features less well-known but equally insightful writing on subjects such as lesbian history, the feminist sex wars, the politics of sadomasochism, crusades against prostitution and pornography, and the historical development of sexual knowledge. In the introduction, Rubin traces her intellectual trajectory and discusses the development and reception of some of her most influential essays. Like the book it opens, the introduction highlights the major lines of inquiry pursued for nearly forty years by a singularly important theorist of sex, gender, and culture.
Full Product Details
Author: Gayle S. Rubin
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Weight: 0.821kg
ISBN: 9780822349716
ISBN 10: 082234971
Pages: 504
Publication Date: 28 November 2011
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
This book brings together a canonical collection of her writing, but it is more than a reader: she rewrites the genealogy of sexuality studies, giving us a precise intellectual history of sexuality studies that recognises the pivotal role played by academic homosexuals other than the now-feted and individuated Michel Foucault... [I]t is clarifying to read Rubin's analyses, still germane, direct and sharp after all these years. She is alert to nuances in the social field, keen to represent the intersectionality of issues around sex, and judiciously observant of any nexus of inequality. - Sally R. Munt, Times Higher Education Supplement Gayle S. Rubin has had an incalculable impact on the study of gender and sexuality over the past 35 years. Rubin's work changed the very language and vocabulary with which we discuss sexuality and gender... It is fitting that a scholar of Gayle S. Rubin's stature has finally been rewarded with a comprehensive collection of her most influential essays. While Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader will please seasoned scholars of queer theory and gay and lesbian studies with its first ever assemblage of Rubin's most significant work, I believe that the collection will most benefit those who are just making their first steps into the study of queer culture. - Chase Dimock, Lambda Literary Review Finally: a collection of Gayle Rubin's writings. It is long overdue and sorely needed... For decades, her works appeared in scholarly journals and small-press publications. This collection includes a dozen of her already published pieces, some updated with thoughtful afterwords. She truly has something to say, not only about women and lesbian culture, but (from her unique and insightful perspective) about the sexual crisis America now faces. - David Rosen, The Brooklyn Rail The definitive collection of Gayle Rubin's work is now available... Deviations offers up articles that shaped the thinking of the modern feminist and LGBT movements, while contextualizing the gradual institutionalization and canonization of sexuality studies. In providing the opportunity to think through the history of American feminism, including the racialization of feminist debates on sexuality, Deviations provides an impetus for 'thinking sex' even more critically. - Svati P. Shah, Women's Review of Books Foundational essays and commentary from America's preeminent queer feminist intellectual; a must-have for any scholar and every library. -Esther Newton, author of Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas Gayle S. Rubin has been breaking new intellectual ground around gender and sexuality for almost four decades. This collection of essays lets us see in one place the breadth, depth, and profound originality of her thinking. It's a wonder to behold. As I reread some familiar pieces and encountered some new ones, I was reminded how much I am in her debt. -John D'Emilio, co-author of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America It is rare to find an intellectual who founded an entire field of sexuality studies, whose theoretical contributions have been so far-reaching, and who continues to make rich, surprising, and singular interventions. These are the essays that riveted generations and claim our attention time and again. Gayle S. Rubin gives us the material life of sexual categories, lucid and careful argumentation, extraordinary and unprecedented archives. This brilliant collection is a gift for anyone who wants to follow the formidable trajectory of the most exacting and influential intellectual of sexuality studies. -Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor, Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley The essays in Deviations cover a tightly meshed set of concerns in an extraordinarily provocative manner. Whether Gayle S. Rubin writes about antiporn politics, lesbian literary histories, gay male leather communities, S/M cultures, or butch-femme erotics, she always provides deeply engaged and respectful accounts of the kinds of knowledges that are produced in sexual subcultures but are often passed over by mainstream theorists and researchers. This is a fantastic collection, and it will be an immensely popular book. -Judith Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure Finally: a collection of Gayle Rubin's writings. It is long overdue and sorely needed... For decades, her works appeared in scholarly journals and small-press publications. This collection includes a dozen of her already published pieces, some updated with thoughtful afterwords. She truly has something to say, not only about women and lesbian culture, but (from her unique and insightful perspective) about the sexual crisis America now faces. -- David Rosen The Brooklyn Rail Gayle S. Rubin has had an incalculable impact on the study of gender and sexuality over the past 35 years. Rubin's work changed the very language and vocabulary with which we discuss sexuality and gender... It is fitting that a scholar of Gayle S. Rubin's stature has finally been rewarded with a comprehensive collection of her most influential essays. While Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader will please seasoned scholars of queer theory and gay and lesbian studies with its first ever assemblage of Rubin's most significant work, I believe that the collection will most benefit those who are just making their first steps into the study of queer culture. -- Chase Dimock Lambda Literary Review The definitive collection of Gayle Rubin's work is now available... Deviations offers up articles that shaped the thinking of the modern feminist and LGBT movements, while contextualizing the gradual institutionalization and canonization of sexuality studies. In providing the opportunity to think through the history of American feminism, including the racialization of feminist debates on sexuality, Deviations provides an impetus for 'thinking sex' even more critically. -- Svati P. Shah Women's Review of Books This book brings together a canonical collection of her writing, but it is more than a reader: she rewrites the genealogy of sexuality studies, giving us a precise intellectual history of sexuality studies that recognises the pivotal role played by academic homosexuals other than the now-feted and individuated Michel Foucault... [I]t is clarifying to read Rubin's analyses, still germane, direct and sharp after all these years. She is alert to nuances in the social field, keen to represent the intersectionality of issues around sex, and judiciously observant of any nexus of inequality. -- Sally R. Munt Times Higher Education Supplement
Foundational essays and commentary from America's preeminent queer feminist intellectual; a must-have for any scholar and every library. --Esther Newton, author of Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas
This book brings together a canonical collection of her writing, but it is more than a reader: she rewrites the genealogy of sexuality studies, giving us a precise intellectual history of sexuality studies that recognises the pivotal role played by academic homosexuals other than the now-feted and individuated Michel Foucault. She reminds us that British sociologists such as Mary McIntosh, Jeffrey Weeks and Ken Plummer, as well as American gay historians including Esther Newton, Jeffrey Escoffier, Martha Vicinus, John D'Emilio and Jonathan Ned Katz and many more besides, ploughed this new field. Sally R. Munt, Times Higher Education It is rare to find an intellectual who founded an entire field of sexuality studies, whose theoretical contributions have been so far-reaching, and who continues to make rich, surprising, and singular interventions. These are the essays that riveted generations and claim our attention time and again. Gayle S. Rubin gives us the material life of sexual categories, lucid and careful argumentation, extraordinary and unprecedented archives. This brilliant collection is a gift for anyone who wants to follow the formidable trajectory of the most exacting and influential intellectual of sexuality studies. Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor, Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley Gayle S. Rubin has been breaking new intellectual ground around gender and sexuality for almost four decades. This collection of essays lets us see in one place the breadth, depth, and profound originality of her thinking. It's a wonder to behold. As I reread some familiar pieces and encountered some new ones, I was reminded how much I am in her debt. John D'Emilio, co-author of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America Foundational essays and commentary from America's preeminent queer feminist intellectual; a must-have for any scholar and every library. Esther Newton, author of Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas
""This book brings together a canonical collection of her writing, but it is more than a reader: she rewrites the genealogy of sexuality studies, giving us a precise intellectual history of sexuality studies that recognises the pivotal role played by academic homosexuals other than the now-feted and individuated Michel Foucault. She reminds us that British sociologists such as Mary McIntosh, Jeffrey Weeks and Ken Plummer, as well as American gay historians including Esther Newton, Jeffrey Escoffier, Martha Vicinus, John D'Emilio and Jonathan Ned Katz and many more besides, ploughed this new field."" Sally R. Munt, Times Higher Education ""It is rare to find an intellectual who founded an entire field of sexuality studies, whose theoretical contributions have been so far-reaching, and who continues to make rich, surprising, and singular interventions. These are the essays that riveted generations and claim our attention time and again. Gayle S. Rubin gives us the material life of sexual categories, lucid and careful argumentation, extraordinary and unprecedented archives. This brilliant collection is a gift for anyone who wants to follow the formidable trajectory of the most exacting and influential intellectual of sexuality studies."" Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor, Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley ""Deviations offers up articles that shaped the thinking of the modern feminist LGBT movements, while contextualizing the gradual institutionalization and canonization of sexuality studies. In providing the opportunity to think through the history of American feminism, including the radicalization of feminist debates on sexuality, Deviations provides an impetus for ""thinking sex"" even more critically."" Svati P. Shah, Women's Review of Books, November/December 2012 ""Gayle S. Rubin has been breaking new intellectual ground around gender and sexuality for almost four decades. This collection of essays lets us see in one place the breadth, depth, and profound originality of her thinking. It's a wonder to behold. As I reread some familiar pieces and encountered some new ones, I was reminded how much I am in her debt."" John D'Emilio, co-author of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America ""Foundational essays and commentary from America's preeminent queer feminist intellectual; a must-have for any scholar and every library."" Esther Newton, author of Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas ""Gayle S. Rubin has had an incalculable impact on the study of gender and sexuality over the past 35 years. Rubin's work changed the very language and vocabulary with which we discuss sexuality and gender. She coined the terms ""sex/gender system"" to describe ""the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity"" and the ""Charmed Circle,"" which describes the normative sexual behaviors our society privileges over the marginalized practices of the queer minority. Rubin's pioneering research on gay leather communities legitimized the anthropological study of sexual subcultures and her participation in the first known lesbian S/M group, Samois, and pro-sex activism helped to de-stigmatize pornography and S/M practices in the 80s when the anti-pornography movement was at its height. In short, Gayle S. Rubin is a living legend whose writing, research, and activism both chronicled and inspired LGBT culture as we know it today... I found Rubin's openness, both as a private individual revealing the personal context of her research and as a scholar taking stock of her life's work to be a rare and valuable look inside the life of an intellectual of her magnitude. Coming from a discipline like anthropology that stresses objectivity and the erasure of the observer, Gayle S. Rubin's reader re-inscribes the personal and the human into academic study and portrays a comprehensive history of the LGBT community through the life and words of one of its most original thinkers and meticulous chroniclers."" Chase Dimock, Lambda Literary Review, January 2012 ""A collection of academic essays on sex, gender and politics from pioneering queer theory and activist Rubin, covering a range of topics including pornography as a focus of feminist rage, punitive US sex laws and the seemingly inexhaustible topic of gender boundaries."" - Diva Magazine, April 2012 ""Finally: a collection of Gayle Rubin's writings. It is long overdue and sorely needed. For those who don't know Rubin, she is a professor of anthropology and women's studies at the University of Michigan. More significantly, she is one of America's most original thinkers about sexuality, especially radical lesbian sexuality. For those who've followed her intellectual journey over the last few decades, it's good to see many of her published articles collected in a single (though hefty) volume."" David Rosen, The Brooklyn Rail, June 2012 ""Deviations is Rubin's omnibus. It contains, of course, her best-known work, 'The traffic in women' (1975), which she famously wrote as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in a ourse taught by Marshall Sahlins. Rubin's musings on her days in Ann Arbor as an undergraduate, grad student, baby dyke, and activist are replete with references to fortune: Michigan itself a 'lucky accident' for her (p. 8); the Diag a perfect space of 'unplanned encounters' (p. 9); the courses, like those with Sahlins and Charles Tilly, that 'changed her life' (p. 295); or, most memorably, the reference librarian ('probably queer'), who would discreetly whisper to Rubin, as the latter plodded away at assembling a bibliography on lesbian writing, that she might take a look at the sections on women philanthropists or women in prisons (p. 348), leading her down a 'breadcrumb trail' into a perfect fantasy world of never-ending scholarly obsession - a world that, now, Rubin might well be the humble, nerdy king of."" - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
It is rare to find an intellectual who founded an entire field of sexuality studies, whose theoretical contributions have been so far-reaching, and who continues to make rich, surprising, and singular interventions. These are the essays that riveted generations and claim our attention time and again. Gayle S. Rubin gives us the material life of sexual categories, lucid and careful argumentation, extraordinary and unprecedented archives. This brilliant collection is a gift for anyone who wants to follow the formidable trajectory of the most exacting and influential intellectual of sexuality studies. Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor, Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley Gayle S. Rubin has been breaking new intellectual ground around gender and sexuality for almost four decades. This collection of essays lets us see in one place the breadth, depth, and profound originality of her thinking. It's a wonder to behold. As I reread some familiar pieces and encountered some new ones, I was reminded how much I am in her debt. John D'Emilio, co-author of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America Foundational essays and commentary from America's preeminent queer feminist intellectual; a must-have for any scholar and every library. Esther Newton, author of Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas
Author Information
Gayle S. Rubin is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.
