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10/10/19: Thinking Sex and The "Beached Whale"


Georgia O'Keefe, "Pelvis IV"

For the week, 10/10/19, we'll be discussing Gayle Rubin’s (1984) “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” and Sharon P. Holland’s (2011) “The “Beached Whale”” (a very short but important response to Rubin’s text written some 25 years later).


Rubin’s essay can be found here and Holland’s is here.


Rubin’s essay is considered one of queer studies’ foundational (‘proto-queer’) texts. In it, Rubin demands that sex be considered as a category of inquiry in its own right, arguing that “the realm of sexuality also has its own internal politics, inequities, and modes of oppression” (p.143). While this observation may seem trite to some, Rubin’s proposal has continuing relevance for STS, a field that has largely failed to take sex (and, in Adorno’s words, its ‘spiciness’) ‘seriously’. As Jennifer Fishman and colleagues (2017, p.381) have argued, sex and sexuality remain somewhat taboo in STS, which has the effect of: (i) limiting these as possible sites of inquiry and (ii) likely warping “the form and content of STS, even across sites of investigation and critical inquiry that may not immediately appear to have anything to do with sexuality.” In other words, STS is long overdue to think sex.


Holland’s very short (6 pages!) and very vital response to Rubin’s text is a critical reminder of the pervasiveness and illusory nature of what Roderick Ferguson (2005) has termed a “racially denuded” queer subject. Holland’s essay problematises historical (and contemporary) theoretical interventions such as Rubin’s that have foregrounded an overlooked queer subject but failed to acknowledge race as a co-constructed subjectivity and thereby constituting the queer subject of inquiry/the archive as always white.


Details: Thursday 10th October, 5pm-6pm, Alice Farrands Reading Room, 22 Gordon Square, WC1H 0AW

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