Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

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NOTHINGNESS AND DE/GENERATION
Seyton:
Macbeth:
The Queen, my Lord, is dead.
She should have died hereafter:
There would have been a time for such a word.-
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(Macbeth, Act V, Scene V)
(Shakespeare: 1964, p. 159).
Gayle Rubin’s article, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of
Sex” (1975), was one of the first works of feminist structuralism in English. Rubin
used structural anthropology and psychoanalysis to develop a theory of the sex/
gender system. Her structuralist analysis focused on relationships: the social
relations which constitute and define female identity. Social relationships and
identity are interdependent and part of a complex process, but Rubin negates
subjectivity and epistemological questions of an etiological nature. As a structuralist,
Rubin is anti-essentialist and the essence she is against is female. 1
The theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud were important to Gayle
Rubin because “In reading through these works, one begins to have a sense of a
systematic social apparatus which takes up females as raw material and
fashions domesticated women as products” (1975, p. 158). While she intends to
bring a “feminist eye” (1975, p. 159) to their work, she believes that Lévi-Strauss
and Freud provide conceptual tools for describing the sex/gender system. Against
this argument it is my contention that these tools and Rubin’s theory are profoundly
phallic. Structuralism and psychoanalysis also seem attractive to Rubin because they
allow an escape from biology: “The ‘exchange of women’ is a seductive and
powerful concept. It is attractive in that it places the oppression of women within
social systems, rather than in biology” (1975, p. 175). However, it is not necessary to
1. See Rubin’s contribution to the sadomasochistic sexuality reader, What Colour is Your
Handkerchief (1979)