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

24 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
repudiate the body and materialism in order to oppose sexist ideologies of
reproduction. Indeed, such anti-matter is the common ground of patriarchal
ideology. Before accepting Lévi-Strauss’s or Freud’s conceptual tools, Rubin should
at least consider the significance of these gifts, a significance which is explicit in her
own quotation from Mauss’s essay on gift giving and the Big Man: “An aspiring Big
Man wants to give away more goods than can be reciprocated. He gets his return in
political prestige” (1975, p. 172).
Freud and Lévi-Strauss are more attractive than Marx, Rubin argues, because their
work makes sexuality visible. The different experiences of men and women could
then emerge in a critical study of the social organization of sexuality, and
particularly Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship:
It is a book in which kinship is explicitly conceived of as an imposition of
cultural organization upon the facts of biological procreation. It is permeated
with an awareness of the importance of sexuality in human society. It is a
description of society which does not assume an abstract, genderless human
subject. On the contrary, the human subject in Lévi-Strauss’ work is always
either male or female, and the divergent social destinies of the two sexes can
therefore be traced. Since Lévi-Strauss sees the essence of kinship systems to
lie in an exchange of women between men, he constructs an implicit theory of
sex oppression (Rubin: 1975, p. 170–171).
Structure tyrannizes over experience: culture is imposed on sensuality and the body,
ideology descends upon substance in a metaphysical and idealistic way. Sexuality, as
one moment of female reproductive experience, is given primacy because it is the
universal masculine position in reproductive consciousness (O’Brien: 1981). In
contrast to Rubin’s assertion, Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical society is an abstract,
universal, male-gendered one, without individual male or female subjects. It is
abstract because it is not material: the relations of kinship are established without
births. A hereditary roster of kingships would allow the social destinies of the two
sexes to be traced, but that does not make it an implicit theory of sex oppression.
Rubin believes that the dual articulation of the theory of the gift and the incest
taboo provides a theory of women’s oppression. The incest taboo is a mechanism to
establish alliances between groups; it “imposes the social aim of exogamy and
alliance upon the biological events of sex and procreation” (1975, p. 173). This
motiveless structure is again unrelated to immediate experience: procreation is an
event which does not relate to serious political action or agency, on the part of men
or women. The agent in this sentence is a cultural structure: the incest taboo, which
imposes a set of relations on matter. The motive is to establish kinship. Rubin tries to
use Lévi-Strauss’s study of kinship as an economics of sexual systems: “the
subordination of women can be seen as a product of the relationships by which sex
and gender are organized and produced. The economic oppression of women is
derivative and secondary” (1975, p. 177). Lévi-Strauss and Freud permit a break
with orthodox Marxism, and a discussion of sexuality. Rubin can then isolate the sex/
gender system from the mode of production, and propose a women’s movement that