Dividing "Gender" from "Sex,"

Professor Gayle Rubin

In Fifty Years of Women's, Gender, and Queer Studies from the "Second Wave" of Feminism to the present, Gayle Rubin, Professor at the University of Michigan, stands out as an American progenitor of Gender Studies. Rubin is acclaimed for attacking the "sex/gender system" in her seminal essay, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," published in 1975 in Lewin. Rubin promulgated the theory that gender was separate from sex and that engendering (i.e. bestowing of the inferior gender on women as marital property) was a "system oppression," like capitalism, to be broken by the new generation of professors and activists. Queer Theory has become the new dogma. A critical eye might observe that Rubin's theory that female gender is an arbitrary system of oppression apparently suits Rubin's personal queer sexual orientation.

Photo credit Alchetron

Photo credit Alchetron

Minnesota's new "health standards" represent the continuation of the good fight called for by Rubin. They are formulated with respect to social views and an agenda regarding sex and drugs