Please join us for a "Show-and-Tell" with Dr. Gayle Rubin at ONE Archives, where Rubin will discuss items from the collection, including publications and newsletters related to the Feminist Porn Wars. This event follows her lecture, "The Feminist Porn Wars: A Retrospective" to be held in Mudd Hall on USC's University Park Campus.
Gayle Rubin is a pathbreaking feminist anthropologist and historian, whose work on sex, gender, and urban life has influenced scholars working on local, regional, and national sexual histories and communities. Her articles, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" (1975) and "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality" (1984) are foundational texts. Rubin's writings were collected in the anthology Deviations (2011), published by Duke University Press. She is currently working on an anthropological study of gay leathermen in San Francisco entitled Valley of the Kings. At USC, she will be speaking about "The Feminist Porn Wars," a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s when feminist communities disagreed over how to interpret sexually explicit imagery, like pornography, and non-normative sexual practices, like BDSM.