Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” offers a decisive feminist intervention into anthropology by arguing that women’s oppression cannot be explained adequately by biology, capitalism alone, or universal male aggression, but must be analysed through the social systems that organise sex, gender, kinship, and exchange. Her key concept, the sex/gender system, names the set of arrangements through which biological sexuality is transformed into social hierarchy, producing women as objects of circulation between men. Drawing critically on Marx, Engels, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, and Lacan, Rubin shows that kinship systems do not merely describe family relations; they actively produce gendered power by regulating marriage, inheritance, sexuality, and obligation. The exchange of women, particularly in alliance theory, becomes a structural mechanism through which men establish social bonds while women are positioned as gifts rather than fully autonomous subjects. Yet Rubin does not simply reproduce structuralism or psychoanalysis; she reworks them to expose how the apparent naturalness of heterosexuality, femininity, and masculinity is institutionally manufactured. Her argument is especially powerful because it separates women’s oppression from any inevitable biological destiny and relocates it within historically organised symbolic and economic relations. The essay therefore becomes a foundational text for feminist anthropology and queer theory alike, since it demonstrates that gender is not a natural expression of sex but a social technology that distributes power, desire, and value. Its conclusion is radically political: if kinship, sexuality, and gender are made by social systems, they can also be transformed, contested, and remade beyond the traffic that has historically subordinated women.
