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Whereas feminists have historically focused on male dominance within heterosexual relations, queer theorists have directed their attention to the ways in which “heteronormativity” renders alternatives to heterosexuality “other” and marginal. An effective critique of heterosexuality—at the levels of social structure, meaning, social practice, and subjectivity—must address both heteronormativity and male dominance. Such a critique involves more than simply a synthesis of queer and feminism: it necessarily entails an understanding of gender as a hierarchical social division since this is intrinsic to heterosexuality.

This analysis should be read against Rubin’s earlier work, which did indeed tie gender too closely to reproductive sexuality through the idea that every society “has a sex/gender system—a set of arrangements through which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human social intervention” (1975: 165). While Rubin’s move away from biological foundationalism and her analytic uncoupling of gender from sexuality represent positive shifts, she went too far in denying the empirical connections between gender and sexuality.

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