In “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” Gayle Rubin’s presents her “charmed circle”, laying out the cultural hegemony of different sexual behaviours, highly hierarchized into commendable and “normal” forms of sexuality as opposed to and marginalized and “unnatural” ones. In fact, Rubin (2012) uses “cultural hegemony” to exhibit the culturally dependent system of rewards and sanctions that shapes sexual practices, arguing that they have been dichotomized to create a binary between good and bad sex (p. 44). Paraphrasing Foucault, she argues that the variation in desires has always existed, but the categorization and creation of identities to support them are culturally constituted (Rubin, 2012, p.43). By demonstrating how each term of the…show more content… Still, it is important to interrogate her logic: does deconstructing the binaries of cultural hegemony always render service to marginalized queer communities?
On one hand, Rubin’s analysis enables marginalized groups by arguing that cultural hegemony utilizes essentialist binaries as a means of oppression - thus their deconstruction would oppose the normalization of certain behaviours over others. Indeed, Rubin displays the perniciousness of an essentialist understanding of sexuality – as an innate force unaffected by any social determinants (2012, p. 42) – because it creates firm categories that do not allow any fluidity or diversity of sexual preferences, instead of embracing the natural sexual variations (2012, p. 45). In doing so, cultural hegemony, through its stratification of the binaries