This chapter focuses on one example (Gayle Rubin’s influential work on gender and sexuality) that illustrates how feminism has placed biology at a distance from its conceptual and political interests. The chapter begins by working through a small section of Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” to map out some of the conceptual and political effects of Rubin’s aversion to biological explanation. In particular, it is interested in how the belly and antibiologism figure in Rubin’s attempts to forge new directions for feminist theory. The implications of this for feminist theory are canvassed via Melanie Klein’s theory of phantasy (and its relation to...