The University of Pennsylvania hosted a "state of the field" conference in gender and sexuality studies on March 4 to 6, 2009, titled "Rethinking Sex" and held in recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the essay "Thinking Sex." Rubin was a featured speaker at the conference, where she presented "Blood under the Bridge: Reflections on ‘Thinking Sex,’" to an audience of nearly eight hundred people. In 2011 "GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies" published a special issue, also titled "Rethinking Sex," featuring work emerging from this conference, and including Rubin's piece "Blood under the Bridge: Reflections on ‘Thinking Sex’”.