Thomas Laqueur
Author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
About the Author
Thomas W. Laqueur is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.
Works by Thomas Laqueur
The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Representations Books) (1987) — Editor — 84 copies
Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and English Working Class Culture, 1780-1850 (1976) 8 copies
Representations 47: National Cultures Before Nationalism — Editor — 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Laqueur, Thomas
- Legal name
- Laqueur, Thomas Walter
- Birthdate
- 1945-09-06
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Princeton University (MA|1969|Ph.D|1973)
Swarthmore College (BA | 1967)
Nuffield College, Oxford - Occupations
- historian
university professor - Organizations
- University of California, Berkeley
- Awards and honors
- American Philosophical Society (Fellow, 2015)
American Academy of Arts & Sciences (Fellow, 1999)
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award (2007)
Lowe Prize (1983) - Short biography
- Thomas Laqueur is arguably one of the most important cultural historians of his generation, worldwide. A trustee of the National Humanities Center and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian, his works have been translated into at least fifteen languages. Spanning two millennia of human experience his research and writing treats a remarkable range of topics and sub-fields in the history of western civilization - from literacy, education and popular politics to the scientific understanding of sex-differentiation, the origins of human rights and the cultural meanings of death. As a founding member of the editorial board of the journal Representations, he was a co-creator of what came to be called "the new cultural history" - whose hallmark is the deployment of literary and anthropological approaches to the study of major transformations in our understanding of fundamental elements of human experience, elements that had previously been viewed as beyond the scope and reach of historical investigation.
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Istanbul, Turkey
- Places of residence
- Berkeley, California, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
Finally finished Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (which I read in French: La fabrique du sexe, translated by Michel Gautier - or is it Pierre-Emmmanuel Dauzat? The book is not clear but whoever he is, he did a pretty good job I think).
I found it a very interesting if slow read, but the second part was much less enjoyable than the first, and I found it confusing at times.
Laqueur's main thesis is that sex is just as socially constructed as gender (that part was not a show more complete shock to me). And that the view of sex underwent a major reversal, from the idea that sexual differences were fluid and females were just an inferior version of males (not hot enough, basically), to the conviction that the sexes are essentially different. In the first view, sex differences are on a continuum, and it’s not particularly shocking to see a girl turning into a boy. In the second view, sex is binary and the differences between genders are grounded in biology and the male and female essence. The first view was prevalent in antiquity and the middle ages, and the second view is the one that still shapes our prejudices (remember Mars and Venus?).
The first part, about the era of the one-sex model (roughly from Greek antiquity to the Renaissance), felt interesting albeit a bit too long. On the other hand the part about the two-sex model felt too short and rather confusing. It started well by explaining how the old model became unsustainable due to the new imperative of explaining social facts scientifically. Something similar happened with race.
Aristotle and the others did not need to justify the inferior social status of women. It was self-evident and ordained by God or Nature. It didn't matter much whether the vagina really looked like an inverted penis or the uterus like an internal scrotum. The similarity was necessary to the higher order of things. The inferiority of women was a given, and the explanation was that they were too cold and humid to be proper males. But when a girl suddenly grew testicles as a result of jumping over a fire, it was notable but not that unexpected.
However, things changed when enlightenment came along and it was decided that all men were created equal. And women? If they were just like men with a vagina instead of a penis, how to explain that they did not have the same rights or the same place in society? They had to be essentially different, of course. And so, just like men before them had ignored obvious anatomical differences because they didn't fit into their model, modern men constructed another model of sex and then found "facts" to suit it. Something similar happened with race.
All in all, a very interesting read, and I fully agree with the author's conclusion that "the discourse on sex differences ignores the burden of facts and remains as free as a pure mind game" (probably not quite what the author wrote, as this is my own clumsy translation from the French translation). show less
I found it a very interesting if slow read, but the second part was much less enjoyable than the first, and I found it confusing at times.
Laqueur's main thesis is that sex is just as socially constructed as gender (that part was not a show more complete shock to me). And that the view of sex underwent a major reversal, from the idea that sexual differences were fluid and females were just an inferior version of males (not hot enough, basically), to the conviction that the sexes are essentially different. In the first view, sex differences are on a continuum, and it’s not particularly shocking to see a girl turning into a boy. In the second view, sex is binary and the differences between genders are grounded in biology and the male and female essence. The first view was prevalent in antiquity and the middle ages, and the second view is the one that still shapes our prejudices (remember Mars and Venus?).
The first part, about the era of the one-sex model (roughly from Greek antiquity to the Renaissance), felt interesting albeit a bit too long. On the other hand the part about the two-sex model felt too short and rather confusing. It started well by explaining how the old model became unsustainable due to the new imperative of explaining social facts scientifically. Something similar happened with race.
Aristotle and the others did not need to justify the inferior social status of women. It was self-evident and ordained by God or Nature. It didn't matter much whether the vagina really looked like an inverted penis or the uterus like an internal scrotum. The similarity was necessary to the higher order of things. The inferiority of women was a given, and the explanation was that they were too cold and humid to be proper males. But when a girl suddenly grew testicles as a result of jumping over a fire, it was notable but not that unexpected.
However, things changed when enlightenment came along and it was decided that all men were created equal. And women? If they were just like men with a vagina instead of a penis, how to explain that they did not have the same rights or the same place in society? They had to be essentially different, of course. And so, just like men before them had ignored obvious anatomical differences because they didn't fit into their model, modern men constructed another model of sex and then found "facts" to suit it. Something similar happened with race.
All in all, a very interesting read, and I fully agree with the author's conclusion that "the discourse on sex differences ignores the burden of facts and remains as free as a pure mind game" (probably not quite what the author wrote, as this is my own clumsy translation from the French translation). show less
Fascinating cultural history in the Western Hemisphere of the treatment and attitude towards mortal remains that suffers from a lack of direction. It reads more like a collection of essays about the cultural attitudes towards stiffs but it is not clear what begets what. Do the dead influence culture or does culture, science, theology, define how we treat mortal remains? Probably both, to be fair to the author.
Still literary and compelling in both scope and content. Not an easy read but show more worth the effort. show less
Still literary and compelling in both scope and content. Not an easy read but show more worth the effort. show less
The author believes dead bodies serve multiple purposes (cultural, places for bodies, preservation of names, cremation) so are not to be discarded, unlike Diogenes who told his friends when he died to throw his dead body over the city walls to let it be eaten by wild animals. The author’s purpose is to describe what death leaves behind through the dead body, and to stress the importance of necronominalism to humanity “to record and gather the names of the dead in ways, and in places, and show more in numbers as never before. We demand to know who the dead are. We find unnamed bodies and bodiless names—those of the disappeared—unbearable “ Laqueur’s magnum opus is both thought provoking and disturbing. show less
In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Laqueur argues that like sex (much like gender) has been invented and reinvented in response to an age’s particular social and cultural norms, and was not a result of scientific advances. He argues that over the course of medical history, there had been a shift from the one-sex model, where there was just one sex, and that differences between males and females were differences in degree, and not of kind, to a two-sex model. The show more one-sex model was, according to him, surprisingly long-lived because differences between men and women were externally accorded to different sexes, and not thought to be a function of a completely different body. Also, he argues that sex was linked to power, and man, at that time, was in all aspects really the measure of all things, including bodies, female and otherwise. The further argues that this was a point corroborated by the great sixteenth and seventeenth century anatomists—their representations of male and female genitalia as simply inverted versions of one another were correct in that they represented what these anatomists thought they saw, because representations are dependent on cultural ideas, and not necessarily on empirical evidence.
Around 1750, he goes on to say, sex was invented. The one-sex model was transformed into the two-sex model that states that men and women have different bodies and different characteristics that are a direct result of these two fundamentally different types of bodies (though, the one sex model lived on in the cultural imagination up to the present day). Again, he argues that this change was not due to advances in medical theory, but a result of a changing social, political, and cultural context. The differentiation (or not) between two sexes was never due to biology or what the status of medicine was at any particular time, but to “the rhetorical exigencies of the moment.” In the end, he argues, sex is an artifice, and always has been.
The problem, however, is that Lacquer grossly simplifies the matter. His one-sex model, especially, picks and chooses ideas from various philosophers and medical figures, and in the end, the patchwork he creates samples many, but adequately explains nothing. His book represents an elaborate attempt to demonstrate that attitudes about a person’s sex have changed over time, and that they have changed as the result of cultural and social factors, rather than strictly scientific ones. In this, he follows the work of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, but on a more specific level, he argues that, in opposition to Foucault’s idea that one episteme overtook and completely supplanted another, ideas of the one-sex model lived on, even in a two-sex model world. And it is at the level of this specific argument that the book ends up woefully unconvincing. Lacquer seemed so intent on adducing evidence for his thesis that he artificially imposes an order on pre-eighteenth century medical thought (that, in itself is problematic—any argument that purports to explain a swath of time from Aristotle to the French Revolution automatically raises red flags) that simply was not there. The book is provocative, to be sure. But the argument, woefully, is simply inaccurate.
http://coffeecoffeebookscoffee.blogspot.com/2011/12/review-making-sex-body-and-g... show less
Around 1750, he goes on to say, sex was invented. The one-sex model was transformed into the two-sex model that states that men and women have different bodies and different characteristics that are a direct result of these two fundamentally different types of bodies (though, the one sex model lived on in the cultural imagination up to the present day). Again, he argues that this change was not due to advances in medical theory, but a result of a changing social, political, and cultural context. The differentiation (or not) between two sexes was never due to biology or what the status of medicine was at any particular time, but to “the rhetorical exigencies of the moment.” In the end, he argues, sex is an artifice, and always has been.
The problem, however, is that Lacquer grossly simplifies the matter. His one-sex model, especially, picks and chooses ideas from various philosophers and medical figures, and in the end, the patchwork he creates samples many, but adequately explains nothing. His book represents an elaborate attempt to demonstrate that attitudes about a person’s sex have changed over time, and that they have changed as the result of cultural and social factors, rather than strictly scientific ones. In this, he follows the work of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, but on a more specific level, he argues that, in opposition to Foucault’s idea that one episteme overtook and completely supplanted another, ideas of the one-sex model lived on, even in a two-sex model world. And it is at the level of this specific argument that the book ends up woefully unconvincing. Lacquer seemed so intent on adducing evidence for his thesis that he artificially imposes an order on pre-eighteenth century medical thought (that, in itself is problematic—any argument that purports to explain a swath of time from Aristotle to the French Revolution automatically raises red flags) that simply was not there. The book is provocative, to be sure. But the argument, woefully, is simply inaccurate.
http://coffeecoffeebookscoffee.blogspot.com/2011/12/review-making-sex-body-and-g... show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 11
- Also by
- 5
- Members
- 1,120
- Popularity
- #22,934
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 8
- ISBNs
- 32
- Languages
- 10
