Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Thomas Laquer writes, “By around 1800, writers of all sorts were determined to base what they insisted were fundamental differences between the male and female sexes, and thus between man and woman, on discoverable biological distinctions and to express these in a radically different rhetoric” (pg. 5). He continues, “The dominant, though by no means universal, view since the eighteenth century has been that there are two stable, incommensurable, opposite sexes and that the political, economic, and cultural lives of men and women, their gender roles, are somehow based on these ‘facts.’ Biology – the stable, ahistorical, sexed body – is understood to be the epistemic show more foundation for prescriptive claims about the social order” (pg. 6). Laquer proposes, “In these pre-Enlightenment texts, and even some later ones, sex, or the body, must be understood as the epiphenomenon, while gender, what we would take to be a cultural category, was primary or ‘real’” (pg. 8). Furthermore, “No one was much interested in looking for evidence of two distinct sexes, at the anatomical and concrete physiological differences between men and women, until such differences became politically important” (pg. 10). Laquer’s “goal is to show how a biology of hierarchy in which there is only one sex, a biology of incommensurability between two sexes, and the claim that there is no publicly relevant sexual difference at all, or no sex, have constrained the interpretation of bodies and the strategies of sexual politics for some two thousand years” (pg. 23).
He writes, “Anatomy – modern sex – could in these circumstances be construed as metaphor, another name for the ‘reality’ of woman’s lesser perfection” (pg. 27). Looking at the Renaissance and the work of Renaldus Columbus, Laquer writes, “The somewhat silly but complicated debate around who discovered the clitoris is much less interesting than the fact that all of the protagonists shared the assumption that, whoever he might be, someone could claim to have done so on the basis of looking at and dissecting the human body” (pg. 65). To this end, “The history of anatomy during the Renaissance suggests that the anatomical representation of male and female is dependent on the cultural politics of representation and illusion, not on evidence about organs, ducts, or blood vessels” (pg. 66). He concludes, “The ancient account of bodies and pleasure was so deeply enmeshed in the skeins of Renaissance medical and physiological theory, in both its high and its more popular incarnations, and so bound up with a political and cultural order, that it escaped entirely any logically determining contact with the boundaries of experience or, indeed, any explicit testing at all” (pg. 69).
Looking forward, Laquer writes, “The one-sex model was deeply imbricated in layers of medical thinking whose origins stretched back to antiquity. Advances in anatomy and anatomical illustration as well as further clinical evidence, far from weakening these attachments, made the body ever more a representation of one flesh and of one corporeal economy” (pg. 114). In this way, “The one-sex body of the doctors, profoundly dependent on cultural meanings, served both as the microcosmic screen for a macrocosmic, hierarchic order and as the more or less stable sign for an intensely gendered social order” (pg. 115). Laquer argues that the nature of sex “is the result not of biology but of our needs in speaking about it” (pg. 115).
In this way, “the context for the articulation of two incommensurable sexes was, however, neither a theory of knowledge nor advances in scientific knowledge. The context was politics” (pg. 152). Laquer writes, “Distinct sexual anatomy was adduced to support or deny all manner of claims in a variety of specific social, economic, political, cultural, or erotic contexts” (pg. 152). He concludes, “All but the most circumscribed statements about sex are, from their inception, burdened with the cultural work done by these propositions” (pg. 153). Furthermore, Laquer writes, “The two-sex model was not manifest in new knowledge about the body and its functions, I will argue here that it was produced through endless micro-confrontations over power in the public and private spheres” (pg. 193). Turning to Freud, Laquer writes, “The history of the clitoris is part of the history of sexual difference generally and of the socialization of the body’s pleasures. Like the history of masturbation, it is a story as much about sociability as about sex. And once again, for the last time in this book, it is the story of the aporia of anatomy” (pg. 234). show less

excellent...

Ganska svårläst men ändå läsvärd. Laqueur visar med olika exempel, framförallt antika och från 15-1700-talet att det fanns en enkönsmodell som senare ändrade sig till en tvåkönsmodell. Han fokuserar sig främst på medicinska rapporter.