Customer Reviews

Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

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Joan Cadden's much more important and accurate book, _The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages_, opens by taking Laqueur's premise to task. And she's right to do so -- someone had to.

The problem is that Laqueur simplifies. He attempts to argue, based on little understanding of the complexity of medical models used either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages, that a one-sex model predominated in medicine. And while, to a degree, he's right, he's equally wrong. He would be correct if Aristotle's model of the human body were the ONLY one used either in antiquity or the Latin west. But Aristotle pointedly presented his model of gender in opposition to that proposed by the Hippocratics. Galen, who obviously knew both Aristotle and Hippocrates, then modified the idea of what constitutes sexual differentiation even further. After Galen, we have centuries of commentary and modification by Arabic scholars -- Avicenna predominates -- before we get to the Latin translations which spurred scholastic debate in the universities of the west. Their model of the body was not simple or limited, it didn't rely solely on authoritative sources from the past, and it never solidified into a unified theory. To argue that it did would rob these individuals of their collective rationality and treat them like amusing children -- something a historian should avoid whenever possible.

In order to create a readable and comprehensible text, Laqueur elided the complexities of the arguments common in the medieval universities regarding sex difference and reproduction in order to present his readers with a neat and tidy package. Whenever presented with a neat package in history, doubt the source.

Cadden's work is a direct refutation of Laqueur's. In it, she attempts to detail the confusing and complex model of sexual differentiation inherited by the Latin west from antiquity, including Galen's two-seed model and all the implications thereof. She furthermore attempts to demonstrate the application of these theories of gender and sex. She grounds her arguments much more firmly in the context of the time than Laqueur ever managed to do.

If you really want to understand pre-modern concepts of the body, set Laqueur aside and pick up Cadden instead. While Laqueur's model is a nicely simplified version of the past, the question has to arise -- when does simplification become distortion? How much detail about the past can be safely ignored in the name of simplicity before you create a useless model? But for those who only want a cursory investigation into the history of the body through a primarily medical lens, by all means read the Laqueur. He's far easier to read than Cadden. He's just not as reputable.

Baffling as it is, my book doesn't feature any imprint whatsoever. The bibliography clocks out with books of 1990 and amazon says it was published on February 1, 1992. Of the some 330 pages, 56 are reserved for the bibliography and far too many footnotes. Also integrated are 63 smaller black and white images, some of them too dark.

The book has many interesting historic concepts to offer. For example that the Greeks used tricks to make their penises appear SMALLER. That for two millennia the same name for homologous organs for "both sexes" was used, e.g. for what today is called ovaries/testes. That in Latin "vagina" wasn't used for what it means today, but additionally in good humor for "anus". That anatomic drawings were made in a way to make them appear the same for women and men (just inside and outside the body). And that at one point the mind was considered the self, which is bodiless, hence no sex difference of mind. However, as other reviewers have pointed out in more detail already, Thomas Laqueur presents the one-sex-concept historically too monolithic. Indeed, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine) is much more complex and should be considered obligatory reading, if "Making Sex" is read. Also of interest may be Nature's Body: Gender In The Making Of Modern Science and Mismeasure of Woman: Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite Sex.

I find "Making Sex" a bit difficult to read. It isn't the vocabulary. Compared to other books, I did not have to grab the dictionary for more than a dozen times. (Which didn't help me with "micturation", though. I had to browse the internet and stump even some dictionaries there to finally find the euphemism for "urination", whyever we need one...). Let's say, the writing style is rather dry and feels repetitive, even though it isn't REALLY. The author "just" repeats the same issues in the light of many epochs again and again. Which comes with the subject matter I guess, but that doesn't change the fact, that it isn't exactly a pleasurable reading experience.

Also, the book seems to be even more devoted to the connection (or not) of orgasm and conception than on the construction of sexes. The reader may get the impression at several points (including in the footnotes) that males do not lactate, even if mentioned that historic sources thought so. Well, the author is wrong on this one: Men are very much able to lactate and that in numerous circumstances, but in the early 1990s, this wasn't really accepted yet (again) in the West. Laqueur doesn't seem to agree as well with historic sources that the prepuce enhances lubrication. Which makes me wonder how to think otherwise. Putting aside the flawed continued chain of historic reasoning that this would be necessary for conception, clearly the prepuce distributes equally any lubrication such as preejaculate. Last not least there are no "races" among humans, and the N word should be avoided accordingly...

Laqueur argues that like sex much like gender, which is now recognised to change with the times, has reinvented by people throughout time. Societies and communities tend to construct categories by which they organise things, people and their societies; whilst, these categorical tools appear legitimate and obvious to the historical actors who employ them, historical hindsight effectively demolishes their innateness. Laqueur argues that sex is not something that exists outside of us but within us, something that is transformed and made by communities and not by nature. Lauquer suggests that ideas of sex can be separated into two groups: the single sex model which precedes the 18th century and the two sex model which follows the invention of sex (which he claims occurs in the 18th century). Further, Lauqueur claims that these changes in the conception and implications of sex changed as a function of society and were independent of scientific advances. Despite presenting a number of interesting case studies and examples Lauquer's evidence does not adequately support his thesis because historical knowledge challenges the one sex model; the lack of categories does not imply the lack of separate entities; the analysis of the implications of the language utilised by historical actors is problematic.
Reading Aristotle also suggests that at least him considered sexes to be separate. He compares slaves to women and implies that there are separate. The historical record challenges Laqueur's assertions because societies have frequently divided roles, and sexual mores according to sex.
Much of Laqueur assertions lay on the apparent absence of separate categories for men and women. He argues that throughout history women were seen as imperfect men, or inverted men (if we look at some of the dissection drawings made - it is clear from the similarities between vaginas and penises that they thought women were inverted males). Thus, Lauquer argues that women were considered to lack the heat required to be male. From this and the lack of different terminology (to which I'll get on later) he extrapolates that there was but one gender. However, he recognises that people were able to distinguish between man and women but the basis of this distinction was not there genitalia. Women were supposed to perform certain roles and also lacked heat; whereas men, who were seen as more rational and superior were expected to fulfil a different set of roles ergo men and women were separated and perceived to be different. While, the basis on which the distinction was made may not have focused on their genitalia the distinction existed and separated society into two groups; coincidentally (or not) once genitalia is used to separate the sexes along with their respective traits and roles the membership of groups does not change. Ergo, there is functionally no change; whereas prior to the 18th century (assuming Lauquer is correct) women were perceived to have certain characteristics and amongst those was their inverted penises; now, these same characteristics were perceived to result from the presence of said genitalia. We are left with a perfect correlation and a distinction that does not affect the interactions between said groups nor their composition but only their name.
Laqueur also explores the language used by historical actors and whilst language can be very important to understand how and what people thought its significance must be properly analysed. Laqueur argues that the fact that people used similar terms to refer to male and female reproductive organs means that these were not differentiated in the minds of those that utilise them. The fact that ovaries were referred as testes according to Laqueur means that these people did not separate the sexes. Alas, they (and may I add we still) refer to other organisms penises as penises; are we to extrapolate from this; that there is or that historical actors thought there was only one species? The fact we call these organs by the same name does not imply we consider them to be the same. Further, we still refer to some of these structures using the same names: gonads, gametes, secondary sexual characteristics; despite the fact we recognise that whilst these structures differ they are functionally homologous.

Thomas Laqueur discusses the emergence of the study and ideation of the corporeal body and the formation of social categorizations of gender from Antiquity to the Freudian Era. He argues that the one-sex body model, in which both "sexes" were considered versions of the male body, consumed anatomical, cosmological and "scientific" thinking until the Enlightenment Era. The Enlightenment, and especially the French Revolution, ushered in "the world of reductionist explanation" in which nature and "the flat, horizontal, immovable foundation of physical fact: sex," mattered most in terms of sexual distinction (151). The Revolution itself gave birth to a "genuine new feminism," but also "a new kind of antifeminism" that erected societal boundaries between the sexes (194). Sexual difference remained a "gender" or "social division between men and women" (155). Thus, the one-sex model continued to permeate notions of sexual relations and anatomy until the early 20th century. Laqueur thus claims "the ways in which sexual difference have been imagined in the past are largely unconstrained by what was actually known about this or that bit of anatomy," or various "physiological" processes. Instead, notions of sexual difference have long stemmed "from the rhetorical exigencies of the moment" (243). Thus, he argues that "gender" was "real," in its social construction of male dominance, while "sex" was "epiphenomenonal," or subject to interpretation.
Laqueur contends that pre-Enlightenment medical texts viewed the physical body as inherently male. The female body's sexual organs were simply an inverted version of the penis. Bodily fluids such as milk, blood and semen were of similar matter. Therefore, "the boundaries between male and female" were (and Laqueur would argue still "are") "of degree and not of kind" (25). This discourse, a "one sex model," supported by such prominent philosophers as Aristotle and anatomists as Vesalius, dominated anatomical and medical rationalization, as well as gender literature, for nearly two millennia. Thus, a female could become a male, for example, after strenuous activity that would cause her inner sexual organs to drop. However, a male could not become a female, since "nature tends always toward what is most perfect," the male body (127). "Man" was "the measure of all things, and woman does not exist as an ontologically distinct category" (62). Moreover, such an order to the cosmos of humanity played a social role, maintaining a male ordered society.
Not even the hard scientific, observable discoveries of the "Scientific Revolution" of the late 17th to early 18th century could overturn the one sex model, as linguistic categories of male and female predominated scientific observation. Although the Enlightenment focus on "nature" garnered a new era of recognition for the female body and politic, as well as a notion of "two fleshes" by the 19th century, the recognition was one of gender differentiation rather than sex delineation. Thus, Laqueur argues, in a vein similar to Foucault that gendered social categories (as well as the discourse and language such categories created), in which men held higher privilege than women, came to dominate Western culture while the one sex model remained. The two sex model was produced, Laqueur contends, "through endless micro-confrontations over power in the public and private spheres" over the course of the late 19th into the early 20th century (193). Moreover, 18th and 19th century beliefs that the female was "passionless" since she did not need orgasm to conceive played into notions of body heat (positive and male) as opposed to body coolness (negative and female). Even the writings of Sigmund Freud, Laqueur contends, indicate Freud saw a paternalistic order, since women possessed an "internal passive vagina," as an appropriate rendering of "socially defined roles" (241).
Laqueur's conception of the social categorization of the sexes, often through the lens of a paternalistically ordered social structure, fits nicely with Barbara Duden's chapter concerning "the perception of the [female] body." Duden examines the journal entries (over 1800) of Dr. Johannes Pelargius Storch, a male "physician" in the German town of Eisenach during the early to mid 18th century. Duden found that Dr. Storch consistently "struggled to force his own body concept into the scheme" of his prognoses of various female patients (106). Because physicians of Storch's era were not permitted to "open" bodies, doctors often examined external fluids in an effort to deduce the workings of the internal body. The internal body was "a place of metamorphosis," in which bodily fluids, especially blood, had to be kept in balance (109). Emotional reactions by women, such as fear, worry, jealousy or anger, caused what Storch labeled "mishaps," that could alter the blood balance in the body leading to various maladies including death. Moreover, natural, "cosmic events" such as the alignment of the stars or changing of the seasons could also cause women to experience various levels of illness, especially during the menses. Thus Storch tried to understand the female body "in the microcosm that corresponds to an order in the macrocosm" (177).

An excellent book laying and discussing the basics of gender creation in western culture. This book borrows heavily from "The History of Sexuality" by Michel Foucault. This book very explictly forms a general hypothesis of gender and doesn't fail to back it up with extreme detail, sometimes "ad nauseum". Overall a good read, though dense.

This book is absolutely fascinating. I recently wrote a paper on gender anatomy in the 18th and 19th century, and this book was my main resource. Laqueur has a clear and well written style as he describes the different theories on gender and sex throughout the ages and the rammifications of these theories in terms of culture and interpersonal relationships.

This book is covered with many glowing reviews. What none of them mention is that the author cannot write an intelligible sentence. Sometime in the 80's, perhaps due to the influence of that patent charlatan Derrida, it became fashionable to write lengthy, tortuous sentences using strings of polysyllabic undefined non-words. This book is firmly in that tradition. There may actually be valuable content here, but it's impossible to get at without subjecting yourself to a hideous reading experience. The author, like others in this prose tradition, seems unaware that his style invalidates his content. If he can't be bothered to write a clear sentence, why should we assume that his thoughts are clear? This book is a great opportunity wasted.