Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Hardcover)

~ Thomas Laqueur (Author)
Key Phrases: external pudenda, fungible fluids, incommensurable sexes, William Harvey, Jacques Duval, Albrecht von Haller (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

[Making Sex is] a brilliant documentation of difference between the one-sex and two-sex models...presenting a simple theme with broad and cascading implications...I didn't need Laqueur to teach me that sex was interesting, but now I have a broader base for this greatest of certainties.
--Stephen Jay Gould (New York Review of Books )

[Laqueur] gives us an excellent sense of how our predecessors, including physicians and scientists, thought about the anatomy that fascinates every schoolchild...No one can doubt, after reading this book, that our notions of masculinity or femininity have been imposed on what are supposed to be objective biological observations.
--Melvin Konner (New York Times Book Review )

[In this] challenging analysis of our ideas on gender...Laqueur shows how radically our consciousness of ourselves, our bodies, our sex has changed over the centuries. The categories we think of as most basic turn out to be mutable...And in this transformation, Laqueur emphasises, social changes were as crucial as medical teachings.
--Roy Porter (The Independent )

Product Description

This is a book about the making and unmaking of sex over the centuries. It tells the astonishing story of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns in a precise account of developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology. We cannot fail to recognize the players in Thomas Laqueur's story--the human sexual organs and pleasures, food, blood, semen, egg, sperm--but we will be amazed at the plots into which they have been woven by scientists, political activists, literary figures, and theorists of every stripe.

Laqueur begins with the question of why, in the late eighteenth century, woman's orgasm came to be regarded as irrelevant to conception, and he then proceeds to retrace the dramatic changes in Western views of sexual characteristics over two millennia. Along the way, two "masterplots" emerge. In the one-sex story, woman is an imperfect version of man, and her anatomy and physiology are construed accordingly: the vagina is seen as an interior penis, the womb as a scrotum, the ovaries as testicles. The body is thus a representation, not the foundation, of social gender. The second plot tends to dominate post-Enlightenment thinking while the one-sex model is firmly rooted in classical learning. The two-sex story says that the body determines gender differences, that woman is the opposite of man with incommensurably different organs, functions, and feelings. The two plots overlap; neither ever holds a monopoly. Science may establish many new facts, but even so, Laqueur argues, science was only providing a new way of speaking, a rhetoric and not a key to female liberation or to social progress. Making Sex ends with Freud, who denied the neurological evidence to insist that, as a girl becomes a woman, the locus of her sexual pleasure shifts from the clitoris to the vagina; she becomes what culture demands despite, not because of, the body. Turning Freud's famous dictum around, Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice.

This is a powerful story, written with verve and a keen sense of telling detail (be it technically rigorous or scabrously fanciful). Making Sex will stimulate thought, whether argument or surprised agreement, in a wide range of readers.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (October 15, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674543491
• ISBN-13: 978-0674543492
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,734,295 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Good Read If You Don't Know Medical History, February 19, 2004

By	Renee L. Goethe "hroswitha" (Iowa City, Iowa USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Paperback)

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.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Much Worthy Information, Too Monolithic Presentation of Thesis and Somewhat Difficult to Read, April 14, 2009

By	Bonam Pak (Berlin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Paperback)

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...

9 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Foucault 101, July 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Paperback)

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.