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.
Image credit: http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Laqueur/
Works by Thomas Laqueur
The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Representations Books) (1987) — Editor — 77 copies
Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and English Working Class Culture, 1780-1850 (1976) 6 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
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Istanbul, Turkey
- Places of residence
- Berkeley, California, USA
- 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
- Fellow, American Philosophical Society (2015)
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999)
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award (2007) - 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.
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Reviews
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 worth the effort.
… (more)
Still literary and compelling in both scope and content. Not an easy read but worth the effort.
… (more)
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 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.… (more)
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 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).… (more)
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).… (more)
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- Rating
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- ISBNs
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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 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).… (more)