Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud by Thomas Walter Laqueur 1990

This a bit meandering and my first post, I have been wanting to discuss this book from a gender critical perspective for a while. I stumbled on the book by random and found the content relevant to the current push to do away with the idea of female/male as distinct categories.

The primary theory in the book is that the very idea of opposite sexes (two-sex model as he refers to it) as incommensurable opposites rooted in biology is a recent development from the 18th century. Prior to that, he argues, Western philosophy held men and women to differ from an underlying nonphysical principle, and the body reflected this metaphysical difference rather than being the material cause (one-sex model). In this model, women were viewed as lesser versions of men.

"Historically, differences of gender preceded differentiations of sex."

"To be a man or a woman was to hold a social rank, a place in society, to assume a cultural role, not to ‘be’ organically one or the other of two incommensurable sexes."

In reading into the topic more I found that this book is given credit for popularizing the idea of "sex is a social construct" and referred to as "a bedrock of gender and sexuality studies."

One critique also praised it by saying: "To the extent that it has helped destabilize the notion of biological sex, the story’s impact has been undoubtedly positive." *

As Laqueur describes the book: > This book, then, is about the making not of gender, but of sex. I have no interest in denying the reality of sex or of sexual dimorphism as an evolutionary process. But I want to show on the basis of historical evidence that almost everything one wants to say about sex—however sex is understood—already has in it a claim about gender. Sex, in both the one-sex and the two-sex worlds, is situational; it is explicable only within the context of battles over gender and power. (chapter one page 11)

His conclusion is that "a two-sex and a one-sex model had always been available to those who thought about difference and that there was no scientific way to choose between them."

In his view, the change from one model to the other is not caused by scientific advances or attaining more facts but is driven by political ideologies. The two-sex model is described as coming into prominence with the Enlightenment as a way of keeping women out of politics. With the democratic ideal of all men having a voice and participating, if women are simply a variation of men, then what basis could there be to keep them out? But if women were not a variation of men, and were instead entirely different beings, then there was a biological and scientific justification for 'separate spheres'. But he also acknowledges that the idea of difference was used by feminists to argue for women's involvement in politics. Because if women are distinct from men, then it is not reasonable to expect men to be able to represent women's distinctly different interests.

The people who use this book to argue against a binary sex model come across as hypocritical, ignoring Laqueur's framing of both models as being culturally produced: > Two incommensurable sexes were, and are, as much the products of culture as was, and is, the one-sex model. (ch5 p.153)

He also describes the one-sex model and the culture around it in the following ways: > [the one sex model] was framed in antiquity to valorize the extraordinary cultural assertion of patriarchy. p20

The one-sex model can be read, I want to suggest, as an exercise in preserving the Father, he who stands not only for order but for the very existence of civilization itself. p58

the one sex model displayed what was already massively evident in culture more generally: man is the measure of all things, and woman does not exist as an ontologically distinct category. p62

Some of the criticisms of his claims have to do with the timeline, saying the shift happened earlier and less dramatically than he presents. That the two models have co-existed and there is no sharp contrast between when one was completely dominant over the other.

Right now seems to be a moment of shifting and competing ideological views on sex difference, so I was curious if Laqueur had commented. When I could not find anything, I thought maybe he had retired, but then found he is a professor of history at the University of California. It seems unlikely he is unaware of people being booed, fired, or accused of bigotry for stating belief in the binary model of sex.

You can read the book here

I would recommend chapters one and two if you don't have time for the whole thing.

Critique focusing on the timeline: A woman down to her bones, Michael Stolberg "As Joan Cadden and others have pointed out, the “one-sex model” was already contested in ancient and medieval medicine, and the historical divide between the periods when the “one-sex” and the “two-sex” model prevailed was less clear cut than Laqueur suggests."

A critique that seems rooted in queer theory that also praises it for questioning sex as a scientific category:

*[ Let go of Laqueur, Brook Holmes] (https://www.academia.edu/41336924/Let_Go_of_Laqueur_Towards_New_Histories_of_the_Sexed_Body_1) "the claim to fame of Making Sex is a narrative of radical historical rupture that makes the idea of biologically sanctioned sexual difference contingent, thereby undermining its status as a scientific fact immune to contestation and helping displace sex together with gender. Who wouldn't be on board with such a project? The numbingly crude politics of sexual difference—scientific findings on the “female brain” or natural deficits in men's capacity to nurture...have hardly gone away."