An Evolving Conception of Sexual Difference: Evaluating Thomas Laqueur’s Theory on the Emergence of a ‘two-sex model’ in the Eighteenth Century.
Keywords:
Sexual Difference, Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex, History of Gender and Sexuality, 18th Century Gender and SexualityAbstract
In 1990, historian Thomas Laqueur published his pivotal ‘one-sex, two-sex’ model. The theory outlines that before the 18th century, it was believed that there was but one sex. The relationship between the male and female sex was vertical, with the female being an inverted, less perfect version of the male sex. While the theory made waves in the sphere of gender history, Laqueur’s model has major theoretical flaws. It is built solely upon evidence from the ‘great men of Western canon medicine’, omitting female and homosexual voices. It stitches together pre-existing contradictory theories, dismisses important contemporary revelations regarding sex difference, and misrepresents the change in perception of sex that occured in the 18th century.
Downloads
References
Bibliography
• Cadden, J. (1993). Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Fisher, K. & Toulalan, S. Kate Fisher (2013), The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, 1500 to the present, Abingdon: Routledge.
• Harvey, K, (2004). Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hitchcock, T. (1996). ‘Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England’, History Workshop Journal, 41. pp.72-90
• King, H. (2013) The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence. London: Routledge.
• Laqueur, T. (1992). Making Sex. Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Laqueur, T. (2003). ‘Sex in the Flesh’, Isis 94, pp.300-306
Park, K. (1997). ‘The Rediscovery of the Clitoris’, in David Hillman and Carla
• Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge.
• Park, K. and Nye, R. (1991) ‘Destiny Is Anatomy’, New Republic. 18:2: pp.53-57.
• Paster G. (1993). The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Stolberg, M. (2003). ‘The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Isis 94, pp.274-299.
