[
Making Sex is] a brilliant documentation of difference between the one-sex and two-sex modelspresenting a simple theme with broad and cascading implicationsI 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 schoolchildNo 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 genderLaqueur 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 mutableAnd in this transformation, Laqueur emphasises, social changes were as crucial as medical teachings.
--Roy Porter (
The Independent )
Customer Reviews & Comments
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.
