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book
BookPrinted Material
Author Laqueur, Thomas Walter.

Title Making sex : body and gender from the Greeks to Freud / Thomas Laqueur.

Publication Info. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1992.
©1990

Item Status

Location Call No. Status OPAC Message Public Note Gift Note
 Moore Stacks  HQ1075 .L37 1992    Available  ---
Edition 1st Harvard pbk. ed.
Description x, 313 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references in "Notes" (pages 245-301) and index.
Contents 1. Of Language and the Flesh -- 2. Destiny Is Anatomy -- 3. New Science, One Flesh -- 4. Representing Sex -- 5. Discovery of the Sexes -- 6. Sex Socialized.
Summary 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 master plots 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.
Subject Sex role -- History.
Sex role.
History.
Sex differences -- Social aspects -- History.
Sex differences -- Social aspects.
Sex differences.
Sex differences (Psychology) -- Social aspects -- History.
Sex differences (Psychology) -- Social aspects.
Sex differences (Psychology)
Sex (Psychology)
Sex (Psychology)
Indexed Term Humans Sex differences History
Humans Sex differences History
Subject Gender roles.
Added Title Body and gender from the Greeks to Freud
ISBN 0674543556 paperback
9780674543553 paperback
0674543491 alkaline paper
9780674543492 alkaline paper