Review: Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Laqueur argues that like sex (much like gender) has been invented and reinvented in response to an age’s particular social and cultural norms, and was not a result of scientific advances.  He argues that over the course of medical history, there had been a shift from the one-sex model, where there was just one sex, and that differences between males and females were differences in degree, and not of kind, to a two-sex model.  The one-sex model was, according to him, surprisingly long-lived because differences between men and women were externally accorded to different sexes, and not thought to be a function of a completely different body.  Also, he argues that sex was linked to power, and man, at that time, was in all aspects really the measure of all things, including bodies, female and otherwise.  The further argues that this was a point corroborated by the great sixteenth and seventeenth century anatomists—their representations of male and female genitalia as simply inverted versions of one another were correct in that they represented what these anatomists thought they saw, because representations are dependent on cultural ideas, and not necessarily on empirical evidence.

Around 1750, he goes on to say, sex was invented.  The one-sex model was transformed into the two-sex model that states that men and women have different bodies and different characteristics that are a direct result of these two fundamentally different types of bodies (though, the one sex model lived on in the cultural imagination up to the present day).  Again, he argues that this change was not due to advances in medical theory, but a result of a changing social, political, and cultural context.  The differentiation (or not) between two sexes was never due to biology or what the status of medicine was at any particular time, but to “the rhetorical exigencies of the moment.”  In the end, he argues, sex is an artifice, and always has been.

The problem, however, is that Lacquer grossly simplifies the matter.  His one-sex model, especially, picks and chooses ideas from various philosophers and medical figures, and in the end, the patchwork he creates samples many, but adequately explains nothing.  His book represents an elaborate attempt to demonstrate that attitudes about a person’s sex have changed over time, and that they have changed as the result of cultural and social factors, rather than strictly scientific ones.  In this, he follows the work of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, but on a more specific level, he argues that, in opposition to Foucault’s idea that one episteme overtook and completely supplanted another, ideas of the one-sex model lived on, even in a two-sex model world.  And it is at the level of this specific argument that the book ends up woefully unconvincing.  Lacquer seemed so intent on adducing evidence for his thesis that he artificially imposes an order on pre-eighteenth century medical thought (that, in itself is problematic—any argument that purports to explain a swath of time from Aristotle to the French Revolution automatically raises red flags) that simply was not there.   The book is provocative, to be sure.  But the argument, woefully, is simply inaccurate.