Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (review)

270 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:3 Thomas Laqueur. Making Sex: Body and Genderfrom the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge , MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. ? + 313pp. US$27.95. ISBN 0-674-54349-1. Although there are, alas, virtually no allusions to eighteenth-century fiction in this book, Making Sex—despite its lurid title—is a crucial contribution to the burgeoning discourse concerning "gender and science" which bears upon the origins of the novel and the shifting representations of gender in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book will make a stir, and has already received a highly favourable and informative review by Stephen Jay Gould in the New York Review of Books (13 June 1991). Making Sex is in some ways the fullest and most powerful statement to date of a new orthodoxy in the history of interpretation, the newest "new historicist" formulation—here in the genre of the history of science—of Clifford Geertz's dictum that 'There is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture" (quoted in that manifesto of new historicism, Stephen J. Greenblatt's introduction to Renaissance Self-Fashioning). Laqueur's book will augment and deepen the movement in literary criticism and theory of the last twenty years from preoccupations with the construction of "the Self to the construction of "the Body," especially the sexual body. Since the terms "one-sex" and "two-sex" models of human sexuality are likely to become part of the vocabulary of gender for the foreseeable future, I will give a brief summary of Laqueur's argument, then offer some demurrals. After beginning with the obligatory new-historicist paradigm story (this time the tale of the girl who becomes pregnant without knowing it), Laqueur outlines the thesis that a "one-sex" model of male/female nature prevailed in Western history from the time of the Greeks until—in a sentence to conjure with—"Sometime in the eighteenth century sex as we know it was invented" (p. 149). His argument is vividly developed and impressively documented with examples, chiefly medical, from many sources—the classical world, the Renaissance, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and modern scholarship—with many well-annotated illustrations. The one-sex model, which owed something to Aristotle's definition of the female as a "deformed" male, was most comprehensively and influentially described by Galen in the second century. He "demonstrated at length that women were essentially men in whom a lack of vital heat—of perfection—had resulted in the retention, inside, of structures that in the male are visible without ... the vagina is imagined as an interior penis, the labia as foreskin, the uterus as scrotum, and the ovaries as testicles" (p. 4). This hoary doctrine of course has long been recognized, but no one has yet discussed it so fully and so provocatively in the context of what Laqueur describes as "the intellectual revolution wrought by feminism since World War u and especially during the past twenty years" (Preface). At the centre of Laqueur's enterprise is a revision of the conventional feminist position (and one that in 1992 is not far from the prevailing view in gender studies) that while one's sex is determined by one's anatomical constitution, the ideas of masculine and feminine gender are largely, if not entirely, constructed by a predominantly patriarchal system of cultural values. Laqueur, however, outdoes even most feminist theorists by proposing that before the Enlightenment, "sex, or the body, must be understood as the epiphenomenon, while gender, what we would take to be a cultural category, was primary or 'real.' Gender—man and woman—mattered a great deal and was part of the order of things; sex was conventional ... what we call sex and gender were in the 'one-sex model' explicitly bound up in a circle of meanings from which escape to a supposed biological substrate—the strategy of the Enlightenment—was impossible. ... 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. Sex before REVIEWS 271 the seventeenth century, in other words, was still a sociological and...