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

Thomas Laqueur's provocative book makes a significant contribution to current discussions about the social construction of sexuality and gender. Drawing upon data from popular literature, midwifery manuals and anatomical handbooks in addition to many standard medical and philosophical texts, Laqueur "fleshes out" and moves beyond the insights of Michel Foucault and other recent social historians. For Laqueur, not just sexuality, but sex itself (i.e., the biological basis of manhood and womanhood) is subject to cultural and political forces. Making Sex is aptly titled: "sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented. The reproductive organs went from being paradigmatic sites for displaying hierarchy, resonant throughout the cosmos, to being the foundation of [an] incommensurable difference [between men and women]."

Methodologically, Laqueur is a cultural constructivist sensitive to the pleasures and pains of embodied existence. We find here a concerted effort to distinguish between representation and reality, between the body and "the body as discursively constituted. " While he repeatedly asserts that "the power of culture represents itself in bodies [and] forges them, as on an anvil, into the required shape," he also shares anatomical anecdotes from his own experience as the son of a pathologist and a one-time medical student and as a person concerned about injustice and the marginalization of women. Readers will be divided as to whether Laqueur's own ideological bias turns in upon itself.

Laqueur takes as his central historical problem the shift from a "one-sex model," which he claims predominated from ancient times until the Enlightenment, to a "two-sex model" of biological difference which modern persons accept as patently true. It is his depiction of the one-sex model which interests us the most here. By focusing his discussion on medical descriptions of female sexual organs as inverted versions of the male organs (ovaries correspond to the testicles, the cervix and vagina to the penis, etc.), Laqueur emphasizes that the difference between men and women was one of degree rather than kind. A socially prescribed hierarchy, in which women were viewed as weaker, more passive, less vital and less perfect than men, was inscribed on human bodies themselves. Despite biological discoveries which might suggest otherwise, this one-sex model continued to shape the discourse of pre-Enlightenment thinkers and writers. For Laqueur, then, "anatomy in the context of sexual difference was a representational strategy that illuminated a more stable extracorporeal reality. There existed many [sic: more than two?] genders but only one adaptable sex."

At first glance, this book may seem to have little relevance for scholars of early Christianity. The paradigmatic shift with which the book is centrally concerned occurs in the eighteenth century and is illustrated by such information as the relationship between female orgasm and conception and the depiction of female genitalia in late medieval medical writings. There is very little awareness of or interest in theological reflections upon body and gender by pagan, Jewish or Christian thinkers. Only one chapter (thirty-seven pages) is devoted to sources from antiquity and even here the discussion is limited primarily to certain writings of Aristotle and Galen, with only a passing reference to a few Greek and Latin fathers (Tertullian, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine) and an acknowledged dependence upon the work of Peter Brown.

The book is not without its problems. Laqueur oversimplifies the one-sex model: ancient medical and philosophical views about sexual difference were far more diverse than he admits, and even some of the texts he does cite need to be manipulated to fit his overall argument. And he occasionally reads too much into anatomical diagrams, offering tendentious suggestions about the intentions of medical illustrators.

Nevertheless, like the hammer and anvil image, Laqueur's pounding thesis won't go away. What study of early Christianity is not illuminated by the claim that in "pre-Enlightenment texts, and even some later ones, sex or the body must be understood as the epiphenomenon, while...