| Edition |
First Harvard paperback edition. |
| 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.
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Sex differences -- Social aspects -- History.
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Sex differences (Psychology) -- Social aspects -- History.
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Sex (Psychology)
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| Indexed Term |
Humans Sex differences History |
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Humans Sex differences History |
| Added Title |
Body and gender from the Greeks to Freud |
| ISBN |
0674543556 paperback |
|
9780674543553 paperback |
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0674543491 alkaline paper |
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9780674543492 alkaline paper |
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