In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Thomas Laquer writes, “By around 1800, writers of all sorts were determined to base what they insisted were fundamental differences between the male and female sexes, and thus between man and woman, on discoverable biological distinctions and to express these in a radically different rhetoric” (pg. 5). He continues, “The dominant, though by no means universal, view since the eighteenth century has been that there are two stable, incommensurable, opposite sexes and that the political, economic, and cultural lives of men and women, their gender roles, are somehow based on these ‘facts.’ Biology – the stable, ahistorical, sexed body – is understood to be the epistemic foundation for prescriptive claims about the social order” (pg. 6). Laquer proposes, “In these pre-Enlightenment texts, and even some later ones, 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’” (pg. 8). Furthermore, “No one was much interested in looking for evidence of two distinct sexes, at the anatomical and concrete physiological differences between men and women, until such differences became politically important” (pg. 10). Laquer’s “goal is to show how a biology of hierarchy in which there is only one sex, a biology of incommensurability between two sexes, and the claim that there is no publicly relevant sexual difference at all, or no sex, have constrained the interpretation of bodies and the strategies of sexual politics for some two thousand years” (pg. 23).
He writes, “Anatomy – modern sex – could in these circumstances be construed as metaphor, another name for the ‘reality’ of woman’s lesser perfection” (pg. 27). Looking at the Renaissance and the work of Renaldus Columbus, Laquer writes, “The somewhat silly but complicated debate around who discovered the clitoris is much less interesting than the fact that all of the protagonists shared the assumption that, whoever he might be, someone could claim to have done so on the basis of looking at and dissecting the human body” (pg. 65). To this end, “The history of anatomy during the Renaissance suggests that the anatomical representation of male and female is dependent on the cultural politics of representation and illusion, not on evidence about organs, ducts, or blood vessels” (pg. 66). He concludes, “The ancient account of bodies and pleasure was so deeply enmeshed in the skeins of Renaissance medical and physiological theory, in both its high and its more popular incarnations, and so bound up with a political and cultural order, that it escaped entirely any logically determining contact with the boundaries of experience or, indeed, any explicit testing at all” (pg. 69).
Looking forward, Laquer writes, “The one-sex model was deeply imbricated in layers of medical thinking whose origins stretched back to antiquity. Advances in anatomy and anatomical illustration as well as further clinical evidence, far from weakening these attachments, made the body ever more a representation of one flesh and of one corporeal economy” (pg. 114). In this way, “The one-sex body of the doctors, profoundly dependent on cultural meanings, served both as the microcosmic screen for a macrocosmic, hierarchic order and as the more or less stable sign for an intensely gendered social order” (pg. 115). Laquer argues that the nature of sex “is the result not of biology but of our needs in speaking about it” (pg. 115).
In this way, “the context for the articulation of two incommensurable sexes was, however, neither a theory of knowledge nor advances in scientific knowledge. The context was politics” (pg. 152). Laquer writes, “Distinct sexual anatomy was adduced to support or deny all manner of claims in a variety of specific social, economic, political, cultural, or erotic contexts” (pg. 152). He concludes, “All but the most circumscribed statements about sex are, from their inception, burdened with the cultural work done by these propositions” (pg. 153). Furthermore, Laquer writes, “The two-sex model was not manifest in new knowledge about the body and its functions, I will argue here that it was produced through endless micro-confrontations over power in the public and private spheres” (pg. 193). Turning to Freud, Laquer writes, “The history of the clitoris is part of the history of sexual difference generally and of the socialization of the body’s pleasures. Like the history of masturbation, it is a story as much about sociability as about sex. And once again, for the last time in this book, it is the story of the aporia of anatomy” (pg. 234). ( )