Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud by Thomas LaqueurIn this historical analysis Laqueur critiques the influence of society on scientific research. By looking at how concepts of sex and sexuality change over time, Laqueur shows that many times science tries to map what it discovers onto prevailing notions of how things should be. This criticism of science shouldn't be taken as a condemnation of the scientific method, but a conscientious warning that science can sometimes be deeply influenced by the social meaning we give to the natural world.
"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 "masterplots" 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. The two plots overlap; neither ever holds a monopoly. Science may establish many new facts, but even so, Laqueur argues, science was only providing a new way of speaking, a rhetoric and not a key to female liberation or to social progress."
Why this is progressive/liberal: Challenging our "common wisdom" is a progressive endeavor. Studying sex and sexuality is more commonly undertaken by progressives than conservatives. Especially if that study suggests that everything we know about sex is wrong. This is an excellent introduction to how profoundly our concepts of sex and sexuality change over time.
A good companion book is How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz.
"How Sex Changed is a fascinating social, cultural, and medical history of transsexuality in the United States. Joanne Meyerowitz tells a powerful human story about people who had a deep and unshakable desire to transform their bodily sex. In the last century when many challenged the social categories and hierarchies of race, class, and gender, transsexuals questioned biological sex itself, the category that seemed most fundamental and fixed of all."
No comments:
Post a Comment