Thomas W. Laqueur

Thomas W. Laqueur
Born Thomas Walter Laqueur
September 6, 1945
Istanbul
Fields History, Sexology

Thomas W. Laqueur (born 1945) is an American historian, sexologist and writer.

He is the author of Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation and Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud as well as many articles and reviews. He is the winner of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award,[1] and is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, located in Berkeley, California.

Career

One-sex model

Laqueur wrote that there was an ancient "one-sex model", in which the woman was only described as imperfect man / human and he postulates that definitions of sex/gender were historically different and changeable.[2]

This argument has been challenged by some historians of science, notably Katharine Park and Robert A. Nye;[3] Monica Green,[4] and Heinz-Jürgen Voss,[5] who reject the suggestion that ancient descriptions show a homogenous model, the one-sex model which then mutated in the 18th century to a two-sex model. They encourage a more differentiated perception that makes clear that gender theories of natural philosophy as well as biology and medicine, are embedded and constructed in certain social contexts.

Bibliography

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See also

References

  1. Database (n.d.). "Thomas W. Laqueur". MIT Press. Retrieved February 16, 2012.
  2. Laqueur, Thomas (1990). Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-54349-1. 25-63.
  3. Park, Katharine; Nye, Robert A. (1991). "Destiny Is Anatomy, Review of Laqueurs Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud". The New Republic. 18. S. 53-57.
  4. Green, Monica (2010). "Bodily Essences: Bodies as Categories of Difference" in Linda Kalof, ed., A Cultural History of the Human Body, Vol. 2: In the Medieval Age. New York City: Berg Publishers.
  5. Voss, Heinz-Jürgen (2010): Making Sex Revisited: Dekonstruktion des Geschlechts aus biologisch-medizinischer Perspektive. Transcript, Bielefeld.

External links