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Powell's Staff: New Literature in Translation: December 2022 and January 2023 (0 comment)
It may be a new year, this may be a list of new books, but our love for literature in translation hasn’t changed at all, and we are so pleased to be enthusiastically recommending these recent releases. On this list, you’ll find a Spanish novel where controversy swirls around a Coca-Cola billboard...
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  • Kelsey Ford: Five Book Friday: Year of the Rabbit (1 comment)

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Making Sex Body & Gender from the Greeks to Freud

by Thomas Laqueur
Making Sex Body & Gender from the Greeks to Freud

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  • Synopses & Reviews

ISBN13: 9780674543553
ISBN10: 0674543556



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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

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 "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. Making Sex ends with Freud, who denied the neurological evidence to insist that, as a girl becomes a woman, the locus of her sexual pleasure shifts from the clitoris to the vagina; she becomes what culture demands despite, not because of, the body. Turning Freud's famous dictum around, Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice.

This is a powerful story, written with verve and a keen sense of telling detail (be it technically rigorous or scabrously fanciful). Making Sex will stimulate thought, whether argument or surprised agreement, in a wide range of readers.

Review

[Making Sex is] a brilliant documentation of difference between the one-sex and two-sex models...presenting a simple theme with broad and cascading implications...I didn't need Laqueur to teach me that sex was interesting, but now I have a broader base for this greatest of certainties. Stephen Jay Gould

Review

[Laqueur] gives us an excellent sense of how our predecessors, including physicians and scientists, thought about the anatomy that fascinates every schoolchild...No one can doubt, after reading this book, that our notions of masculinity or femininity have been imposed on what are supposed to be objective biological observations. New York Review of Books

Review

[In this] challenging analysis of our ideas on gender...Laqueur shows how radically our consciousness of ourselves, our bodies, our sex has changed over the centuries. The categories we think of as most basic turn out to be mutable...And in this transformation, Laqueur emphasises, social changes were as crucial as medical teachings. Melvin Konner - New York Times Book Review

Synopsis

Thomas Laqueur is Recipient of the 2007 Andrew W. Mellion Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award

Table of 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

Notes

Credits

Index


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Product Details

ISBN:
9780674543553
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
02/01/1992
Publisher:
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Pages:
336
Height:
.80IN
Width:
6.40IN
Thickness:
1.00
Number of Units:
1
Copyright Year:
1992
UPC Code:
2800674543555
Author:
Thomas Laqueur
Author:
Thomas Walter Laqueur
Author:
Thomas Walter Laqueur
Subject:
Gender Studies-General
Subject:
Sex education
Subject:
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies
Subject:
Psychology
Subject:
Science -- History.

Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$45.33
New Trade Paperback
Available at a Remote Warehouse. Ships separately from other items. Additional shipping charges may apply. Not available for In Store Pickup. More Info
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20Remote Warehouse
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