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Sto caricando le informazioni... L'identità sessuale dai Greci a Freuddi Thomas Laqueur
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Laqueur argues that like sex (much like gender) has been invented and reinvented in response to an age’s particular social and cultural norms, and was not a result of scientific advances. He argues that over the course of medical history, there had been a shift from the one-sex model, where there was just one sex, and that differences between males and females were differences in degree, and not of kind, to a two-sex model. The one-sex model was, according to him, surprisingly long-lived because differences between men and women were externally accorded to different sexes, and not thought to be a function of a completely different body. Also, he argues that sex was linked to power, and man, at that time, was in all aspects really the measure of all things, including bodies, female and otherwise. The further argues that this was a point corroborated by the great sixteenth and seventeenth century anatomists—their representations of male and female genitalia as simply inverted versions of one another were correct in that they represented what these anatomists thought they saw, because representations are dependent on cultural ideas, and not necessarily on empirical evidence. Around 1750, he goes on to say, sex was invented. The one-sex model was transformed into the two-sex model that states that men and women have different bodies and different characteristics that are a direct result of these two fundamentally different types of bodies (though, the one sex model lived on in the cultural imagination up to the present day). Again, he argues that this change was not due to advances in medical theory, but a result of a changing social, political, and cultural context. The differentiation (or not) between two sexes was never due to biology or what the status of medicine was at any particular time, but to “the rhetorical exigencies of the moment.” In the end, he argues, sex is an artifice, and always has been. The problem, however, is that Lacquer grossly simplifies the matter. His one-sex model, especially, picks and chooses ideas from various philosophers and medical figures, and in the end, the patchwork he creates samples many, but adequately explains nothing. His book represents an elaborate attempt to demonstrate that attitudes about a person’s sex have changed over time, and that they have changed as the result of cultural and social factors, rather than strictly scientific ones. In this, he follows the work of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, but on a more specific level, he argues that, in opposition to Foucault’s idea that one episteme overtook and completely supplanted another, ideas of the one-sex model lived on, even in a two-sex model world. And it is at the level of this specific argument that the book ends up woefully unconvincing. Lacquer seemed so intent on adducing evidence for his thesis that he artificially imposes an order on pre-eighteenth century medical thought (that, in itself is problematic—any argument that purports to explain a swath of time from Aristotle to the French Revolution automatically raises red flags) that simply was not there. The book is provocative, to be sure. But the argument, woefully, is simply inaccurate. http://coffeecoffeebookscoffee.blogspot.com/2011/12/review-making-sex-body-and-g... nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
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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 insistthat, 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. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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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). ( )