Thomas Laqueur

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Thomas Walter Laqueur (born September 6, 1945 in Istanbul , Turkey ) is an American historian of culture and science. His research focus is the history of sexology and the cultural approach to sexuality . Laqueur has taught history at the University of California, Berkeley since 1973 .

Life

Laqueur received his bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1967 and his MA from Princeton University in 1968 . He received his doctorate from Princeton University and Oxford University and completed his doctorate in 1973. He has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley since 1973, most recently as a (full) professor of history.

In 1999 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 2007 Laqueur won the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Achievement Award . In 2015 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society .

Act

Research areas

Initially, Laqueur did research on the social history of modern England, but soon he concentrated on the history of sexuality and sex research. Laqueur's latest research project is the history of masturbation . He is particularly interested in the question of why masturbation was viewed as a central danger in the 18th and 19th centuries and was combated on an educational, medical and psychological level.

Laqueur's work on sex research is influential in the history of science and philosophy. In the philosophy of sexuality, Alan Soble , among others, refers to Laqueur's constructivist interpretation of the history of biology and anatomy. In the context of feminist scientific theory and history, Londa Schiebinger has further developed Laqueur's theses.

The one-sex model

Illustrations of the vagina / uterus by anatomist Andreas Vesalius . The representation of the female reproductive organs in analogy to the male reproductive organs is noteworthy.

Laqueur is best known for his book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud , in which he describes the development of gender concepts using anatomical sources in particular . The central thesis of the work is that European culture was shaped by a one sex model over a long period of time. According to this model, female and male genital organs were not thought of as fundamentally different, rather it was assumed that the vagina was an inwardly turned penis . The other sexual organs were thought analogous to each other, such as the should scrotum the uterus and the testicles , the ovaries sector.

However, the one-sex model did not teach fundamental equality between the sexes. Initially, the female sex organs were interpreted as a less perfect variant of the male sex organs. The vagina should be turned inward from women's lack of heat, while male heat should push the penis outward. Gender differences were not explained by two fundamentally different biological systems, but by the lack of perfection in women.

On the other hand, Laqueur's talk of the one-sex model only refers to the biological gender and allows a radical differentiation of the sexes on a social level. Accordingly, in the original English it is also called one sex model and not one gender model (see Sex and Gender ). Laqueur's thesis is therefore that gender differences were essentially thought of as social differences up to the 18th century and not justified in gender biology : To be a man or a woman was to hold a social rank, a place in society, to assume a cultural role , not to be organically one or the other of two incommensurable sexes.

The two-gender model

According to Laqueur, the two-sex model is an invention of the 18th century. The female and male sexual organs are increasingly viewed as fundamentally different and given different scientific names. The change in the anatomical theory of the genital organs is only part of a general biological comparison of the sexes. Differences are now sought at all levels of biology - in neuroanatomy, evolutionary biology and even in cell biology. Gender biology now also serves as a basis for social and psychological gender differences, and gender biology thus becomes the basis for thinking about genders.

According to Laqueur, the two-gender model operates with incommensurable terms: "Woman" and "man" are thought of as fundamentally different principles that make the genders different in an irreconcilable way in biology, psychology and social roles. So the two-gender model is not just a new and better anatomical theory, but a new perspective (or paradigm ) on the sexes. Since the 17th century, this new perspective began to slowly supplant the one-sex model.

Philosophical interpretation

It is very important to Laqueur not to reconstruct the transition from one to two sexes as a simple story of scientific progress. The development of the two-gender model cannot be explained by decisive discoveries, it is rather a scientific revolution in the sense of Thomas S. Kuhn , which cannot be grasped with the help of simple falsificationist or verificationist models. Laqueur even explains in this context: I think that anatomy, more than physics, provides the paradigmatic case of Thomas Kuhn's argument that one cannot translate between theories across the chasms of revolution. (Eng. "I think that anatomy, even more than physics, is a paradigmatic example of Thomas Kuhn's argument that one cannot translate between the rifts of scientific revolutions.")

Laqueur's constructivist perspective is already hinted at by the English title of the work Making Sex : Modern bisexuality is not simply an objective scientific fact , but rather established to a certain extent by scientists: Sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented . (Eng. "Sometime in the 18th century, the known biological gender was invented.") Laqueur points out, however, that he does not want to deny the reality of biological gender differences, he rejects a general deconstruction of physical gender.

However, each is representing a perspective interpretation of gender and loaded by the cultural context. For example, the anatomical illustrations of the one-sex model are no less correct than the later images from anatomy books. Corresponding illustrations would be differentiated by emphasizing different aspects, the cultural context resulted in simplifications in different places. In the same way, the linguistic representations of the two-gender model are not simply more correct; new linguistic strategies have simply been used, such as anatomical terminology based on a fundamental difference between the sexes.

Criticism of Laqueur's one-sex model

Laqueur's description of a "one-gender model" and the radical demarcation from a "two-gender model" of our time were criticized soon after its publication. Katherine Park and Robert A. Nye (1991) criticized Laqueur's unifying descriptions for natural-philosophical gender theories of antiquity. They stated that ancient natural philosophical gender theories also had to be differentiated, a "one-gender model" as Laqueur explains, did not exist.

For the Middle Ages, for example, Joan Cadden and Rüdiger Schnell have pointed out that it is imprecise to assume that there was only one dominant gender model in the Middle Ages. In 1993 Cadden came to a different conclusion than Laqueur in her study of medieval gender constructs, in particular the notion of gender difference in medicine, natural philosophy and theology. Your research provides evidence for Laqueur's thesis of a "one-sex model", but also underlines that many sources show that not everything can be reduced to this model. According to Cadden, there were different ideas about gender in the European Middle Ages; Not only one but several theories can be identified, which are also interwoven with one another. There was also the idea of ​​a biological duality of the sexes.

In his study from 2002, Rüdiger Schnell criticizes the fact that Laqueur greatly simplified and thus recorded the history of medicine in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Before the 18th century there was not a uniform "one-sex model", but rather complex and permeable concepts. There was no change from a "one-sex model" to a "two-sex model", but a change from plural perceptions to a monolithic one (according to Micheler 2005, p. 33/34). (However, natural philosophical and biological gender theories have also been characterized by discussions and debates since 1800.)

Michael Stolberg (2003) also criticized Laqueur's (and Londa Schiebinger's) statements. Stolberg stated that it was already in the 16th century a. Z. clearly bisexual distinctions, u. a. of skeletons.

In the book "Making Sex Revisited: Deconstruction of Gender from a Biological-Medical Perspective", Heinz-Jürgen Voss specifies the criticism of a rigid demarcation of biological gender models, as made by Laqueur. Among other things, ideas of equality have also been shown in the biological gender theories of "modern" biology and medicine. Voss (2010) suggests to work out the diversity of biological gender models and thus to be able to take a closer look at their social integration - e.g. the partialities and assumptions of the scientists working there - better than before.

Fonts (selection)

  • Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780-1850 , Yale, Yale University Press 1976, ISBN 0-300-01859-2
  • Catherine Gallagher, Thomas Laqueur, edited with introduction, The Making of the Modern Body , Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press 1987, ISBN 0-520-05961-1
  • Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud , Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press 1990, ISBN 0-674-54355-6
    • German: written on the body. The staging of the sexes from antiquity to Freud , Frankfurt / Main a. New York, Campus 1992, ISBN 3-593-34623-0
  • Theater and trial. The death penalty in the USA , Berlin, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies 2002
  • Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation , Zone Books 2003, ISBN 1-890951-32-3

literature

  • Joan Cadden: Meanings of sex difference in the Middle Ages. Medicine, Science and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993.
  • Katherine Park, Robert A. Nye, 1991: Destiny is Anatomy, Review of Laqueurs Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. The New Republic, 18, 53-57.
  • Michael Stolberg, 2003: A Woman Down to Her Bones. The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries. Isis, 94, 274-299.
  • Rüdiger Schnell: Sexuality and Emotionality in Premodern Marriage, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna: Böhlau Verlag 2002.
  • Heinz-Jürgen Voss , 2008a: [Natural philosophical] genders in antiquity. In: Rosa, Journal for Gender Research (Zurich), 37: pp. 46–49. Online http://www.schattenblick.de/infopool/geist/philo/gpthe011.html
  • Heinz-Jürgen Voss, 2010: Making Sex Revisited. Deconstruction of gender from a biological-medical perspective. Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ [1]
  2. ↑ mellon.org ( Memento of the original dated December 29, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mellon.org
  3. ↑ Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation , see work
    * Lutz Sauerteig: (Detailed) Review In: sehepunkte 4 (2004), No. 11 [15. Nov. 2004]
  4. ^ Alan Soble: The Philosophy of Sex and Love , St Paul, Paragon House, 1998, ISBN 1-55778-716-6
  5. ↑ Schiebinger, Londa: The Mind has no Sex? , Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991, ISBN 0-674-57623-3
  6. ↑ MS p. 8
  7. ↑ MS p. 149
  8. ↑ MS p. 96
  9. ↑ MS p. 149
  10. ^ Park, Katherine; Nye, Robert, A. 1991: Destiny is Anatomy, Review of Laqueurs Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. The New Republic, 18, 53-57.
  11. ↑ Voß, Heinz-Jürgen 2008a: [Natural Philosophical] Gender in Antiquity. In: Rosa, Journal for Gender Research (Zurich), 37: pp. 46–49.
  12. ↑ Cadden, Joan: Meanings of sex difference in the Middle Ages. Medicine, Science and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993.3, pp. 3, 279-281.
  13. ↑ Schnell, Rüdiger: Sexuality and Emotionality in Premodern Marriage, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna: Böhlau Verlag 2002., pp. 71/72.
  14. ↑ Micheler, Stefan: Self-images and external images of the "others". Men covetous men in the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz 2005.
  15. ↑ cf. for example introductory: Voss, Heinz-Jürgen (2008b): Made for you: the social production of biological sex. In: Coffey, Judith / Köppert, Katrin / mAnN *, LCavaliero / Emerson, Juliette / Klarfeld, Roman * a / Müller, Daniela / Huber, Jamie / Emde, VD (eds.): Queer Leben - queer labeling? (Science) critical head massages. fwpf Verlag, Freiburg, pp. 153-167.
  16. ↑ Stolberg, Michael 2003: A Woman Down to Her Bones. The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries. Isis, 94, 274-299.
  17. ^ Voss, Heinz-Jürgen (2010): Making Sex Revisited: Deconstruction of Gender from a Biological-Medical Perspective. Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Laqueur, Thomas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Laqueur, Thomas Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian of science
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Istanbul