#thomas laqueur

[uranianrights]

"A large penis was thought to be comic in Ancient Greek art and drama, appropriate to satyrs, while the preferred size was small and delicate: "little prick" (posthion) was among Aristophanes' terms of endearment. Young athletes in Athens tied down the glans with a leather string, apparently for cosmetic reasons, to make the male genitals look small and as much like the female pudenda as possible."

-- Thomas Laqueur (1992) Making Sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud, p. 31

[uranianrights]

"In 1559, for example Columbus—not Christopher but Renaldus—claims to have discovered the clitoris. He tells his "most gentle reader" that this is "preeminently the seat of woman's delight." Like a penis, "if you touch it, you will find it rendered a little harder and oblong to such a degree that it shows itself as a sort of male member." Conquistador in an unknown land, Columbus stakes his claim: "Since no one has discerned these projections and their workings, if it is permissible to give names to things discovered by me, should be called the love or sweetness of Venus." Like Adam, he felt himself entitled to name what he found in nature: a female penis.

[...]

Columbus' colleagues, meanwhile, attacked him with equal vigor. Gabriel Fallopius, his successor at Padua, insisted that he—Fallopius—saw the clitoris first and that everyone else was a plagiarist. Kaspar Bartholin, the distinguished seventeenth-century anatomist from Copenhagen, argued in turn that both Fallopius and Columbus were being vainglorious in claiming the "invention or first Observation of this Part," since the clitoris had been known to everyone since the second century. "

- Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Thomas Laqueur

[uranianrights]

"In Aristophanes' story of the origins of men and women from two aboriginal, globular creatures who had either two male organs, two female organs, or one of each, only those who descended from the hermaphroditic form would "naturally" seek the "opposite" sex in order to achieve union. Otherwise, as Aristotle pointed out in the context of "what is natural is pleasant": like loves like, jackdaw loves jackdaw. In fact, reproductive heterosexual intercourse seems an afterthought. [...] "Love is born into every human being" the story concludes [...] But what we would call the sex of that human being seems of only secondary importance.

But where honor and status are at stake, desire for the same sex is regarded as perverse, diseased, and wholly disgusting. A great deal more was written about same-sex love between men than between women because the immediate social and political consequences of sex between men was potentially so much greater. Relatively little was directly at stake in sex between women. Yet whether between men or between women, the issue is not the identity of sex but the difference in status between partners and precisely what is done to whom. The active male, the one who penetrates in anal intercourse, or the passive female, the one who is rubbed against, did not threathen the social order. It was the weak, womanly male partner who was deeply flawed, medically and morally. His very counternance proclaimed his nature: pathieus, the one being penetrated; cinaedus, the one who engages in unnatural lust; mollis, the passive, effeminate one. Conversely, it was the tribade, the woman playing the role of the man, who was condemned and who, like the mollis, was said to be the victim of a wicked imagination as well as an excess and misdirection of semen. The actions of the mollis and the tribade was thus unnatural not because they violated natural heterosexuality but because they played out -- literally embodied -- radical, culturally unacceptable reversals of power and prestige.

Similarly, when power did not matter or when a utopian sharing of political responsibility between men and women is being imagined, their respective sexual and reproductive behavior is stripped of meaning as well. Aristotle, who was immensely concerned about the sex of free men and women, recognized no sex among slaves. A "woman," as Vicky Spellman puts it, "is a female who is free; a 'man' is a citizen; a slave is a being whose sexual identity does not matter. For Aristotle, in other words, slaves are without sex because their gender does not matter politically."

-- Thomas Laqueur (1992) Making Sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud, pp. 52-54 (emphasis mine)

Note that "sexual identity" here means gender and indeed all uses of the word "sex" in this text refer to it in the sense of biological sex.

[uranianrights]

"The commonplace psychology -- that men want sex while women want relationships -- is the exact inversion of pre-Enlightenment notions that, extending back to antiquity, equated friendship with men and fleshliness with women. Women, whose desires knew no bounds in the old scheme of things, and whose reason offered so little resistance to passion, became in some accounts creatures whose whole reproductive life might be spent anesthetized to the pleasures of the flesh. When, in the late eighteenth century, it became a possibility that "the majority of women are not much troubled with sexual feelings," the presence or absence of orgasm became a biological signpost of sexual difference.

The new conceptualization of female orgasm, however, was but one formulation of a more radical eighteenth-century reinterpretation of the female body in relation to the male. For thousands of years it had been a commonplace that women had the same genitals as men except that, as Nemesius, bishop of Emesa in the fourth century put it: "theirs are inside the body and not outside it." Galen, who in the second century A.D. developed the most powerful and resilient model of the structural, though not spatial, identity of the male and female reproductive organs, demonstrated at length that women were essentially men in whom a lack of vital heat -- of perfection -- had resulted in retention, inside, of structures that in the male are visible without. [...]

In this world the vagina is imagined as an interior penis, the labia is a foreskin, the uterus is a scrotum, and the ovaries are testicles. The learned Galen could cite the dissections of the Alexandrian anatomis Herophilus, in the third century B.C., to support his claim that a woman has testes with accompanying seminal ducts very much like the man's, one on each side of the uterus, the only difference being that the male's are contained in the scrotum and the female's are not."

-- Thomas Laqueur (1992) Making Sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud, p. 4 (emphasis mine)

[forislynx]

Istället anser jag att i dessa texter före upplysningstiden, och till och med i vissa av senare datum, måste könet, eller kroppen, ses som bifenomenet medan genus, det som vi skulle uppfatta som en kulturell kategori, var primärt eller "verkligt". Genus – man och kvinna – hade stor betydelse och ingick i tingens ordning; könet var en konvention, trots att den moderna terminologin gör en sådan omkastning befängd.

Thomas Laqueur, Om könens uppkomst: hur kroppen blev kvinnlig och manlig

[forislynx]

Därmed är inte sagt att en metaforiskt mjölkavsöndrande Kristus, vars blod livnär hans kyrka liksom jungfru Marias mjölk livnärde honom, eller ett Jesusbarn avbildat med kvinnobröst beredda att spruta ut mjölk ska ses som mer etnografiska exempel på samma fenomen. Men de tyder faktiskt på att i det enda könets värld var kroppen mycket mindre fastlåst och mycket mindre kringskuren av biologiska kategoriseringar än den kom att bli efter 1700-talet. Det är på inget vis klart var gränsen går mellan en mer moderlig, mer feminin Kristus som avsöndrar mjölk i religiösa avbildningar och män med mjölk i prosaiska etnografiska och kliniska rapporter.

Thomas Laqueur, Om könens uppkomst: hur kroppen blev kvinnlig och manlig

[forislynx]

Manlighet och kvinnlighet var [under renässansen] inte inneboende i något speciellt. Sålunda gav hermafroditer inte upphov till frågan "vilket kön de verkligen tillhörde", utan vilket genus uppbyggnaden av deras kroppar var mest lämpad för.

Thomas Laqueur, Om könens uppkomst: hur kroppen blev kvinnlig och manlig

[forislynx]

Faktiskt uppenbarade sig de galeniska, likformiga manliga och kvinnliga organen ånyo på 1850-talet som homologer: vetenskapsmännen upptäckte att manslemmen och klitoris, blygdläpparna och pungen, äggstockarna och testiklarna hade gemensamt ursprung i tillståndet som foster. Det fanns alltså vetenskaplig bevisning till stöd för det äldre synsättet om detta hade varit kulturellt relevant. Och omvänt var ingen särskilt intresserad av att granska bevis på två olika kön, anatomiska och konkreta fysiologiska skillnader mellan män och kvinnor, innan sådana skillnader blev politiskt viktiga.

Thomas Laqueur, Om könens uppkomst: hur kroppen blev kvinnlig och manlig