"Nothing could be more obvious, implied the most influential anatomist in the western tradition, than to imagine women as men." The anatomist in question is Galen; the author of this provocative quote is Thomas Laqueur, whose book, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), is an important study about the formation of gender as a biological and social category.
The idea behind this theory was that the male external genitalia were, in females, turned inward, so that the scrotum became the uterus, the testes the ovaries, and so forth. Women produced less heat and so needed to keep the uterus inside for gestation. Thus there was one sex and two genders naturally distinguished within it. Men and women were thus anatomically opposed, as Laqueur writes: "One sex is strong and the other is weak so that one may be cautious and the other brave in warding off attacks, one may go out and acquire possessions and the other stay home to preserve them, and so on" (29).
This theory coincides in important ways with the idea that blood circulates spirits, since fluids both composed the body and were exchanged in sexual intercourse. Ejaculation expelled a fluid and restored a balance in the male (like sweating or bleeding); menstrual blood and milk, secreted from females, were part of the other side of the equation.
One can see the potential of these systems, as Laqueur says: they suggest that "conception is the male having an idea in the female body" (35). Laqueur's historical analysis is rich and worthwhile but also controversial. It demonstrates how deeply ingrained in medical observation gender divisions and hierarchies have been for many centuries. But some readers see it as an attempt to deny the biological nature of sexual division--that is, to obscure the real physical differences between male and female. Others observe that whatever other implications for the history of sexuality it might have, Laqueur's model is explicitly heterosexual and sets a heterosexual norm as the basis or origin of the discussion. What do you think, and how can you connect these ideas to the texts we've examined in class?
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