One-Sex, Two-Sex, or …?: Thinking About the Sexed Body in History

Bodies, Episode #1 of 3. Historian Thomas Lacquer’s 1992 Making Sex argues that the one sex model dominated ancient and medieval medicine and popular ideas of sex, until, approximately, the Enlightenment, which gradually dispelled the one sex model in favor of the two-sex model--the strict dimorphic binary of sex, male and female, that most people are probably familiar with today. While numerous historians, and particularly historians of the ancient and medieval periods, have challenged the scope and specifics of Lacquer’s thesis, the revolution in gender history that his work prompted is undeniable. To kick off this series on Bodies, we’re going to talk about the history of how sex - or the meaning and value ascribed to genitals - was socially and scientifically constructed and reconstructed in Europe over the last two thousand years.

For a full transcript, bibliography, and more, visit digpodcast.org

Select Bibliography

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990). 

Joan Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Routledge, 2013). 

Thomas Lacquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1992)

Elizabeth Reis, Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex (John Hopkins Press, 2021)

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