Thomas Walter Laqueur (born September 6, 1945) is an American historian, sexologist and writer. He is the author of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation and Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud as well as many articles and reviews. He is the winner of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award, and is currently the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, located in Berkeley, California. Laqueur was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2015.

One-sex model Laqueur wrote that there was an ancient "one-sex model", in which the woman was only described as imperfect man / human and he postulates that definitions of sex/gender were historically different and changeable.Laqueur, Thomas (1990). Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press. . 25-63.

This argument has been challenged by some historians of science and experts in Early Modernity, notably Katharine Park and Robert A. Nye;Park, Katharine; Nye, Robert A. (1991). "Destiny Is Anatomy, Review of Laqueurs Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud". The New Republic. 18. S. 53-57. Monica Green,Green, Monica (2010). "Bodily Essences: Bodies as Categories of Difference" in Linda Kalof, ed., A Cultural History of the Human Body, Vol. 2: In the Medieval Age. New York City: Berg Publishers. Heinz-Jürgen Voss,Voss, Heinz-Jürgen (2010): Making Sex Revisited: Dekonstruktion des Geschlechts aus biologisch-medizinischer Perspektive. Transcript, Bielefeld. Helen King, and Paola Uparela, who reject the suggestion that ancient descriptions show a homogenous model, the one-sex model which then mutated in the 18th century to a two-sex model. They encourage a more differentiated perception that makes clear that gender theories of natural philosophy as well as biology and medicine, are embedded and constructed in certain social contexts.

Bibliography

Books

Selected articles

"The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 54, No. 3, September 1982

See also

List of non-fiction writers

List of University of California, Berkeley faculty

References

External links University of California, Berkeley Department of History Faculty: Thomas W. Laqueur