In 1990, classicists were coming to terms with Foucault's contention that the ancients inhabited a time Before Sexuality – the title of a book published that year, framed in relation to Foucault's History of Sexuality (D. Halperin, J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin [edd.], Before Sexuality: the Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient World). That same year saw the publication of T. Laqueur's Making Sex. Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, which argued that the ancients lived at a time not only before sexuality, but also before sexual difference had been established as a conceptual category. In the current book, K. critiques Laqueur's thesis.
Laqueur's book is one with a clear and simple central argument: in antiquity and right through to the end of modernity, men and women were thought to have the same genital organs, the difference being that men's were on the outside and women's on the inside. But then, sometime in the eighteenth century – Laqueur is unsure quite when – with the rise of modernity there came a shift to a ‘two sex’ model, which has prevailed ever since. K. explains when it was that she came to realise that she would need to take Laqueur's book seriously. This was at a conference in 2005 where she gave a paper on a medical treatise concerned with menstruation. Her paper made no reference to Laqueur because, as far as she was concerned, Laqueur's model was not relevant to her material. Yet members of the audience asked afterwards why she had omitted Laqueur and how she could make her evidence fit his concept of the one-sex body.
The current book is K.’s answer. She assesses and contextualises Laqueur's thesis; then she explores a range of ancient evidence to test the applicability and viability of this thesis. She shows what it was that made the model so appealing in the early 1990s, namely its fit with the then-current interest in sex as socially and culturally constructed. And she shows how, by identifying the eighteenth century as the time of the shift from the ‘one-sex’ body to a notion of sexual difference, Laqueur was able to slot his argument into the Foucauldian critique of the rise of modernity. As K. shows, also appealing was Laqueur's perception of a unified notion of biology. This – combined with the clarity of his thesis – gave it an appeal across and between disciplines.
K. sets out how much is wrong with the model, including its vagueness over when in the eighteenth century the shift occurred. She also critiques how Laqueur uses a model in the first place. As she stresses, there is nothing wrong with models per se – as ‘ideal types’ (p. ix) advocated by Weber they are useful ‘conceptual, comparative tools’ (p. ix – K.’s words). The problem arises when they come to be regarded as the reality. K. also appraises how the model has been applied in various disciplines. As she shows, a pattern has been for scholars to hold to the overall model, but to challenge its applicability to the area of their own expertise. The result has been challenges to specifics of the argument, but the model as a whole has prevailed.
Laqueur's model is clearly set out, while those of his critics have tended to be more complex and nuanced. The clarity of K.’s critique provides a refreshing counterpart. She shows how selective Laqueur is in his reading of classical antiquity; she also shows how over-simple he is in his reading of postclassical evidence. The main evidence discussed in her book could have been produced without reference to Laqueur – just like her 2005 paper. But, by presenting the evidence in the context of Laqueur's model, K. is able to address some of the issues that have helped the model to prevail. She provides two case studies, one concerning a patient, Phaethousa, the other concerning a practitioner, Agnodice, whose (intersex?) body is itself put on trial. Each of these stories challenges the concept of a ‘one-sex’ body in antiquity and also in pre-modern periods when they continued to be narrated. By a wonderfully nuanced reading of the sources, K. shows the hopelessness of squeezing evidence into either a one-sex or a two-sex model.
This book provides a persuasive challenge to Laqueur's model by uncovering how selective Laqueur is in his choice of evidence and in how he reads the evidence he does use. K.’s book opens the classical evidence to a more nuanced reading than Laqueur's framework allows. Indeed, it offers new ways to read ancient medical texts, including the non-canonical material that K. has already, in her previous publications, been instrumental in opening up to scholarly study. K. also helps make the case that a publisher will hopefully take seriously – that it is high time that the Hippocratic corpus was available in full in English translation. This is a timely book that interrogates a prevailing model. It is also a visionary book that should feed into the emerging fields of classical reception studies, medical humanities and transgender studies.
