Re-Making Sex: Observing, Representing, and Explaining Sex Difference in Early Modern European Vernaculars

Since Thomas Laqueur's controversial arguments in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), scholars of gender history have debated the shift from so-called ""one-sex model,"" in which the bodily differences between male and female human beings were thought to exist on a continuum from a fully formed human male body to an inferior, ""less male"" female body, to the modern ""two-sex model"" at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Building on critiques of Laqueur's arguments, this project analyzes vernacular texts treating sex differences, hermaphroditism, and human reproduction circa 1600-1800 in German, French, English, and Spanish in medical and non-medical sources.

Although the ""one-sex model"" did not dominate premodern and early modern medical discussions of sex difference as Laqueur argues, in the learned Latin traditions taught in medical faculties in universities, European vernacular literatures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries paid special attention to specific visual and spatial analogies between male and female anatomies and debated the possibilities and implications of sex ambiguity and sex change.

The project analyzes how vernacular texts described the determination of sex difference, the extent to which male and female bodies were different, and in what sense, what the stakes were of failing to determine the maleness or femaleness of a body, and the specific social, political, and religious anxieties about gender roles and norms, the family, literacy, sexuality, and religious piety were expressed and developed in the discussions of sex difference and determination.