Project description
A closer look at historical notions of human sexuality
For centuries, the understanding of human sex and gender has undergone profound evolution. Initially, the ‘one-sex model’ depicted male and female bodies as existing on a continuum, later supplanted by the ‘two-sex model’ in the 19th century. However, Thomas Laqueur's Laqueur’s influential arguments in ‘Making Sex’ stirred scholarly debate, challenging this narrative. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme, the Re-Making Sex project reviews historical texts from 1600-1800 across Europe to shed light on the intricacies of sex determination and its societal implications. By analysing depictions of sex differences, hermaphroditism, and reproduction, the project reveals nuanced debates on anatomical similarities, sex ambiguity, and gender norms. It also explores societal anxieties, family dynamics, literacy, and sexuality.
Objective
"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."
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineanatomy and morphology
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
1010 Wien
Austria