It was very interesting to see so many somewhat obscure topics connected together. It is honestly hard to place yourself in a world where the binaries we have now do not exist, but it is also such a fun pathway of thinking. The idea of the similitudes really helped me understand the framework that people were looking at the world through, and it then allowed me to better grasp concepts such as the one-sex model. Therefore, the idea of the one-sex model is much more understandable. It is still insane to me that they believed this, but I can now more clearly understand it. Since men wanted to be superior, of course, they would place women as just a subset of men. It reminds me a lot of Adam and Eve, which in a Christian society would be ever present in collective knowledge. Eve was made from the rib of Adam, and the one-sex model reminds me of this, where women are not women but just another inferior version of men. Women were, and still, are not allowed to be their own separate entities but just deformed and less than image of a man. It’s honestly quite interesting the number of subjects like the one-sex model you can tie back to Christian stories, or maybe I just do that because I was raised so deeply in it that everything to me connects to the Bible.
As a Biology Major, I know that scientists tend to see gender as a spectrum and sex as a general binary. Put another way, scientists tend to see sex as bimodal, meaning almost everyone fits into two extremes: male and female. Males tend to have testes, small gametes, XY Chromosomes, and produce more testosterone than estrogen. Females tend to have uteruses, large gametes, XX Chromosomes, and produce more estrogen than testosterone.
However, there are also a few people who fit in between. Intersex people can have both genitilia (such as an external penis but can still get pregnant). Many genetic conditions like Turner Syndrome (X), Klinefelter Syndrome (XXY), XYY Syndrome, and XXX syndrome also cast doubt on the chromosomal binary. These disorders can be debilitating and are very rare. Alternatively, someone can have Androgen Insensitivity syndrome, where someone can appear to be male or female, but are always XY genetically. These anomolies demonstrate that sex is better characterized as bimodal, not binary. Although they may be outliers, they are still important to consider when thinking about the current sex model.
On many accounts, it is much easier to be an artist today than it was in the 15-16th centuries. Today, we can simply pull up a quick Google search of an animal like a rhinoceros and have our pick of thousands of images to reference while we sketch. It doesn’t matter if we have never seen a rhinoceros before, as we can use the power of the Internet to guide us. Artists like Albrecht Dürer were not so lucky. Dürer, according to the video linked in the post, used a written description and sketch of the animal from someone who had actually seen a rhinoceros in Portugal. Upon first learning of the concept of the one-sex body, I was shocked that humans have ever been so wrong about something we are already so intimately familiar with, the body. But when we consider this in the context of artists working with few resources to depict something they had never seen before, we can relate this to scientists and doctors working with their few resources to create a picture of the human body. X-rays and in depth models of the human body had yet to exist. Rather, they used their own personal experiences, as well as religious and medieval texts to explain the human body. Perhaps in the future, historians will look back at our understanding of the natural world or human anatomy and realize that we were missing a few pieces of the puzzle shaped by our own misguided interpretations of the world, just like artists and anatomists of the Renaissance era were.
I have said it before and I will say it again - Thomas Laquer’s One Sex Model did irreversible damage in the world of medicine in relation to their treatment of women, treatment that still exists today. The intrusive means of studying women and their genitalia, under the guise of true scientific exploration, as well as the selfish lack of consideration for women and their feelings in the process, opened up the possibility for further exploitation. Selfish desires to ‘learn’ about female bodies while actively disregarding the desires of those who inhabit such forms is a trend that exists even today. Selfish medical practices such as experimentation on women and even administering clitoridectomies on them were furthered during the Renaissance but are not isolated to that period. Other selfish forms of medicine exist, one of the most terrible cases that immediately came to mind is the pervasive idea that black women do not feel pain, as perpetuated by slavery and racism in America. This has led to extreme abuse in the population, with childbirth or other surgeries being performed with no pain medication, sometimes resulting in death. All of these happenings, whether it be clitoridectomies in the Renaissance or medical malpractice with black female patients in the 20th century, are rooted in a blatant disregard for women.
The readings highlight the fascinating interplay between belief, representation, and the construction of knowledge in the Early Modern period, particularly in anatomy and natural history. Thomas Laqueur’s concept of “believing is seeing” underscores how deeply cultural ideologies shape scientific understanding, as seen in the persistence of the one-sex body model. Anatomists interpreted their observations through the lens of ancient texts, producing visual representations that reinforced prevailing gender and physiological assumptions rather than challenging them. This process mirrors Pamela Smith’s exploration of artists’ roles in shaping scientific knowledge. The labor and discipline required to create accurate anatomical and natural illustrations—often involving challenging techniques like casting a snake or capturing fleeting details—demonstrates how artistry and science were inseparably linked. These images, reproduced through the printing press, reached broader audiences, solidifying questionable interpretations as “truth.” These practices remind us how representations can perpetuate cultural biases, as seen in Kameron Hurley’s llama analogy, showing that repetition in media can overwrite direct experience. Together, these readings prompt reflection on how science and art have historically co-created knowledge, often shaped by societal ideologies that persist in unexpected ways.
This idea is a little difficult for me to grasp. I know it's 100% untrue, but it's insane that they were still trying to argue males and females were the same. There are very obvious differences in the reproductive organs of the two sexes. It makes sense that they would try to argue males as a dominant sex. Males WERE the "dominant" sex. It's interesting to read this now knowing that there are usually two sexes. How did they explain child birth? Did they just ignore the fact that ONLY women could give birth to children. They were literally studying bodies. They were looking at these peoples organs. They still came to this one sex model conclusion. Men and women are very different from one another. I think I also just may be biased because of what I know now. In Figure 18, you can see how different the reproductive systems are. They have vague similarities, but not anything to argue the one sex model.
This was something that blew my mind when I first read Laqueur back in the '90s. There was a lot of great gender historiography at the time that showed me that my own gender fluidity would have fit in then much better even than now. Compared to the '90s, today we are quite firm in our categories and seem to create more and more distinctions instead of fluidities. The value of understanding how categories and even systems for organizing knowledge change through these kinds of paradigm shifts is that it gives us choice and insights us to envision new systems for organizing power and relations between humans and with the rest of the planet.
I don't think they had the intention of misleading people. I think when it comes to studying bodies, all soft organs look very similar. I think the ideas of things being different might have been a little scary to them. They wanted to be able to fit everyone into one sort of categories. So if ovaries kind of look like testicles, they ran with it.
It was very interesting to see so many somewhat obscure topics connected together. It is honestly hard to place yourself in a world where the binaries we have now do not exist, but it is also such a fun pathway of thinking. The idea of the similitudes really helped me understand the framework that people were looking at the world through, and it then allowed me to better grasp concepts such as the one-sex model. Therefore, the idea of the one-sex model is much more understandable. It is still insane to me that they believed this, but I can now more clearly understand it. Since men wanted to be superior, of course, they would place women as just a subset of men. It reminds me a lot of Adam and Eve, which in a Christian society would be ever present in collective knowledge. Eve was made from the rib of Adam, and the one-sex model reminds me of this, where women are not women but just another inferior version of men. Women were, and still, are not allowed to be their own separate entities but just deformed and less than image of a man. It’s honestly quite interesting the number of subjects like the one-sex model you can tie back to Christian stories, or maybe I just do that because I was raised so deeply in it that everything to me connects to the Bible.
As a Biology Major, I know that scientists tend to see gender as a spectrum and sex as a general binary. Put another way, scientists tend to see sex as bimodal, meaning almost everyone fits into two extremes: male and female. Males tend to have testes, small gametes, XY Chromosomes, and produce more testosterone than estrogen. Females tend to have uteruses, large gametes, XX Chromosomes, and produce more estrogen than testosterone.
However, there are also a few people who fit in between. Intersex people can have both genitilia (such as an external penis but can still get pregnant). Many genetic conditions like Turner Syndrome (X), Klinefelter Syndrome (XXY), XYY Syndrome, and XXX syndrome also cast doubt on the chromosomal binary. These disorders can be debilitating and are very rare. Alternatively, someone can have Androgen Insensitivity syndrome, where someone can appear to be male or female, but are always XY genetically. These anomolies demonstrate that sex is better characterized as bimodal, not binary. Although they may be outliers, they are still important to consider when thinking about the current sex model.
On many accounts, it is much easier to be an artist today than it was in the 15-16th centuries. Today, we can simply pull up a quick Google search of an animal like a rhinoceros and have our pick of thousands of images to reference while we sketch. It doesn’t matter if we have never seen a rhinoceros before, as we can use the power of the Internet to guide us. Artists like Albrecht Dürer were not so lucky. Dürer, according to the video linked in the post, used a written description and sketch of the animal from someone who had actually seen a rhinoceros in Portugal. Upon first learning of the concept of the one-sex body, I was shocked that humans have ever been so wrong about something we are already so intimately familiar with, the body. But when we consider this in the context of artists working with few resources to depict something they had never seen before, we can relate this to scientists and doctors working with their few resources to create a picture of the human body. X-rays and in depth models of the human body had yet to exist. Rather, they used their own personal experiences, as well as religious and medieval texts to explain the human body. Perhaps in the future, historians will look back at our understanding of the natural world or human anatomy and realize that we were missing a few pieces of the puzzle shaped by our own misguided interpretations of the world, just like artists and anatomists of the Renaissance era were.
I have said it before and I will say it again - Thomas Laquer’s One Sex Model did irreversible damage in the world of medicine in relation to their treatment of women, treatment that still exists today. The intrusive means of studying women and their genitalia, under the guise of true scientific exploration, as well as the selfish lack of consideration for women and their feelings in the process, opened up the possibility for further exploitation. Selfish desires to ‘learn’ about female bodies while actively disregarding the desires of those who inhabit such forms is a trend that exists even today. Selfish medical practices such as experimentation on women and even administering clitoridectomies on them were furthered during the Renaissance but are not isolated to that period. Other selfish forms of medicine exist, one of the most terrible cases that immediately came to mind is the pervasive idea that black women do not feel pain, as perpetuated by slavery and racism in America. This has led to extreme abuse in the population, with childbirth or other surgeries being performed with no pain medication, sometimes resulting in death. All of these happenings, whether it be clitoridectomies in the Renaissance or medical malpractice with black female patients in the 20th century, are rooted in a blatant disregard for women.
The readings highlight the fascinating interplay between belief, representation, and the construction of knowledge in the Early Modern period, particularly in anatomy and natural history. Thomas Laqueur’s concept of “believing is seeing” underscores how deeply cultural ideologies shape scientific understanding, as seen in the persistence of the one-sex body model. Anatomists interpreted their observations through the lens of ancient texts, producing visual representations that reinforced prevailing gender and physiological assumptions rather than challenging them. This process mirrors Pamela Smith’s exploration of artists’ roles in shaping scientific knowledge. The labor and discipline required to create accurate anatomical and natural illustrations—often involving challenging techniques like casting a snake or capturing fleeting details—demonstrates how artistry and science were inseparably linked. These images, reproduced through the printing press, reached broader audiences, solidifying questionable interpretations as “truth.” These practices remind us how representations can perpetuate cultural biases, as seen in Kameron Hurley’s llama analogy, showing that repetition in media can overwrite direct experience. Together, these readings prompt reflection on how science and art have historically co-created knowledge, often shaped by societal ideologies that persist in unexpected ways.
This idea is a little difficult for me to grasp. I know it's 100% untrue, but it's insane that they were still trying to argue males and females were the same. There are very obvious differences in the reproductive organs of the two sexes. It makes sense that they would try to argue males as a dominant sex. Males WERE the "dominant" sex. It's interesting to read this now knowing that there are usually two sexes. How did they explain child birth? Did they just ignore the fact that ONLY women could give birth to children. They were literally studying bodies. They were looking at these peoples organs. They still came to this one sex model conclusion. Men and women are very different from one another. I think I also just may be biased because of what I know now. In Figure 18, you can see how different the reproductive systems are. They have vague similarities, but not anything to argue the one sex model.
Interesting connection to the movie!
Good connection to Foucault! I hadn't put that together actually. I'm glad you did!
This was something that blew my mind when I first read Laqueur back in the '90s. There was a lot of great gender historiography at the time that showed me that my own gender fluidity would have fit in then much better even than now. Compared to the '90s, today we are quite firm in our categories and seem to create more and more distinctions instead of fluidities. The value of understanding how categories and even systems for organizing knowledge change through these kinds of paradigm shifts is that it gives us choice and insights us to envision new systems for organizing power and relations between humans and with the rest of the planet.
Good work making sense of this difficult material!
I don't think they had the intention of misleading people. I think when it comes to studying bodies, all soft organs look very similar. I think the ideas of things being different might have been a little scary to them. They wanted to be able to fit everyone into one sort of categories. So if ovaries kind of look like testicles, they ran with it.
Yes! Thank you for pointing this out.
Good point!