| Thomas W. Laqueur | |
| Birth Name: | Thomas Walter Laqueur |
| Birth Date: | 6 September 1945 |
| Birth Place: | Istanbul, Turkey |
| Fields: | History, Sexology |
| Workplaces: | University of California, Berkeley |
| Alma Mater: | Nuffield College, Oxford, Princeton University, Swarthmore College |
| Known For: | One-sex and two-sex theories |
| Awards: | Rockefeller Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship,[1] Cundill Prize in Historical Literature |
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,[2] and is currently the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, located in Berkeley, California. Laqueur was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2015.[3]
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.[4]
This argument has been challenged by some historians of science, notably Katharine Park and Robert A. Nye;[5] Monica Green,[6] Heinz-Jürgen Voss,[7] and Helen King,[8] 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.