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Thomas W. Laqueur

Born

in Istanbul, Turkey

September 06, 1945

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Thomas W. Laqueur 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 and is Professor of History at the University of California. ...more

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Average rating: 3.85 · 1,399 ratings · 132 reviews · 10 distinct works • Similar authors

	Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud 3.91 avg rating — 757 ratings — published 1990 — 20 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation 3.80 avg rating — 203 ratings — published 2003 — 17 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains 3.96 avg rating — 181 ratings — published 2015 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry by Michael Ignatieff, Kwame Anthony Appiah (Commentary), David A. Hollinger (Commentary) 3.63 avg rating — 183 ratings — published 2001 — 19 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Dog's Gaze: A Visual History 3.75 avg rating — 53 ratings — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader by Susan Brownell (Editor), Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (Editor), Thomas W. Laqueur (Foreword) 3.83 avg rating — 29 ratings — published 2001 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century by Catherine Gallagher (Editor), Thomas W. Laqueur (Editor) 3.58 avg rating — 31 ratings — published 1986 — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Rethinking Masculinity: Philosophical Explorations in Light of Feminism by Larry May, Robert Strikwerda (Editor), Patrick D. Hopkins (Editor) 3.60 avg rating — 5 ratings — published 1992 — 9 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Religion and respectability: Sunday schools and working class culture, 1780-1850 liked it 3.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1976 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	oi kata monas idones / οι κατά μόνας ηδονές 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Thomas W. Laqueur (?)

“The falseness of the seventeenth century became a large measure of the truth by the nineteenth. Money made the man, or at least went a long way toward doing so; and death became the occasion for a final accounting, a stocktaking of worldly success. Of course, there were other metrics: virtue, martyrdom, political standing, fraternal ties. But it took money to publicize them. The funeral became more and more a standardized commodity whose cost could be matched with exquisite precision to the class and degree of 'respectability' of the deceased. When one bought a funeral, one bought a more or less splendid parade, each additional bauble, each horse, each feather or set of nails adding to the base price. Bit by bit, finery accumulated, and by looking at the account books of an undertaker who specialized in pauper funerals, we can begin to see the bounds of decency in death.”
― Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains

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“By 1850, the pauper funeral had become perhaps the dominant representation of that vulnerability, of the possibility of falling irrevocably from the grace of society, of exclusion from the values of one's culture. It was an image that worked on the poor; they would, as one observer put it, "sell their beds out from under them sooner than have parish funerals." Anxiety about pauper burial did not, of course, stand alone in drawing - pushing might be the better verb - the poor into industrial civilization, but ignominious burial was one of the most powerful ways in which the relationship between money and standing was made manifest, a metaphor for the meaning of consumption, a vehicle for the creation of desire that made the new economic order possible.”
― Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains

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“Onania had legs, as they say in publishing. Even after two of its publishers died, it kept going. But its monopoly on masturbation was short-lived; others moved in to make the private vice ever more public and profitable. Next in the field, in the mid-1720s, was the most successful of London's quack-medicine establishments, led by the famous Mrs. Garroway, scion of the well-known coffeehouse family. From a secure base in "Dr. Chamberlayne's Anodyne Necklace for Children's Teeth" and a subsidiary line that included gout cures, purging sugarplums, ague plasters, saffron drops, and ophthalmic tobacco that the firm made, sold, and advertised lavishly, she branched out into the self-pollution business. The whole array -her new cure for the newly discovered masturbatory disease and the old standbys could be had in London or the provinces, retail and wholesale, in person and by mail. Hundreds of pamphlets, each slightly different from the others, as well as weekly notices in newspapers, spread the fame of this wide-ranging pharmacopoeia and of onanism. In short, others rushed into the niche that Onania had pioneered.”
― Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation

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