The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century

by Catherine Gallagher (Editor), Thomas W. Laqueur (Editor)

The body in its cultural context has become a rich topic for interdisciplinary studies. This book brings together theoretically sophisticated and empirically revealing contributions that present the most advanced work in this new field.

Genres: History, Sexuality, Nonfiction, Gender and Sexuality, European History, Bodies, History Of Science

242 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Catherine Gallagher is an American historicist literary critic and Victorianist, and Professor Emerita of English at UC Berkeley. She has authored influential works including Nobody’s Story, The Body Economic, and Telling It Like It Wasn’t. Gallagher has received the Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Jacques Barzun Prize, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2020.

Reviews

[Madelyn]

“In the realm of sociology, there is the new status of women in large cities, subjected by work and urbanization to a certain sexual uniformity. The violent insertion of women into commodity production collapses both material (division of labor) and symbolic differences of sex. Women become mass-produced, widely available commodities with the ‘massification’ of industrial labor and society, simultaneously losing their ‘natural’ qualities (a feminine essence, a nature determined by child-bearing) and their poetic aura (beauty as the sublimating idealization that surrounds Dante’s Beatrice”