One-Sex, Two-Sex, or …?: Thinking About the Sexed Body in History

Historian Thomas Lacquer’s 1992 Making Sex argues that the one sex model dominated ancient and medieval medicine and popular ideas of sex, until, approximately, the Enlightenment, which gradually d…

DIG

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I was fascinated to see that this 1913 "Venus" - in life, the popular singer Raquel Meller - is depicted with underarm and pubic hair.

This prompted my interest for two reasons.

In the first place, I find it attractive when women have not removed all of their underarm and pubic hair. This body hair to me is a sign of sexual maturity and of a certain animal physicality.

Secondly, I would like to know more about the history of depilation. The internetish history usually tells the story of underarm hair only becoming taboo amongst western women in the early decades of the twentieth century as a result of changing fashions and concomitant advertising by the manufacturers of razors.

I suspect, however, there is more to the story. I wonder if depilation practices have a longer history and have varied in Europe and the Americas according to socioeconomic class, ethnicity, and religion.

There is also, of course, the gap between bodies and pictorial representations of bodies. I remember being struck at Avignon's Musée Calvet by the underarm hair depicted in Théodore Chassériau's "Baigneuse endormie près d'une source".

#Art #BodyHair #UnderarmHair
#MuséeCalvet
#ThéodoreChassériau
#Depilation
#HistoryOfTheBody

The History of Fat: The Complex Attitudes Toward Fatness in the Pre-Modern West - DIG

The dominant narrative- and the story that many of you expect to hear today- is that fatness used to be less stigmatized; that plump women were beautiful and plump men regarded as wealthy and important but that somewhere along the way, thinness became associated with beauty and fatness became medicalized as obesity and stigmatized as

DIG - History that matters.

Re-introducing (my first instance vanished): I'm an economist from U.Mass. Amherst teaching in an interdisciplinary unit at UW Bothell. I've written in #PostKeynesian and #Feministeconomics

Current research on race and economics late 19th and early 20th centuries is summarized here, with some working papers: https://sites.google.com/uw.edu/crisesofthewhitebody/home

#historyofthebody #historyofeugenics #historyofeconomics #historyofpsychology
#histodons

Colin Danby

Saxonism

I posted notes on the young #AlfredMarshalland the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos to my research site:

https://sites.google.com/uw.edu/crisesofthewhitebody/home

#Keynes started the myth that Marshall suffered a mental crisis in his mid 20s. There's no evidence of that, but it's interesting that people have run with it -- a breakdown seems to be what the story needs. Why the epidemic of such crises among European intellectuals late 19th and early 20th century?

#HistoryoftheBody #HistoryofEconomicThought

Colin Danby

Saxonism

Now that my following has surged into double digits, a moment of sharing and peeps-seeking. I've put up here:

https://sites.google.com/uw.edu/crisesofthewhitebody/home

some notes and mini-working-papers from a project on body, nation, race, and economy in the 19th and 20th centuries. Most interested in hearing from others working in these areas.

#CharlesBabbage
#HerbertSpencer
#AlfredMarshall
#eugenics
#Neurasthenia
#IrvingFisher
#Keynes
#JamesMeade
#HistoryofEconomicThought
#HistoryoftheBody

Colin Danby

Saxonism