This turned out to be a good choice to follow directly after Laqueur, as they cover much the same ground but from different angles. (Although I've tried to plan out the order of the publications I'm covering in this "basic theory" group so that I'm following thematic threads, I don't always know how that will play out until I start reading.)
Both authors point to the contrasting ideas of sexual difference in the classical authors that formed the underpinnings of later theory, and to how those ideas were transmitted and interpreted in new contexts. But where Laqueur seems to reach for a relatively tidy notion that the "one-sex" model was dominant in classical and medieval times, Cadden puts a lot more weight on how diverse and contradictory the material was and how those contrasts formed part of the ongoing development of sexual theory.
Both Laqueur and Cadden are clearly distinguishing between ideas about sex/sexual difference--that is, the physiology of male and female--and ideas about gender (masculine and feminine) that relate to idealized prototypes of behavior/roles/social attributes which are associated with, but not identical to, the sexes. I'll come back to this later in the coverage of Cadden when it becomes a focus of one of the chapters. This distinction of sex and gender in earlier historic eras is similar--but not identical--to current gender theory. Earlier concepts of gender were focused on an inherent association of certain behaviors, personalities, and attributes with a gender concept (man or woman), as contrasted with modern theory which focuses more on an individual subjective "sense of self". But the idea that sex and gender were distinct and not always aligned is common throughout (western) history.
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