This article provides a comparative analysis of the books Making Sex, by Thomas Laqueur, and The Woman in the Body, by Emily Martin. While Laqueur studies how the distinction between the sexes as we now conceive of it was established, Martin focuses on the female body from the point of view of gynecology and obstetrics. The purpose is to show how the body assumes different places in the authors' respective theoretical/methodological work, as reflected in the construction of more or less reductionist perspectives, with greater or lesser explanatory capacity. On the one hand, a concept considering the body's historicity and the multicausality of the process of distinction between the sexes; on the other, the body as a fundamental substrate capable of determining women's particular experience.