Gender, Health, and History in Modern East Asia

"This groundbreaking volume captures and analyzes the exhilarating and at times disorienting experience when scientists, government officials, educators, and the general public in East Asia tried to come to terms with the introduction of Western biological and medical sciences to the region. The nexus of gender and health is a compelling theme, for this is an area in which private lives and personal characteristics encounter the interventions of public policies. The nine empirically based studies by scholars of history of medicine, sociology, anthropology, and STS (science, technology, and society), spanning Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 1870s to the present, demonstrate just how tightly concerns with gender and health have been woven into the enterprise of modernization and nation-building throughout the long twentieth century. The concepts of "gender" and "health" have become so commonly used that one might overlook that they are actually complicated notions with vexed histories even in their native contexts. Transposing such terminologies into another historical or geographical dimension is fraught with problems, and what makes the East Asian cases in this volume particularly illuminating is that they present concepts of gender and health in motion. The studies show how individuals and societies made sense of modern scientific discourses on diseases, body, sex, and reproduction, redefining existing terms in the process and adopting novel ideas to face new challenges and demands"--Publisher's website This groundbreaking volume captures and analyzes the exhilarating and at times disorienting experience when scientists, government officials, educators, and the general public in East Asia tried to come to terms with the introduction of Western biological and medical sciences to the region. The nexus of gender and health is a compelling theme, for this is an area in which private lives and personal characteristics encounter the interventions of public policies. The nine empirically based studies by scholars of history of medicine, sociology, anthropology, and STS (science, technology, and society), spanning Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 1870s to the present, demonstrate just how tightly concerns with gender and health have been woven into the enterprise of modernization and nation building throughout the long twentieth century. The concepts of "gender" and "health" have become so commonly used that one might overlook that they are actually complicated notions with vexed histories even in their native contexts. Transposing such terminologies into another historical or geographical dimension is fraught with problems, and what makes the East Asian cases in this volume particularly illuminating is that they present concepts of gender and health in motion. The studies show how individuals and societies made sense of modern scientific discourses on diseases, body, sex, and reproduction, redefining existing terms in the process and adopting novel ideas to face new challenges and demands This volume explores gender and health in the East Asian region during the long twentieth century. The nine chapters represent cases studies from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, with complex interactions of biology, body, gender, and modernity from the 1870s to the present. The book is organized into three sections. The first series of chapters highlight processes that standardize gendered bodies in theories of physical development and reproductive technologies in modern and postcolonial East Asia in face of changing political and demographic needs and realities. The second section focuses on women producing and consuming health knowledge, facilitated by growing consumer and media cultures, where the marketing of health and medical products and knowledge not only competed with the state over the formation of gender and body norms and roles, but allowed for selective production and consumption by women themselves. The final section of three chapters examine how labor requirements, military cultures, and demographic policies shaped and were shaped by competing visions of masculinity, influenced by changing medical authorities and legitimacy of colonial powers and postcolonial nation-states. By illuminating these flows of knowledge, influences, and reactions, this volume highlights the prominent role that biopolitics of health and gender has played in knitting and shaping the East Asian region as we know it today.