Housewives as Kitchen Pharmacists

By way of analyzing the health doctrine of Dr. Zhuang Shuqi 莊淑旂 (1920-2015), arguably the most popular author of traditional medicine in contemporary Taiwan, this paper discovers a surprisingly close alliance between gender role and traditional medicine, an alliance that she created on the basis of the allegedly traditional practice of viewing food as medicine. Instead of promoting the general idea that food has health benefits, Dr. Zhuang used her own personal tragedies to argue for the provocative idea that inappropriate intake of food is what causes people to fall victim to cancer. As each food functions like a double-edged sword, both the major cause of and a powerful tool for coping with cancer, preparing food in the kitchen, in her eyes, becomes comparable to handling effective and dangerous drugs in the “family pharmacy.” As the result, Dr. Zhuang urged housewives to identify themselves with the role of the “family pharmacist” and to take responsibility for the health of the whole Family.”

Solving Low Fertility Rate with Technology?

South Korea's total fertility rate (TFR) in 2005 was 1.08, the lowest in the world. The government launched the National Support Program for Infertile Couples (“the Program”) in 2006 which expenditures for diverse assisted reproductive treatments are subsidized. This chapter seeks to critique three aspects of the Program. First, the Program is a population policy that has not kept up with changes in family values and practices. Second, the Program’s very implementation has created demand, ‘those diagnosed as infertile’ have become ‘infertile members of the population’. Lastly, the Program has resulted in a meaningful increase in the number of in vitro fertilization treatments, and this increase has negatively impacted the health of women and children. Reproduction has always been a field for political struggle, and political imagination-created reproduction is revealed most strikingly when reproduction becomes a “population problem”. South Korea’s National Family Planning Project was brought by the Park Chung-hee government, which emphasized the value of the “modern family,” specifically, “Modernization of the Fatherland,” as part of economic development in the 1970s. The low fertility rate that South Korea is now facing is considered a national crisis and the Program represents the government’s will to solve the crisis through medical technologies. However, the bodies of women are still considered objects in TFR statistics, much as they were in the 1970s. This has led to a situation in which the health and even the lives of women are being endangered once again

Sex in School

Nearly two hundred volumes of physiology and hygiene textbooks, together with governmental and other materials, are investigated in this chapter to illuminate the intricacies in drawing the moral landscape pertinent to sex education in early republican China. Frequent revisions of official directives testify to the fast changing political and intellectual arena of China. Shifted emphases between reproductive functions and puberty sexuality exemplify the professionals’ uncertainties in getting to the early teens. Pedagogical publication boomed and writers experimented on both textual and visual materials. Bio-medicine was flagged as entrance to learning one’s own body, but a healthier nation promoted in the New Life Movement eventually relied on the individual’s self-discipline not necessarily required of scientific erudition. Some may have found secretion system more useful than anatomical information to integrate physiology, psychology and pathology into the mechanism of sexual differences, so much so that a gender division of labour was proposed to fulfill both personal responsibilities and to echo contemporary political rhetoric. Not all endorsed such elaboration, however, and the zigzag between sexual differences and gender equality became a noteworthy parallel to the tug-of-war between sexuality and reproduction.

Gender, Health, and the Problem of “Precocious Puberty” in Meiji Japan

Mishima Michiyoshi, a Japanese pioneer of school hygiene, believed that Japanese children experienced precocious puberty, resulting in underdeveloped and inferior physical stature in comparison to European and American children. This analysis of comparative anatomies interpreted the inferiority of the “Japanese” body as embodiment of its diminutive status in politics and civilizations. This chapter shows how intellectuals, government bureaucrats, school hygienists, and pediatric specialists viewed and interpreted children’s bodies and their physical growth, illustrating the complex interactions between ideals of civilization and gendered norms in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan.

Providing Reassurance and Affirmation

This chapter looks at the voluntary vasectomy campaigns headed by Dr. Lee Hui-Yong at Seoul National University hospital, concurrent with ongoing family planning campaigns for much of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, the surgery was first tested on a range of civilian subjects before becoming specifically attached to the Home Reserve Army (Yebigun), a body created in the late 1960s in the aftermath of a North Korean incursion and direct assault on the Blue House, or presidential residence. In a wonderful bit of irony, the hyper-masculinist rhetoric of the period asked South Korean males to stand for the nation, to father children and nurture them, and at the same time, to curb their reproductive urges after a proscribed number of children. Carrying into the 1970s, reservists received additional incentives (access to apartments, education for children, reduced reserve periods) for compliance with the “voluntary program. The logic and zeal of the program was such that numbers continued to peak into the 1980s and early 1990s, even as South Korea underwent democratization and the transition to pro-natal initiatives.

Christine Goes to China

In 1953, the success of native doctors in converting a man into a woman made news headlines in Taiwan. Considered by many as the “first” Chinese transsexual, Xie Jianshun was also frequently dubbed as the “Chinese Christine”—an allusion to the contemporaneous American ex-G.I. transsexual celebrity, Christine Jorgenson. But besides its anatomical and surgical transformations, Xie’s sex, this chapter argues, was reconfigured by the cultural forces operating upon his body, through which new meanings of corporeality and sexual embodiments consolidated in post-WWII Sinophone culture. Within a week, the characterization of Xie changed from an average citizen whose ambiguous sex provoked uncertainty and national anxiety to a transsexual icon whose fate would indisputably contribute to the global staging of Taiwan on a par with the United States. This chapter uses the cultural politics of transsexuality to reflect on the evolving geopolitical contours of Greater China in the postwar era of transnationalism.

Introduction

This volume breaks new ground in the history of East Asian biopolitics, offering the first broad-based exploration of gender and health in the region during the long twentieth century. The core theme is the complex meshing of biology, body, and citizen that underpins projects of biological nation building and molds the forms of modern subjectivity. The nine case studies presented here, 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 period. Colonial powers and medical associations, government bureaucrats, military personnel, and pharmaceutical companies as well as scientists, educators, and medical practitioners contributed to the legitimation and popularization of evolving scientific discourses and interpretations of the gendered body, sex, and reproductive health. As novel visions of the body and its possibilities took shape, new expressions of individuality, sociality, transgression or resistance, new desires, and fears emerged. Across the region and over the decades, norms and ideals, techniques, terminology, and forms of scientific or cultural authority circulated and converged, faded and resurfaced. In mapping such flows, influences, and reactions, the volume highlights the prominent role that the biopolitics of health and gender has played in knitting and shaping the East Asian region as we know it today....

Weak Men and Barren Women

Western biomedical and traditional East Asian medical experts disagreed on the causes of the modern Asian epidemic named as beriberi/jiaoqi/kakké in English, Chinese and Japanese. While conflicting explanations made the epidemic experience most puzzling and elusive, there was general agreement among experts from competing medical traditions that the main victims were Asian men, especially soldiers and workers. The triumphant vitamin B1 deficiency theory based on white-rice as an inferior food also worked with East Asian diagnostic assemblages to frame the disease as native to East Asia, now eloquently explained as an unhealthy environment detrimental to masculinity.

The Japanese Patent Medicine Trade in East Asia

This chapter explores modern Japan’s pharmaceutical interest in and competition over women’s bodies in the 1920s and 1930s, analysing how patent drugs as “medical commodities” promoted multiple and competing representations of health and femininity not only to citizens but also to its colonial consumers. These commercial tonics contested the racialized and politicized Japanese bioscience and its hierarchies, presenting cosmopolitan ideals of health and beauty. Yet, when political shifts required it, the medical capitalists easily transitioned to marketing their products for child-bearing imperial female subjects.

From Single Motherhood to Queer Reproduction

This chapter examines the regulatory trajectory of access to assisted reproductive technology (ART) in Taiwan since 1980s. The analysis focused on how diverse governing activities validate, challenge, or shape the social relationship at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and heteronormativity. Heternomativity and the discourse of absent fatherhood have reigned so that Taiwan has, from the first ethical guidelines in 1986 to the Human Reproduction Law in 2007, continued to prohibit unmarried women from using ART. Despite the legal exclusion, single women, lesbians and gays did gain access to ART secretly in Taiwan, and more openly abroad. Medical doctors, encountering these excluded women users in their clinics, once lobbied for their legal inclusion in the 2000s, with the rationale centering on women’s desire for motherhood —an acclaimed femininity. By comparison, women’s groups have been seldom involved with the access politics, for their agenda against compulsory motherhood and medicalization of women’s reproductive bodies. Since the mid-2000s, advocacy of queer reproduction, particularly lesbian motherhood, actively shared the information of ART use, and asked for legal inclusion. Their aim to reorder the sexuality hierarchy by asking for reproductive rights makes this unthinkable and unimagined group in early stage of policy-making become the strongest force in reconfiguring the politics of access to ART in Taiwan.