Concerns over health and gender have consistently been interwoven into modern nation-building projects in East Asia from as early as the late nineteenth century. In Gender, Health, and History in Modern East Asia, editors Angela Ki Che Leung and Izumi Nakayama bring these strands into dialogue to show the various ways that state concerns over health in China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have been articulated through efforts to control reproduction, optimize sexual hygiene, assign gendered identities, and promote men's economic productivity. Across nine chapters and an introduction by Francesca Bray, this volume sheds new light on the ways that intraregional exchanges and experiences have led to shared ideas about gender, sexuality, and biological and reproductive health, thereby emphasizing the need to combine science studies with a broader regional focus on East Asia as a whole.
The volume is divided into three sections. The first, “Bodies Beyond Boundaries,” explores discourses of normative sexual development in early twentieth-century China and Japan, as well as the advent and use of new reproductive technologies in Taiwan and South Korea. Izumi Nakayama begins this section with a discussion of precocious puberty in Meiji Japan. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, intellectuals feared that Japanese youths were experiencing puberty too early, leading to stunted growth. Due to their height and developmental differences from the “normative West” (p. 37), children were viewed as emblematic of the biological deficiencies that plagued East Asia. Jen-der Lee's following chapter explores the content of and intended audiences for physiology textbooks in early Republican China. Many of these textbooks were modeled on those used in the American school system, which tended to focus on biologically determined gender roles and the sexual hygiene of young boys. The following two chapters turn their attention to assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chia-ling Wu's nuanced research into ARTs in Taiwan demonstrates the evolving and conflicting ways that activists, physicians, markets, and families determine who should be considered “appropriate” users of technologies like artificial insemination and surrogacy. Jung-ok Ha's subsequent chapter likewise describes how the South Korean state promotes the use of ARTs to boost declining fertility rates. In so doing, the government restricts its definition of reproductive health to include only those aspects that involve pregnancy and childbirth.
The second section, “Women Producing and Consuming Health Knowledge,” consists of two excellent chapters that take very different approaches to understanding the role of women in the Asian medical marketplace. Susan Burns examines patent medicine advertisements within the Japanese empire to show how pharmaceutical manufacturers marketed their products to appeal to the demands of colonial consumers. By emphasizing the “shared corporality” of all Asian women (p. 154), advertisements deviated from state rhetoric that foregrounded racial and colonial difference. Sean Hsiang-lin Lei's chapter describes the success of Dr. Chuang Shu Chih, a Taiwanese housewife-turned-entrepreneur who published widely on the relationship between diet and health. Since Dr. Chuang equated food preparation with medical treatment, her regimen validated the knowledge of housewives who worked outside the realm of professional medicine.
Masculinity and the construction of male identity comprises the focus of the last section, “Potent(ial) Virility.” Angela Ki Che Leung's essay, perhaps the most recognizably transnational in the volume, looks at the disease of beriberi and its shifting etiologies across time. Originally attributed to prosperity and urban life, beriberi gradually came to be known as a disorder of deprivation that mainly affected Asian men. Fast-forwarding to the Cold War period, Howard Chiang examines the case of Xie Jianshun, an intersex soldier who captured the attention of the Taiwanese press in the 1950s. Viewing Xie's “discovery” through the intersecting lenses of medicine and the media, Chiang shows how Xie's “(trans)sexual identity was driven less by his self-determination and more by the cultural authority of the surgeons involved and the broader impact of the mass circulation press” (p. 227). The final chapter, written by John DiMoia, returns to the theme of family planning originally discussed in the first section of the volume. Here, DiMoia shows how the South Korean government purposely targeted military men as potential candidates for voluntary vasectomies. Through promotional materials, soldiers were reassured that vasectomies were signs of both masculinity and patriotism.
Individually, many of these chapters are empirically fascinating, thoughtfully framed, and convincingly argued. Collectively, however, the broader takeaway of this volume is not always apparent. In her introduction, Bray suggests that the volume highlights transnational circulations of scientific knowledge within and among East Asian nations, thereby challenging or decentering the typical emphasis that has been placed on Western formulations of biopolitics. While the volume certainly showcases instances where common rhetoric and policies might be found across borders, only a few of the authors explicitly move beyond their own geographical focus to describe intraregional similarities or exchanges of medical knowledge. A conclusion would have been helpful for putting these separate threads into dialogue and for raising questions like: What accounts for similarities and differences in contemporary approaches to family planning in East Asia? How can we understand the continued emphasis on normative gender roles and sexual behaviors in Asian countries? More transnational and comparative research along these lines will certainly be welcome in the future.
