Gender, Health, and History in Modern East Asia

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.