Picturing Empire and Illness

Biomedicine, Venereal Disease and the Modern Girl in Korea under Japanese Colonial Rule

Datos Bibliográficos

ID18985992
AutoresJin-Kyung Park (autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Volumen28
Número1
Páginas108-141
Fecha de publicación2014-01-02
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0950-2386 • E-ISSN: 1466-4348
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09502386.2013.775319
OpenAlexW1498304437
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas32

Reflecting on recent debates within cultural studies on non-Western modernities and 'cultural studies in/of Asia', this essay explores a cultural history of venereal disease (VD) in Korea under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). The colonial representation of and discourse on VD in Western colonial settings was often built around a missionary medical account of sin and disease and a colonial dialectic of white civilization and non-white backwardness. This essay draws attention to the colonial discourse on VD in the non-Western Japanese Empire and its East Asian context, which compels us to look into the colonial framing of disease and bodies in imperial contexts where ruler and ruled shared close racial, cultural and religious affinities and where colonial medical power did not stem from white hegemony and Christian religious authority. By using methods from cultural studies and feminist history, this essay uncovers and critically reads the Japanese colonial medical and popular cultural archives on VD that range from state documents to laboratory reports to patent medicine advertisements, in order to reconfigure Japan's colonial medical empire and its underlying, gendered assumptions. It clarifies not only the legal, military and institutional bases for the intense governmental control over VD, but also the cultural image, metaphor and knowledge of VD and the biomedical female body promoted by Japan's transnational patent medical industry in close collaboration with the colonial state. By doing so, this essay sheds light on the gendered epistemic violence of Japanese colonialism.Keywords: postcolonial studiescultural studies of/in Asianon-Western modernitynon-Western empirecolonial diseasegender and the Japanese colonial archive A note on romanizationKorean and Japanese words and names in the text are romanized by the McCune-Reischauer and Hepburn Systems, respectively. Korean and Japanese names cited in the text are given full names (surname first, no comma). All translations of Japanese and Korean texts are done by the author.AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Paula Treichler and Antoinette Burton for their intellectual support of my work and the current paper. I also like to thank anonymous reviewers of Cultural Studies, whose helpful comments and suggestions were critical to the final revision of this paper. I had a privilege to share an earlier version of this paper at a Historical Studies of East Asia (HSEA) seminar at the University of Toronto where HSEA's members helped me strengthen the argument of this article. My special thanks go to the Korea-based cultural studies scholar Sunyoung Yoo who provided me with an invaluable feedback when I presented a draft of this paper at a Korean Cultural Studies Association meeting in Seoul, Korea.Notes on ContributorJin-kyung Park is an assistant professor in the Department of Historical & Cultural studies and Women & Gender studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the history and cultural studies of empire, colonialism, gender, medicine and technology in twentieth-century Korea. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Corporeal Colonialism: Gender, Biomedicine, and Race in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945, which explores a cultural history of women's diseases and bodies in Korea under Japanese colonial rule.Notes1 For postcolonial reflections on 'cultural studies of/in Asia', see Shome (Citation2009, pp. 711–714).2 In a 1917 Methodist Episcopal Church report, a medical missionary even urged missionary medical personnel to withdraw from the Korean Peninsula in the face of the superior medical institutions supported by the Japanese colonial state. Given the need for efficacy and financial resources of missionary medicine, the report emphasized that the continuation of missionary medical work could not be justified. See R. K. Smith, 'Medical Practice in Chosen', Korean Mission Field Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1917), cited in Cho (Citation1997, p. 177).3 This was first cited in Myŏng (Citation2004, pp. 85–90).4 According to the 1919 statistics of the GGK, among a total of 404, 240 deaths, VD-related fatalities amounted to 122,485 cases – or one-fourth of the total number of fatalities, outnumbering fatalities related to nerve, digestive and circulatory diseases (67,418; 49,018 and 43,439, respectively) (Government-General of Korea Citation1921 ).5 These dailies began circulation in the 1920s under bunkaseiji (cultural policy), following the initial 10-year period of budanseiji (military policy) that prohibited the circulation of Korean-language newspapers (Robinson Citation1989). These newly emerged Korean vernacular newspapers became critical spaces for Korean cultural nationalists in the midst of Korea's multilayered experience of exploitation and development, coercion and discipline, and oppression and seduction in the formation of colonial modernity (Yi Citation2008, p. 41).6 In their exploration of cultural accounts and images of medicine, Paula Treichler, Lisa Cartwright and Constance Penley have urged us to note that the visibility of the female body in medical representations (e.g. in cinema and television) is not transparent and rather that visibility is itself a claim that warrants critical scrutiny. In accordance with this argument, I call into question the hyper-visibility of the female body in ads about VD and interrogate the knowledge that they disseminated. See Treichler et al. (1998, ch.1, 'Introduction: Paradoxes of Visibility').7 For example, a professor of Yonsei medical school, a leading medical school, wrote in Tonggwang ('east light', one of the most popular Korean-language medical journals in colonial Korea) that it was most ideal and proper to define VD as hwaryubyong, for, in most cases, men who went to brothels contracted it. Newspaper editorials and articles frequently reported that VD originated from brothels. Those female prostitutes in brothels were selling 'smiles' and transmitting 'disease'. Prostitutes roaming in back streets were giving a lustful eye at worn-out males, firing up male sexual desires. It was the evil and diseased female prostitutes who were severely threatening 'innocent', disease-free men. VD from brothels broke into the domestic space and destroyed marriages, family happiness and children's health (Tonga ilbo, August 29, 1925, p. 5; Tonga ilbo, June 11, 1938, p. 7)

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