Gender, health, and history in modern East Asia / edited by Angela Ki Che Leung, Izumi Nakayama ; with an introduction by Francesca Bray.

Print version record.

Bodies Beyond Boundaries : Evolving Physical Development and Reproductive Technologies. Gender, health, and the problem of "precocious puberty" in Meiji Japan / Izumi Nakayama -- Sex in school : educating the junior high students in early republican China / Jen-der Lee -- From single motherhood to queer reproduction : access politics of assisted conception in Taiwan / Chia-ling Wu -- Solving low fertility rate with technology? / Jung-ok Ha -- Women Producing and Consuming Health Knowledge : Embracing Drugs, Vitamins, and Food. The Japanese patent medicine trade in East Asia : women's medicines and the tensions of empire / Susan L. Burns -- Housewives as kitchen pharmacists : Dr. Chuang Shu Chih, gendered identity, and traditional medicine in East Asia / Sean Hsiang-lin Lei -- Potent(ial) Virility : Labor, Migration, and the Military in the Construction of Masculinity. Weak men and barren women : framing Beriberi/Jiaoqi/Kakké in modern East Asia, ca. 1830-1940 / Angela Ki Che Leung -- Christine goes to China : Xie Jianshun and the discourse of sex change in Cold War Taiwan / Howard Chiang -- Providing reassurance and affirmation : masculinity, militarization, and refashioning a male role in South Korean family planning, 1962 to the late 1980s / John P. DiMoia.

"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.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [271]-302) and index.

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