Organizer: Jiweon Shin, Harvard University
Chair: Merry White, Harvard University
Discussant: Atsuko Sakaki, Harvard University
This panel focuses on sexuality and women in Japan, Korea, and China with a comparative and historical perspective. These countries in East Asia have a common background of traditional ethics and also have been greatly influenced by the Western ideologies on sexuality and womanhood through modernization since the latter half of the 19th century. On the other hand, they have kept different indigenous cultures; also, each case has a unique experience as to when and how it was influenced by the West through its modernization process. The panel analyzes how they accepted, digested and transformed the Western ideologies to construct the new and modern ideas of sexuality and womanhood in each country.
The first paper deals with the discourse on chastity and motherhood in magazines in 1900s-30s in Japan and examines how the concepts were modified with its encounter with the West. The second focuses on the discourse on female sexuality during the interwar years in Japan and finds that the sexological knowledge articulated the normal and the pathological for women. The third paper shows what kind of images for motherhood and womanhood were reconstructed through public discourse in Korea in 1920s-1930s. The last paper deals with city movies in 1930s China and argues that the image of the female body shown in those movies conveyed the implication of the battle ground for the contestation between innocence and corruption.
Chastity and Motherhood in Modern Japan
Kazue Muta, Konan Women's University, Japan
The concept of womanhood and sexuality in Japan greatly changed with encounters with the West since the latter half of the 19th century. As for chastity, premarital sex was not prohibited in premodern Japan. But with the advent of the modern era which was launched under the influence of the West, common people began to observe female chastity as a norm. Those women who promoted to value chastity borrowed the idea from the West. They idealized the western idea of romantic love and devoted their chastity for the sake of romantic love. The idea of motherhood is another example. They had long kept rigid ethics, especially for elite women, and disciplined them as well known in Onna-daigaku. In the premodern era, however, motherhood was not highly valued. It was the western ideology that encouraged motherhood. These ideas such as female chastity and maternal love had ambiguous meanings for women. A woman was proud of these ideas and identified herself as a chaste woman and a devoted mother so as to be respectable. On the other hand, because of the ideas, women were doomed to domestic gender roles, which alienated women from the public sphere, or the outer world. The paper deals with discourses in magazines in 1900s-30s to focus on how women accommodated the western ideas with indigenous ones to develop their own ideology, and how they contributed to construct the modern womanhood in Japan.
Redefining the Normal and the Pathological: Japanese Women and Sexological
"Knowledge" During the Interwar Years
Sabine Fruehstueck, University of Vienna, Austria
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Japan experienced a diversification and popularization of discourse on female sexuality. Medical doctors and biologists founded sexological and popular medical journals, and wrote medical family encyclopedias providing information and giving advice for 'sexual problems' in general newspaper and magazine columns. The most commonly debated were the harmful side-effects of masturbation, mental preparation for sex in the state of matrimony, sexual etiquette when on honeymoon, menstruation and wedlock, pregnancy and birth, advice in the eventuality of the husband contracting a venereal disease, and breast care.
This paper will cover two issues. Firstly, how Japanese medical doctors and biologists redefined female sexuality in terms of normal and pathological behavior. Secondly, who had access to the 'scientific' information thus engendered.
Images of Motherhood and Womanhood Reconstructed, Korea 1920s-1930s
Jiweon Shin, Harvard University
The purpose of this paper is: (1) to examine the images of new motherhood and womanhood constructed through public discourse in 1920s and 1930s Korea; (2) to understand how Korean traditional images of motherhood/womanhood were redefined and modified with the introduction of Western ideas.
Since the late nineteenth century, Western knowledge/ideas began to be introduced in Korea. Home journals for women showed up in public sphere in the 1910s, and these journals flourished in the public domain in the 1920s and 1930s. The major concerns of the articles in those journals can be roughly divided into two main categories: (1) what a 'new woman' is like; (2) how to be a good mother as a 'new woman.' In addition to the importance for Korean women at those times to be 'new women' who can keep up with social changes, the importance of motherhood/child rearing for women is emphasized and glorified in essays, poems, novels, and articles in those journals.
In this paper, the home journals published in Korea in 1920s and 1930s are studied to see what kinds of images for motherhood and womanhood were reconstructed through public discourse, and the implications of those images on women's lives.
Glorifying Moving Parts: Symphonies of Modern Girls and Mass Transportation in
1930s Chinese City Films
Alisa Freedman, University of Chicago
The silent films of 1930s Shanghai both captured and exemplified the speed of moving parts. Shanghai had evolved into a bustling, illuminated metropolis, filled with modern technological goods and entertainment, the physical presences of which dramatically illustrated the irreversible demise of long-held social patterns and the inherent foreignness of this Chinese city. Steam trains, modern girls, and motion pictures conveyed the speed, shock, and spectacle of this historical moment, and the exaggerated traits of modern girls can be seen as analogous to the allure, energy, and fear of train travel and cinema spectatorship.
Confusion caused by the production of new signs and behaviors was projected upon representations of modern girls, who were perceived as symbols for the stimulation and unpredictability of the metropolis itself. The city was used as both a setting and a source for potentially harmful practices and ideologies, which were examined through depictions of the daily lives of women.
These themes were vividly illustrated in Sun Yu's Sports Queen (Ti yu huang hou), released in 1934 from Lianhua Studio. This silent film optimistically presented a city undergoing unprecedented change and the possibility for beneficial national development if technology, the crowds it helped bring together, and modern girls were controlled and directed to advance the common good. In this, literally, motion picture, mobile female body parts, such as bare legs and straight teeth, were provided extensive cinematic attention and equated filmically to mass transportation vehicles, creating a symphony of composite components of a city on the move.