Corporeal colonialism: Medicine, reproduction, and race in colonial Korea

This dissertation examines the cultural history of colonial medicine and the female body in colonial Korea (1910--1945). It investigates how Japanese colonial medicine linked the gynecological health of Korean women to the governance of the colonial population and the expansion of the empire. Drawing on original Japanese and Korean archival sources, this study provides a vivid historical account of how Japanese male physicians in fields that include gynecology and social hygiene constructed the Korean female body as an object of modern medical research and subjected it to intense biomedical classification, policing, and discipline for the purpose of augmenting the procreative capacities, vitality, and size of the colonial populace. This regime, which I have termed Japan's "corporeal colonialism," is testament to the ideological service that male medical professionals performed in the biopolitics of the Japanese imperial and colonial states.;Increasing and mobilizing the Korean population as human resources ( jinteki shigen) was pivotal in Japan's colonial penetration of the Chinese continent and Southeast Asia. So, too, was propagandizing such population growth, which served as an index of Korea's modernization. Under these circumstances, Korean women were considered biological reproducers of the colonial populace. My research shows how Japanese medical modernizers aimed to produce fertile bodies within the familial sphere, while meticulously inspecting and regulating "diseased" bodies, deemed a formidable threat to conjugal space. I argue that under corporeal colonialism, the location of women's reproduction moved from the domain of "Nature" to the public realm of medical, statistical knowledge in the service of colonial state governance and pronatalist policymaking. I further maintain that corporeal colonialism was central to Korea's dramatic demographic change---the doubling of the total population---during the 35-year colonial period.;Unlike the existing literature elucidating the management of colonial bodies in the familiar dichotomy of white/non-white colonial relations, my study offers an innovative perspective on the "Asian-led" governance of racially proximate "Asian" populations. In the unique Asian imperial context of racial ambiguity between ruler and ruled, I examine techno-scientific interventions on Korean women's bodies and show how Japan's management of the population entailed producing a range of racialized, colonial knowledge about women's reproductive physiology and activities. Such knowledge production was a pivotal technology of corporeal colonialism in establishing authority over and effectively administering phenotypically similar colonized bodies.;This dissertation makes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature in both cultural and social studies of science in Korea and the global history of colonialism, science, and gender. Foremost, my work demonstrates the colonial origin of Western medical intervention in the physical and sexual well being of Korean women and maps out the scientific and medical protocols for the diagnosis, classification, and treatment of women's reproductive diseases. In doing so, my study establishes rich new ground for further research on the genealogy and current manifestation of scientized, medicalized women's identities in Korea and East Asia. Moreover, my finding that modern medical science constituted a globalized imperial male enterprise could stimulate conversations and collective research among feminist scholars studying Western and Japanese empires.