Picturing Empire and Illness

Abstract

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.