The Gentleman, the Detective, and the Housewife

Abstract

Abstract This article examines Japanese experiments concerning the power of “thoughtography,” demonstrating how sensory disagreements between psychologists and physicists were concretized through divergent gendered personae within contested spaces of experiment. Specifically, I analyze thoughtography as a story of conflicts between personae of “gentleman” and “detective” within the private, nuclear-familial home of the “housewife.” In the early twentieth century, the psychological laboratory had yet to establish its authority in Japan. Successful experiment thus required visiting subjects and navigating the intersensorial spaces of their homes. The strategies through which researchers adapted to homes, and the strategies by which housewives manipulated homes to their advantage, reveal contestations over how to look, touch, and feel in the presence of others. They furthermore reveal that the drive to emulate “Western science” met with contradictions in “Westernization” itself, particularly between demands concerning new protocols of masculine scholarly sociability and the prerogatives of the bourgeois wife and mother.