Corporeal Colonialism: Gynecology, Early Marriage, and Racial Disease in Japanese Colonial Korea, 1926–32

This paper explores one case of what I call Japan’s “corporeal colonialism,” a colonialism which constructed the Korean female body as the object of modern medical research and subjected it to intense biomedical classification, policing, and discipline for enhancing the procreative capacities, vitality, and size of the Korean populace. This corporeal colonialism testifies to the ideological service that male medical professionals performed in the biopolitics of the Japanese imperial and colonial states—to increase the Korean population in an attempt to mobilize Koreans as human resources in empire building, as well as to propagandize population growth as an index of Korea’s modernization under Colonial Rule (1910-1945). Korean women were viewed as biological reproducers of the colonial populace and human resources. Embodying corporeal colonialism, Japanese medical doctors aimed to produce fertile bodies within the familial sphere, while meticulously inspecting and regulating “diseased” bodies, which were deemed a formidable threat to the conjugal space.
This paper examines the ways in which these medical authorities established “unproductive” female bodies and practices as the legitimate object of medical examination and colonial reform. It does so by focusing on the Japanese obstetrician-gynecologist Takeshiro Kudō’s study (fujin kagakutekina kenkyū) on imprisoned Korean women who murdered their husbands. I am interested in showing how this medical professional classified and re-categorized these female inmates as the diseased colonial subject by pathologizing these women’s sexual and conjugal practices based on the norms of various modern disciplines including eugenics, criminology, and gynecology, ultimately establishing, by extension, the entire female population as the object of medical remedy. I argue that Kudō’s gynecological research represents a racially-coded colonial project that served to scientifically construct the individual and institutional basis for social reproduction as diseased so as to naturalize techno-scientific intervention into the marital and reproductive life of the colonial female subject.