60 min listen
Sujin Lee, "Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Sujin Lee, "Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
ratings:
Length:
59 minutes
Released:
Jan 17, 2024
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
In 2007, Japan’s health minister referred to women ages 15-50 as “birthing machines.” The context was a speech about Japan’s declining birthrate and projected population shrinkage. As Sujin Lee shows in Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan (Stanford UP, 2023), neither population anxieties nor the idea of women as childbearing devices whose wombs were the property of the state are new. However, when the “population problem” became a public preoccupation for politicians, scientists, and activists in the 1910s, it was an expression of worries about overpopulation and carrying capacity in a “resource-poor” nation and empire. Wombs of Empire traces the trajectory of population discourses and practices from these years through wartime Japan, with particular attention to the ways in which notions of motherhood were constructed hierarchically within the context of empire and war, and how Malthusian population control discourses formulated by leftists, feminists, scientists, and politicians gave way to the natalism of total war.
Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Released:
Jan 17, 2024
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Clare Haru Crowston, “Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France”: Anyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capital au XXIe siecle) knows how a la mode the economy is at the moment. by New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work