- Title: Wombs of Empire: The Gendered and Racial Politics of Motherhood
- Date: Friday, Oct 27th, 2023
- Time: 3:30-5:00PM (PST)
- Location: The Case Room (Room 132), UBC Liu Institute for Global Issues
- Speaker: Dr. Sujin Lee (Assistant Professor of Pacific and Asian Studies at University of Victoria)
- Bio: Sujin Lee is an Assistant Professor of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria. Lee completed her PhD in History from Cornell University in 2017 and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies in 2017-18. She is an author of articles on the birth control movement in Interwar Japan and the book: Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan (Stanford University Press, 2023). Her research interests encompass the history of the Japanese colonial empire, biopolitical governance of bodies and its gender impacts, and historical narratives of women’s reproductive experiences.
- Abstract: In this presentation, Dr. Sujin Lee will examine the Japanese biopolitical state’s increasing attention on the maternal body during wartime. The presentation situates the wartime pronatalist policy under the slogan “give birth and multiply” (umeyo fuyaseyo) within the broader context of population discourses and discusses the gendered nature of the biopolitical state that normalized the roles of female Japanese citizens in producing as many healthy and superior citizens as possible. A set of wartime population policies, such as the government’s “fertile womb battalion” (kodakara butai) commendations and “Ninsanpu techō” (Handbook for the Expectant Mother) of July 1942, offers a revealing look at the instrumentality of motherhood and family in the governmentalization of the state. In addition to the gendered division of citizenship, this presentation examines the differential effects of biopolitical rationalities along racial and class lines. The so-called ‘comfort women’, or military sexual slavery mobilized across the Japanese colonial empire, were transformed into women unfit for motherhood. Their fertility was denied by the imperial total war regime that mobilized “comfort women” only as disposable sexual resources. (This presentation covers part of her book, Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan).