ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Ishimoto Shizue & Yamada Waka’s Jinkō Mondai: Population Biopolitics and Birth Control in Early Japanese Women’s Movements

• In Event: Fertility and the Sexed Body: Forms of Control

English Abstract

Recently intensifying global anxieties toward migration reveal the prevailing nature of Malthusian narratives about overpopulation and resource scarcity. It is thus more critical than ever to examine the gendered discourses that have shaped the biopolitics concealed within our current conditions. This paper explores the work of early 20th century (Taishō era) Japanese women activists to show the inextricable relationship between population concerns (jinkō mondai) and the multifaceted production and transmission of knowledge about birth control. It brings together the contrasting perspectives of social reformers Ishimoto Shizue and Yamada Waka through previously untranslated essays, articles and books published in the years following World War I. These demonstrate the diversity of opinion on birth control in Japan at the time and locate discourse within a vivid landscape of domestic and transnational issues including war, immigration, colonialism and poverty. Their ideas are ultimately revealing of the problematic impact population politics has had on the outcomes of contraceptive advocacy and access to reproductive care for all women, regardless of their positioning within sex, race and class-based hierarchies. My analysis deploys the intersectional lens first conceptualised by Black American feminists to tease out the discursive stratification of bodies within Ishimoto and Yamada’s discussion of birth control. Shifting across these temporal and transnational layers constructed by dialogue on reproductive rights and health, I argue that conceptualising population has been inextricable from birth control discourse. The paper highlights the necessity of critically dissecting narratives through which knowledge about birth control has been produced, communicated and contested.

Author

• Iona Leask Fleming, Humboldt University/Free University of Berlin