Shu Yang reports on the latest developments in understanding diseases and disorders in the Chinese context from a gender perspective in medicine.
“Dis-ease: Women and (Dis)order in China,” an international symposium co-organized by Global Asian Studies (GAS) at the University of Tokyo and Dr. Shu Yang from Western Michigan University, took place at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (IASA) on the University of Tokyo campus on July 28. The event aimed to encourage reflection on gender and medicine within the vibrant context of China, featuring ten presenters from seven different countries and regions.
Post-COVID tensions anticipated such an event as a wake-up call for rethinking the definition of disease and women’s place in it. The generous support of GAS at IASA made it possible for researchers and students alike to travel afar from their home institutions to exchange insights on Chinese societies, past and present, through the lens of female dis-eased status. The notion of being “dis-eased” refers to a state of uneasiness, which is both more descriptively authentic than reductive terms of disease verdicts and yet more incisive in bringing out the passivity and discomfort of subjects under medical judgment. It completes, if not always counters, the normative “diseased” in encompassing nuances.
Aligning with the “inside-out” approach promoted by GAS towards Asian studies that respects the agency of local scholarship while engaging with a global audience, Shu Yang called attention to an “inside-out” method to tackle the validity (or absurdity) of discussing women and/as disease. She suggested going back to the root of the term “woman” and considering how internal strands configure the origin of being or becoming woman, and then outwardly, connect with external forces. How did women come to be? Does she ever exist? In his-story, Eve’s body comes from Adam’s rib. “She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” A woman’s identity is derivative, said the Bible, as well as Greek mythology and more. In early Europe, the male was the only acknowledged sex, and women were merely defective or degenerate males. Woman is a disease, isn’t she? Incomplete, imperfect, inferior. Her inside story is so dis-eased that any telling and retelling of that story from the outside emits an aura of sanity and supremacy.
Bad Body
Feminine sins and sicknesses are where our discussion began. Panel One “Bad Body” revisits the patriarchal policing of the female body in its highly mercurial, utilitarian language. The presentations by Janice Kam (Singapore University of Social Sciences) and Shu Yang shed light on the phallocentric narrative of the womb from early China to the modern era, embedded in traditional myths and translational maneuvers in and out of cultural bounds. From the poems in the Shijing (The Classic of Poetry), to historical accounts in extant texts like the Zuozhuan (The Zuo Tradition), the Guoyu (Discourses of the States), and the codified “Muyi” of the Lienü zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women), to excavated materials, Kam finds that references to conception, labor, and motherhood attest to the importance and influence of mothers on the quality of their children and, given the elite positions of these children, on the order and stability of the state. The virtue of the womb, if any, is evaluated in ambivalent terms. This vacillation continued into Republican China, as Shu Yang showed, when the womb wonder intersected with the importation of the Western psychological concept of hysteria. From xiesidili (a Chinese transliteration of “hysteria” or ヒステリー in Japanese) to zangzao (“visceral unrest”), bentun (“rampaging piglet”), and xing de shenjingshuairuo (“sexual neurasthenia”), Yang mapped out the trajectory of the translational traffic across cultural borders, from which emerged the urge to foreground the womb as a symbol of epistemological and sexual superiority among the new Chinese male intelligentsia. Jingwen Zhang (University of California, Los Angeles) weighed in on the changing discourse of the female body in her analysis of the place of the courtesan figure between good models and harmful elements in conjunction with the image of the city of Yangzhou along regime transformations from the High Qing to the modern period.
Mad Mind
Panel Two “Mad Medicine” sets out to shift the focus from the womb to the brain yet fully recognizes the inseparable twist between the body and the mind. Womb power and brain power had been associated in history to discredit women in higher education and social mobility. Biases were often disguised as science when medicine victimized or criminalized the womb, stripping women of their rights in the name of protection and nurturing. Well, what voices did we hear from women themselves, as doctors, writers, and norm benders? Yun Zhu (Temple University, Philadelphia) introduced the practices of American medical missionaries and led the audience to think over historical narratives about and by female Chinese doctors of Western medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the interactions between Mary H. Fulton and her female Chinese patients, Zhu’s research adds religious and colonial dimensions to the already complex matrix of defining women’s diseases. Shannon Gilbert (University of Cambridge) put male-centric literary criticism in the hot seat by exposing the voice of the female avant-garde writer Can Xue in the swirl of psychiatric misogyny. Going beyond Foucauldian theory, Gilbert pointed to the more troubling interpretative authority exercised by mainland critics and reinforced by Chinese sociopolitical realities in diagnosing a woman author-patient. Xi Liu (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University) and Xuying Yu (Hong Kong Metropolitan University) heightened the presence of women’s voices in their studies of two female sci-fi writers, Tang Fei and Chi Ta-Wei. Located respectively in the mainland and Taiwan, both women question the medical intervention in identity shaping and chart the madness of technology through indefinable female subjects. Geopolitical particularities also open possibilities for the female writers to experiment with ways of transgression.
Erratic Emotion
The symposium concluded with the panel on sentiments. In Panel Three “Erratic Emotion,” we again were faced with competing claims spotlighting women’s passion, paranoia, and pain. The presentations refresh both personal and public memories of censorship, criminology, and creative labor. Yuhan Zhang (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) updated the understanding of female sickness and crime by treating madness as a feminist outlet in instances of patriarchal deceit, hostility, or stifling domestic as well as societal constraints. The idea of “pathological exit” enables Zhang to investigate Republican-era female stories and sensational scandals with a fresh eye. Wei Guo (University of Göttingen) continued the critique of feminine agency in the discussion about female spectatorship during the COVID-19 lockdown. Adopting a rather personal approach while combining affective theories in cinematic studies, Guo showed how the viewing of the banned classic Farewell My Concubine could speak to political allegories regarding autonomy, resistance, and empowerment. The medico-ideological dynamic found a more concrete illustration in the last presentation by Jia Li (University of Tokyo), who revealed dilemmas in the life and career choices of contemporary women artists in southern China. Their desire to seek emotional and creative freedom wrestles with their awareness and (un)acceptance of their gender identity, which interlocks with the social fabric of post-Mao China.
In her closing remarks for the symposium, Dr. Yuki Tanaka from GAS invited the presenters and the audience to brainstorm on how gendered notes could sound out unheard tunes in the chords of medical humanities. We commented on more anecdotes surrounding the womb, added to the debate on sexism and mental health, and inspired each other to vocalize on the issue of the state ownership of (fe)male bodies. The polyphonic echo lingers on.
About the Author
Shu Yang is an Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University in the United States, specializing in literary, cultural, and gender studies on modern China. After publishing her recent monograph, Untamed Shrews: Negotiating New Womanhood in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2023), she has been working on her next book about the discourse of hysteria in Republican China.
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