But through such legal, political, and social processes, feminine cultures of religious healing acquired subversive and insurgent qualities. State-supported campaigns and scholarship feminized what would come to be called “faith healing” and “superstitions,” even when practiced by men. It argues that forms of feminine healing were forged in the crucible of persecution, during which a range of people and institutions-from the Japanese imperial state and lawmakers to journalists and anthropologists-created a gendered civilizational hierarchy among religious specialists and their practices. The book exemplifies ways of critically reading dominant archives to access experiences and voices that have long been rendered invisible and unintelligible.Ĭurrently, I am working on my second book, Archives of Feminine Religiosity in the Peripheries of the Japanese Empire, 1879-1945, which explores the making of feminine religiosities under conditions of colonial and gendered violence in the outermost edges of the empire: the annexed islands of Okinawa, the remote areas of Northeast Japan, and the colonized territory of Jeju Island in what is now South Korea. Shifting the perspective of psychiatric, medical, and state documents from their male authors to their female (and at times male) subjects, I trace the languages and practices of domestic intimacy and illness with which women and families negotiated a dizzying array of claims about madness and its proper management across various settings: the rural village, farm household, urban marketplace, and courtroom. It also showed the vulnerabilities and resilience of women who drew on their experiences of kinship and care to parse plausible causes of their own bodily, psychic, and emotional pain. Madness exposed forms of kinship along supernatural, communal, and matrilineal lines that did not fit normative visions of family. At the same time, the everyday demands of caregiving labor countered models of kinship in laws and official ideologies. It argues that the caregiving obligations of families-and especially the women therein-intensified by becoming institutionalized in legal and bureaucratic processes and gendered as women’s responsibilities. My book, Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2022), shows that most people in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Japan who suffered from what we today call mental illnesses remained in the care and custody of their families, despite the introduction of European-derived psychiatry and its institutions in the late nineteenth century. I am a historian of Japan and Korea, with research and teaching interests in cultural and social histories of women, gender, medicine, religion, racialization, and colonialism in Japan, Korea, and the Asian diaspora in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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