Decentering Medical Orthodoxy: Visualizing Female Agency and Epistemic Subversion in Early Modern Japanese Print Culture

Christy Sher, The Ohio State University

Historical narratives of medical modernization frequently frame the adoption of Western clinical objectivity as an inevitable progression, a process that simultaneously centralized formal, male-dominated medical authority. This paper decenters that teleological narrative by examining how commercial print culture in Edo-period Japan (1603–1868) provided a tactical space to subvert patriarchal medical and moral orthodoxies from below. Before the boundaries of modern science hardened, artists and commercial publishers actively negotiated who could claim authority over female bodies, sexuality, and health. Through a comparative visual analysis of two distinct interventions, this paper demonstrates how popular visual culture generated alternative, embodied epistemologies. First, Tsukioka Settei’s parodic conduct book, Onna dairaku takara-beki (Great Pleasures for Women and Their Treasure Boxes, 1770), weaponized the rigid visual layout of traditional women's moral manuals. By embedding graphic depictions of female sexual agency within this recognizable format, Settei exposed the gap between patriarchal prescriptions and lived female experience, using visual evidence to invalidate abstract Confucian ideals. Second, Katsushika Oi’s Onna chohoki (Illustrated Handbook on Daily Life for Women, 1847) extended this subversion into reproductive health. By illustrating fetal development and childbirth through the practical, relational lens of midwifery—rather than the abstract, externalized anatomical diagrams of male physicians—Oi asserted the superior epistemic authority of women’s experiential knowledge. Ultimately, this paper argues that the modernization of Japanese medicine during the Meiji era was not a linear emancipation, but a process of epistemic enclosure. The formalization of Western medical models and the suppression of commercial erotic print actively foreclosed the spaces where alternative, female-centric authorities had previously circulated. By recovering these visual histories, this research challenges the assumed neutrality of medical modernization, revealing it as a highly gendered consolidation of power.

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 Presented in Session 142. Contested Intimacies: Gender, Knowledge, Desire, and the Making of Authority Across Modernities