Please note: This session is planned to be held both in-person and virtually EST through Zoom. This webinar is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Once you've registered, the joining information will be sent to your email.

Register at: https://myumi.ch/x74Dq

This talk describes interventions to shape human reproductive outcomes, and the desires embedded in them, in colonial Korea. I investigate articulations of the “population problem,” knowledge production of bodies in medical sciences, and implications posed for childbearing and rearing in the context of a shifting medical landscape in an expanding Japanese empire. Historicizing strategies to achieve diverse visions for the body politic illuminates the centrality of individual bodies – differentiated in gendered, racialized, classist, and ableist terms – in Korean social imaginaries. I close by considering alternate frames and how the case of colonial Korea may provide us with a deeper contextualization of the politics of reproduction in Korea’s long twentieth century.

Sonja Kim is associate professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University. The author of Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea (University of Hawai’i Press 2019) and co-editor of Future Yet to Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Modern Korea (University of Hawai’i Press 2021), she researches and teaches on gender, health, and welfare in Korea and global Asia more broadly.

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.