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- Title
'Scientific' Menstruation: The Popularisation and Commodification of Female Hygiene in Republican China, 1910s-1930s.
- Authors
Lin, Shing‐ting
- Abstract
This article examines the gendered implications of the public discourse on female hygiene in Republican China. Through a close reading of articles and advertisements from the Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi, 1915–1931) and Women’s Eastern Times (Funü shibao, 1911–1917), I analyse the passage of menstrual discourse from a specialist focus on ‘regulation’ to a lively public discussion that emphasised women’s corporeal sensations and consumerist choices. My main argument is that the arrival in China of ‘female hygiene’, an import from the west, weakened the boundaries between western sanitary science and Chinese medicine. The discursive multiplicity that appeared in the popular press was not based on the tension between two monolithic categories called ‘western medicine’ and ‘Chinese tradition’, as previous scholarship tends to assume; rather, the two were in a process of dynamic definition – biomedicine defined its own shifting boundary by claiming that it was not traditional Chinese medicine. Moreover, modern menstrual discourses created a form of embodied ‘know-how’ entangled with consumerism: female hygiene came not from state intervention but rather from the alteration of personal behaviour through daily consumption. This article thus relates the nascent discourse of body and gender to evolving Chinese medical thinking and its accommodation with global science and markets in the twentieth century.
- Subjects
CHINA; HYGIENE -- History; CHINESE women; CHINESE Republic, 1912-1949; MENSTRUATION; 20TH century Chinese history; ADVERTISING; HEALTH products; GENDER &; society; CHINESE medicine; COMMODIFICATION; MAGAZINE advertising; MEDICAL sciences; HEALTH; TWENTIETH century; HISTORY
- Publication
Gender & History, 2013, Vol 25, Issue 2, p294
- ISSN
0953-5233
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1468-0424.12019