IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB319096840

Historical Dynamism of Childbirth in Japan: Medicalization and its Normative Politics, 1868–2017 (April 2020)

Shirai, Chiaki (Author)

Technology and Culture
Volume: 61
Issue: 2
Pages: 559-580

URI: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/761576

DOI: 10.1353/tech.2020.0053

Outside Links

PubMed

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Medical technology Women Medicine Childbirth Medicine and culture 20th century Japan

This article explores the changing institutional and technological frameworks of childbirth practices in Japan, highlighting the historical dynamism and the normative dimensions of women's experiences. This article shows how childbirth in Japan was subject to a very powerful and far-reaching process of medicalization going back to the mid-nineteenth century. In present-day Japan, the drive towards high-tech medicalization remains strong, but there is also an emphasis on the need to be "natural" and "healthy" and to avoid unnecessary medical interventions in the body. These two seemingly contradictory sets of demands are an important feature of contemporary Japanese society. Their coexistence is only possible due to the continuing hold of a system of moral responsibility that emphasizes the duty of mothers to do whatever is necessary in terms of medical care to protect the safety and the well-being of their babies.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB319096840/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Gonçalo Santos; Suzanne Z. Gottschang; (April 2020)
Rethinking Reproductive Technologies and Modernities in Time and Space (/isis/citation/CBB404202879/)

Article Suzanne Z. Gottschang; (April 2020)
Reproductive Modernities in Policy: Maternal Mortality, Midwives, and Cesarean Sections in China, 1900s–2000s (/isis/citation/CBB126256232/)

Article Tsuge, Azumi; (2021)
Women’s decision-making and their experiences in the changing socio-technical system of prenatal testing in Japan, 1980s to the 2010s (/isis/citation/CBB279929874/)

Article Nishizaka, Aug; (June 2011)
The embodied organization of a real-time fetus: The visible and the invisible in prenatal ultrasound examinations (/isis/citation/CBB383905731/)

Article Jacqueline H. Wolf; (2021)
“They said her heart was in distress”: The Electronic Fetal Monitor and the Experience of Birth in the U.S.A., 1960s to the Present (/isis/citation/CBB006891858/)

Article Gonçalo Santos; (April 2020)
Birthing Stories and Techno-moral Change across Generations: Coping with Hospital Births and High-tech Medicalization in Rural South China, 1960s–2010s (/isis/citation/CBB732387721/)

Article Stokes, P. R.; (2000)
Pathology, danger, and power: Women's and physicians' views of pregnancy and childbirth in Weimar Germany (/isis/citation/CBB000110123/)

Book Jacobson, Nora; (2000)
Cleavage: Technology, Controversy, and the Ironies of the Man-Made Breast (/isis/citation/CBB000111974/)

Article Donzé, Pierre-Yves; (2010)
Making Medicine a Business in Japan: Shimadzu Co. and the Diffusion of Radiology (1900--1960) (/isis/citation/CBB001220551/)

Article Andreeva, Anna; (2014)
Childbirth in Aristocratic Households of Heian Japan (/isis/citation/CBB001500008/)

Chapter Marland, Hilary; (2000)
Smooth, Speedy, Painless, and Still Midwife Delivered? The Dutch Midwife and Childbirth Technology in the Early Twentieth Century (/isis/citation/CBB000101509/)

Article Weaver, Lawrence T.; (2010)
In the Balance: Weighing Babies and the Birth of the Infant Welfare Clinic (/isis/citation/CBB001020992/)

Article Kellie Owens; (September 2017)
Too Much of a Good Thing? American Childbirth, Intentional Ignorance, and the Boundaries of Responsible Knowledge (/isis/citation/CBB160615752/)

Thesis Claudia Jeanne Ford; (2015)
Weed Women, All Night Vigils, and the Secret Life of Plants: Negotiated Epistemologies of Ethnogynecological Plant Knowledge in American History (/isis/citation/CBB407270471/)

Book Jenifer Buckley; (2017)
Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Maternal Imagination (/isis/citation/CBB193270883/)

Book Wilson, Adrian; (2013)
Ritual and Conflict: The Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England (/isis/citation/CBB001552385/)

Thesis Patterson, Amy Suzanne; (1999)
“We ought not to be inactive spectators”: Physicians and Childbirth inAmerica, 1780--1840 (/isis/citation/CBB001562718/)

Article de Ceglia, Francesco Paolo; Pogliano, Claudio; (2011)
Introduction (/isis/citation/CBB001024822/)

Book Dijck, José van; (2005)
The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (/isis/citation/CBB000641252/)

Book Snow, Stephanie J.; (2008)
Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How Anaesthetics Changed the World (/isis/citation/CBB000951519/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}