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  • Xing bie shen ti yu yi liao [Gender, Body, and Medicine]
  • Yan-Chiou Wu
李貞德, 性別、身體與醫療 Jen-der Lee (ed.), Xing bie shen ti yu yi liao [Gender, Body, and Medicine]. Taipei: Linking Books, 2008. 448 pp. ISBN-978-957-08-3324-9.

Gender, Body, and Medicine is a collection of nine theses on the genderized concepts of body and medicalization. Although these theses were presented in the Symposium on the History of Health and Beauty and in workshops by the Research Group on the History of Health and Healing a few years ago, their penetrating observations on the body are still very instructive to those in relevant fields. For example, how do people act when the concepts of body are changing? People rarely transform themselves passively. A new model of the body is established through active practice, as David Harvey explained, saying "new technologies (hardware, software, organizational forms) have no meaning or value without active users" (2003: 23). Suzuki Noriko and Chien-ming Yu show us women in modern Japan and China how to be enthusiastic participants in "body reform." Noriko's research, "Beauties in the Mirror: Changes in Beauty Consciousness as Seen in Makeup Guidebooks in Edo Japan," is one of the few dissertations not highlighting reproduction in this collection. According to classical aesthetics, Noriko supposes that traditionally Japanese bodies were thought difficult to change and that people paid more attention to self-cultivation. By the end of the eighteenth century, people gave more weight to the body's appearance than to self-cultivation. At the same time, inexpensive and portable mirrors for commoners helped to intensify the concept of transforming the body. People stressed the body only from face to torso; thus, cosmetics and medicines were regarded as tools to reshape bodies. As education became widespread and job opportunities increased in cities, women could afford more tools to reform their bodies purposely.

Yu looks at the modern Chinese counterpart to Japanese beauty consciousness in "Discourse on Women's Health and Beauty in Modern China, 1920s-1940s." The author uncovers women's agency, unlike other modern China historians who emphasize female physical education to save the country and to build up the race. [End Page 117] Health and beauty were not always juxtaposed in China until they became popular in the 1920s in the period of the Republic. Advocates of female physical education publicized its advantages and fiercely attacked the weak and fragile image of traditional beauties. In addition to encouraging female sports, "health and beauty" was an issuable commodity for hucksters' medicines, nutrients, movies, and so on. Further, Yu describes how women actively demonstrated their agency by following ideals of healthy beauty. Yu's conclusion leaves some questions. For instance, she challenges the new aesthetic, based on Western standards, to eradicate the stigma of "sick women in east Asia." For her, the new Western aesthetic perhaps was an alternative shackle on women's bodies in early modern China. Yu asks whether reshaping the female body can consequently change the relationship between the sexes and whether an influence in the opposite direction is possible.

Ping-yi Chu's essay, "Shape My Body: The Representations of Femininity and Science in the Advertisements for Body Sculpturing Beauty Salons," examines how the beauty business made money by concocting knowledge and technologies to lure female customers when the trade was in an upswing under an advantageous environment in the 1990s. Illustrations of nude women did not appear in public until the end of the 1970s, gradually molding female bodies into desired sexual objects. Assorted books advised women on how to be attractive, and The Gallant Woman—Feminism and Sexual Emancipation (1994) by the feminist Chuen-juei Ho (which advocates sexual emancipation for women) was appropriated by beauty salons to convince women to have their bodies sculpted. Chu canvasses body-sculpting ads in newspapers to decipher the pseudoscience constructed by the beauty trade. Beauty salons set a standard of the perfect body and a formula for potential consumers to assess themselves; they changed the methods, such as diet and exercise regimens to reshape bodies, and turned to using instruments with a high-tech guise to convince women that they could sculpt their body...

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