(CANCELLED) Reproductive Desires in Colonial Korea

This presentation examines interventions to shape human reproductive outcomes, and the desires embedded in them, in colonial Korea. It investigates articulations of the “population problem,” knowledge production in medical sciences, and implications posed for lived experiences in the context of a shifting medical landscape in an expanding Japanese empire. Historicizing strategies to achieve diverse visions illuminates the centrality of bodies – differentiated in gendered, racialized, and ableist terms – in social transformations and the political order. They also help us better situate reproductive politics and practices in Cold War South Korea. 

A historian by training, 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.