Medicine, Sexuality, and Imperialism: British Medical Discourses Surrounding Venereal Disease in New Zealand and Japan: a Socio-Historical and Comparative Study

Abstract

This thesis explores the role of British medical discourses in shaping socio-sexual relations between women and men and between cultures in nineteenth century New Zealand and Japan. It argues that Western medicine has functioned as a carrier of patriarchal and Eurocentric consciousness, and that its global expansion can therefore be analysed as a form of 'cultural imperialism'. Utilizing Ludwik Fleck's method of comparative epistemology, this thesis examines the historical and cultural specificity of medical theories and practices surrounding venereal disease. European medical discourse linked prostitution with venereal disease, using the motif of the 'poison damsel' to construct female sexuality and to underpin the regulation of prostitution. Discourses surrounding syphilis were intertwined with notions of sin and shame to create and maintain distance from a variety of 'Others'. In contrast, in pre-colonial New Zealand and pre-Meiji era Japan, the relationships among discourses on health and discourses on sexuality were constructed differently, with little of the theoretical elaboration surrounding venereal disease that occurred in Europe. This thesis argues that, as an important part of the nineteenth century imperialist advance, discourse surrounding venereal disease came to function as a means by which British medicine participated in the construction and regulation of sexuality in imperial and non-imperial settings. In the white settler colony of New Zealand, medical discourse surrounding venereal disease was used to shape early European constructions of the Māori, to shape changing socio-sexual relations within the colonial population, and to promote a particular sexual ethos. While Japan was never colonized, it was nonetheless subject to forces of 'cultural imperialism' in the Meiji era, an important one of which was medicine. The establishment in Japan of British run and funded venereal disease hospitals for the surveillance of prostitutes was a British initiative intended to assert British medical and moral superiority. These hospitals represented for the British, an attempt to 'assault the untreated strangeness' of the Japanese, particularly in the domain of sexuality. This thesis' comparative epistemological investigation of medical discourses surrounding venereal disease, is a contribution to the wider critique of the global expansion of Western medicine in the nineteenth century. It is argued that medicine operated as a force of 'cultural imperialism'. Imbued with a number of patriarchal and Eurocentric assumptions surrounding, in particular, female sexuality, it was used to demarcate a variety of internal and external 'Others', and in the cultural construction of sexuality in both imperial and non-imperial settings.