Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2016. xiii, 534 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, illustrations, boxes.) US$55.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8133-4875-9.
This is an excellent textbook for an undergraduate course on East Asian history. It summarizes the histories of primarily women and secondarily men in Korea, Japan, and China from a genuinely comparative and global perspective. It also pays adequate attention to the interplays between gender and other categories of social hierarchy, including class, ethnicity, race, and sexuality. These critical perspectives are well sustained throughout the book, from the first chapter discussing gender relations in “ancient and medieval East Asia before 1600,” to the last chapter covering such relations in the current, post-Cold War. The consistent use of these perspectives makes this book stand out by compensating for the sweeping surveys on any given subject that textbooks are commonly bound to. The chapters alternate between the three Asian societies being studied, according to the historical direction of sociopolitical and economic change. For example, up to the early modern era, China, as the central civilization of East Asia, is discussed first, and then Korea as civilizational bridge, and finally Japan as the recipient of cultural diffusion. From the 1860s to World War II, the discussion begins with Japan, then moves to Korea, and ends with China, symbolizing the historical reversal in the direction of sociopolitical and economic change. During the Cold War and the post-Cold War eras, the authors alternate between Korea (South and North) and Japan as a source of sociopolitical and economic change in East Asia. The book lives up to the authors’ claim of offering “the first book-length work that focuses on gender in modern East Asia from both a transnational perspective at the macro level and an intersectional perspective at the level of the individual” (xii).
This book is written in a lucid and inviting style, perhaps even for undergraduate students who grew up with tweeting and texting as their primary mode of communication. In particular, this book does a good job in elevating sweeping historical surveys beyond descriptive narratives; it does so by focusing on the following thematic points. First, it approaches gender as a social structure that hierarchically organizes relations between women and men of various social groups. This is a basic but very important point because many undergraduate students and the general public tend to assume that gender is merely a more sophisticated-sounding term for women or it sounds neutral enough to unburden us from the vexing realities of women’s subordination and discrimination against women. Second, it links gender to other categories of social hierarchy and encourages students to see intersections between these hierarchies. This also allows the students to recognize differences and diversity among women and men as social groups and see that such variations often involve power differences. The section under the heading, “Sexuality and the Arts” (78–82), conveys an ideal discussion in this regard: it shows both the fluidity and constraint that Tokugawa society exhibited in dealing with femininity and masculinity in connection to sexuality. It also captures power inequality as a central factor in sexual encounters and interactions and thereby demystifies the romanticization of sexuality that is still prevalent in a popular view of sexuality. Third, it illuminates broader political and economic changes as the macro sources for altering gender relations and the remaking of meanings and practices of femininity and masculinity in a given social and historical context. This approach enables students to situate gender relations that individual women and men experience in their micro settings of families, romantic pairs, and a circle of friends in a larger context and thereby understand the social construction and reconstruction of gender in East Asian histories.
I would have preferred a more sustained and substantial discussion of men and masculinity in this book’s surveys of changing meanings and practices of gender. The disparity between discussion of the two dominant genders seems to reflect the relative paucity of existing studies of men and masculinities in these Asian societies. This in turn reproduces the common perception that women’s lives have been far more extensively and deeply shaped by gender than men’s, rendering critical roles that gender has played in men’s lives less visible, which is analogous to the relative invisibility of whiteness as a racialized category in the social hierarchy of race. Readers would have benefitted from more sustained attention to power, privilege, and invisibility in the discussions of men and masculinities in the modern era governed by nation-states when gender has become salient as a social category. Similarly, the discussion of sexuality is uneven throughout the book, reflecting the presence and absence of existing studies on this topic in these societies.
In chapter 10, covering “revolutionary social and gender transformations from 1953 to the 1980s,” there is a curious absence of serious discussion on militarization and militarism as crucial political and ideological forces in the politics of gender. Accordingly, there is no single index entry under militarism, militarization, and military service. During this period, both Koreas, China, and Taiwan were ruled by military or militarized leaderships and mandatory military service for men functioned as an important institutional mechanism for gender differences and hierarchy. The comparison between these militarized societies and the apparently demilitarized Japan could have been fruitful. Given that this chapter opened with the discussion of the global context marked by Cold War politics, readers would have benefitted from a substantial discussion of the masculinization of military service and its implications for gender hierarchy and citizenship.
Seungsook Moon
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, USA