Donald Keene Center Special Lecture Series: The Most Essentially Female Function of All?: Birth-Giving in Premodern Japan

February 10, 2005

Donald Keene Center Special Lecture Series
The Most Essentially Female Function of All?: Birth-Giving in Premodern Japan
Hitomi Tonomura (Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM<

Women and men hold different physiological and social relationships to birth-giving, an act polemically dubbed “the most essentially female function of all.” Koji ruien, an early twentieth-century encyclopedia of historical sources, disaggregates the term “birth [tanjô]” into three verbs: “umaru [to be born]” for the child, “umu [to give birth]” for the mother, and “umasu [to make someone give birth]” for the father. Instead of a structure of binaries expressed as “nature vs. culture” or “female vs. male,” these verbs turn birth-giving into a dynamic and multidimensional process that embodies distinct interests of different human agencies associated with hierarchically arranged subject positions. Treatment of premodern births in much modern scholarship reflects the power relations governed by the authority to “umasu.” Prevalent in these works is a tendency to submit the entire birthing experience to a static and totalizing notion of kegare (pollution). Evidence such as the scattered remains of ubuya (parturition huts) is cited to support this intellectual position. The nearly universal and unchanging physiological aspects of vaginal birth-expulsion of the offspring followed by the placenta–also contribute to a static understanding of birth-giving and help to justify the reading of the ‘data’ backward in time. Only when the meaning of birth-giving is freed from the discursive shackle of kegare can we begin to appreciate the history of the “umu” sex.