2025 Theses Doctoral

Embodied Belongings: Gender, Reproduction, and Motherhood in Late Chosŏn Korea

Kim, Stella S.

This dissertation examines representations of female reproduction in connection with ideas of family and kinship during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), the second half of which saw notable developments in two relevant cultural spheres. The rise of agnatic consciousness from the seventeenth century onward inspired ritual scholarship that made the interrogation of kinship norms an important component of intellectual activity. Meanwhile, innovations in medical thinking and practice offered professionals and laypeople novel ways of thinking about human reproduction. An unprecedented volume and variety of information on childbearing and infant health drew attention to the female body as a potent site for intervention.

This dissertation explores the impact of these developments on the connections between bodies and kinship based on a wide range of sources including medical treatises, formularies, clinical records, domestic handbooks, liturgical manuals, hagiographies, elegies, and more. It is structured around three aspects of the female reproduction that figured prominently in mid- to late Chosŏn culture: gestation, lactation, and (in)fertility. Each demonstrates how the boundaries of normative kinship formations were articulated and negotiated in relation to bodily discourse. Whether such representations highlighted the internal workings of the female body, its external divisibility, or abnormalities, what they had in common was their assumption of a procreative power that was excessive by nature. Defining this power and determining how it ought to be harnessed or curbed called attention to the gaps and inconsistencies in social hierarchies of gender and status.

Chapter One sets the stage for these representations of the childbearing and childrearing body by looking at constructions of maternal and caregiving kinship bonds in the normative domain of ritual mourning. It shows that the persistent presence of mothers, mother-like figures, and maternal bonds in ritual discourse was closely related to the rise of ritualism in the seventeenth century.

Chapter Two turns to the longstanding belief that a woman’s sensory experiences during her pregnancy directly influenced the physical and social soundness of the child. While the language of maternal impressions was woven deeply into the depictions of women’s bodily virtue, the proximity of the gestating body to the product of its gestation stirred widespread concern with the rise of “fetal toxin” theory.

Chapter Three looks at lactation medicine in relation to visual and literary depictions of surrogate forms of breastfeeding. Shaped by relations of gender and hereditary social status, the work of surrogate breastfeeding became most visible through the bodies of lower status wet nurses. Commemorative dedications for lower status “nurse mothers” by their elite charges illustrate how some nonnormative relationships were accommodated.

Chapter Four examines the spread of (in)fertility medicine in connection to the changing terrain of medical knowledge and practice in the late Chosŏn. Prescriptions for sonlessness in learned medicine were inseparable from “seeking descendants,” an indispensable component of the gendered work of domestic curing and healing.

By considering these areas of reproductive medicine together, this dissertation shows that perceptions of the gendered body critically shaped ideas about the bond between a woman and a child, and vice versa. It uncovers the connections between a multivalent kinship system and an increasingly pluralistic medical terrain that made motherhood a highly porous and socially potent ideological construct through to the end of Korea’s last dynasty.