Gary P. Leupp

In The Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature (review)

role. Unearthing this history clearly took years of painstaking effort and required a new vision of medical history, a Gestalt shift of sorts that could only come from a scholar who had scrutinized a variety of sources and had delved deeply into the social, intellectual, religious, and political context of late medieval and early modern Italy. In doing so Park is able to present us with something truly pathbreaking, a distinct change from the narrow, linear, and modernist perspective that has dominated much of the history of medicine and science. In this way her work presents a challenge to us all to think outside the neat, traditional narratives of our own fields.

Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950

Acknowledgments Note Introduction 1. Authorizing Pleasure: Male-Male Sexuality In Edo-Period Popular Discourse 2. Policing the Perisexual: Male-Male Sexuality In Edo-Period Legal Discourse 3. The Forbidden Chrysanthemum: Male-Male Sexuality In Meiji Legal Discourse 4. Toward the Margins: Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Popular Discourse 5. Doctoring Love: Male-Male Sexuality In Medical Discourse From the Edo Period Through the Early Twentieth Century 6. Pleasures of the Perverse: Male-Male Sexuality In Early Twentieth-Century Popular Discourse Bibliography Index

Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan.

In this analysis of lower-class life in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868), the author portrays the emergence of an urban proletariat during a time of extraordinary economic change. With the rapid increase in urban construction and commercial activity, hired labourers came to replace the traditional workers, while in households, contracted servants supplanted hereditary workers. The text demonstrates that in the same way that products previously restricted to use by the elite became commodities for mass consumption, labour power itself became a commodity: class relations were gradually mediated by money, and employers and employees dealt with each other on increasingly impersonal, if not hostile, terms. Attempting to control such trends, government officials regulated workers by fixing employment seasons, limiting job tenures, setting wages, and establishing labour exchanges, licensing systems and workhouses. The author points out many cases in which Tokugawa policies toward labour resembled those applied by early modern regimes in Europe. Based on population registers, household records, legal documents and popular literature, the book offers a social history of workers and employers alike.