The Gentleman, the Detective, and the Housewife: Sensory Worlds of Experiment in Japanese Thoughtography, 1910–1911

Hsiung, Hansun

Abstract

This article examines Japanese experiments concerning the power of “thoughtography,” demonstrating how sensory disagreements between psychologists and physicists were concretized through divergent gendered personae within contested spaces of experiment. Specifically, I analyze thoughtography as a story of conflicts between personae of “gentleman” and “detective” within the private, nuclear-familial home of the “housewife.” In the early twentieth century, the psychological laboratory had yet to establish its authority in Japan. Successful experiment thus required visiting subjects and navigating the intersensorial spaces of their homes. The strategies through which researchers adapted to homes, and the strategies by which housewives manipulated homes to their advantage, reveal contestations over how to look, touch, and feel in the presence of others. They furthermore reveal that the drive to emulate “Western science” met with contradictions in “Westernization” itself, particularly between demands concerning new protocols of masculine scholarly sociability and the prerogatives of the bourgeois wife and mother.

Citation

Hsiung, H. (2024). The Gentleman, the Detective, and the Housewife: Sensory Worlds of Experiment in Japanese Thoughtography, 1910–1911. Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 39(2), 390-416. https://doi.org/10.1163/18253911-bja10083

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 25, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Nov 1, 2023
• Publication Date: Jun 18, 2024
• Deposit Date: Nov 6, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 7, 2023
• Journal: Nuncius
• Print ISSN: 0394-7394
• Electronic ISSN: 1825-3911
• Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 39
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 390-416
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/18253911-bja10083
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1884077
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1163/18253911-bja10083