Side Effect: Notes on Bodily Violence and Medical Mistrust from Japan

This presentation revisits the moral worlds of medicalized risk by drawing parallels between low vaccine confidence in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic and Japanese women’s rejection of the hormonal birth control pill as a contraceptive option. Despite high efficacy rates in international clinical trials for both of these drugs, anxieties over potential bodily risk and prevailing attitudes that pharmaceutical medicines, especially those of foreign origin, must be used cautiously, shape their weak reception. Adverse experiences with mass inoculation in recent memory hang over Japan’s emergency authorization for coronavirus vaccines, which also takes place as the government presses on with holding the Tokyo Olympics. For the birth control pill, Japanese women’s experiences with high gender inequity shape their refusal of hormonal contraception, as many feel that medicalizing their bodies for sex is disempowering. In placing these two cases together, this presentation interrogates the meanings of “side effect” to unpack the social worlds of medicalized risk, asking: on whose bodies is medical efficacy forged? I look beyond binaries like “scientific,” which has historically indexed modern, enlightened subjects, and “un-scientific” through a gendered analysis of global biomedical practice to reveal the multiple scales of power relations that inform the bodily politics of medical mistrust.