Governing “secrecy” in medical modernity: knowledge power and the mi-yi outlaws
AbstractThis paper pursues the genealogies of mi-yi (secret doctors) as a threshold figure to attend to the questions of state-mediated governance and knowledge power concerning medical modernity in postwar Taiwan. To consider the mi-yi figure as symptomatic of Taiwan's medical modernity, I inquire into the question of how the scientific discourse of modernity as purported by the class of medical professionals converges with state power to discipline and regulate medical subjects and practices vis-a-vis the discourse of mi-yi. To this end, I analyze the anti-mi-yi discourse that emerged since the 1950s to discuss how the modern medical profession employed a language of science, rationality, and security that initiated an extended state surveillance of unregulated medical subjects and practices. The second part of the essay reads Chen Yingzhen's novella, Zhao Nandong as part of Taiwan's medical “archives” to explore the politics of embodied medical labor as a situated instance of the contradictions of medi...