Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea

Abstract

Curative Violence focuses on disability as confined to a particular temporal imagination through the violent imperatives to “cure” in the context of modern Korean history, which was fraught with colonial and postcolonial / Cold War legacies and produced in conjunction with norms and normativity regarding gender, sexuality, and nondisabled bodies. It is a remarkable book that combines critical thinking with transnational and postcolonial feminist views and in-depth archival and narrative analysis. Not only does it provide numerous entry points to contemplate the issue of disability within a historical and categorical nexus, but it also brilliantly rearticulates what might have been plainly regarded or already established by deploying imaginative thinking tools and visual images.An example of the book’s elucidation of already established frameworks with imaginative thinking is the way in which Eunjung Kim unravels a notion of “folded time” as expressed in the narratives of curing, healing, and rehabilitation. The temporality of a cure presumes the past and the future as normative by highlighting hopes to recover or to achieve “betterment.” As a result, it erases the present as both a potential time and space to dwell and the compulsion of modification; furthermore, it overlooks the lived experiences after the “cure” that deal with different kinds and extents of disabilities and illnesses by mystifying the boundaries between disability and nondisability.In the rubric of critical studies of ableism, it is already commonplace to problematize teleological views on linear progress as entrenched in medical approaches to disability. Yet the book rearticulates the problematization of temporality through the notion of “folded time,” along with vivid examples of Korean and American celebrities’ appearances in medical promotions that disavow disabled bodies for the sake of hailing a future “cure.” Similarly, Kim illuminates the limitation of folded time by offering rich elaborations of historical contexts of, among others, the people with Hansen disease (and their children without symptoms) who were forced to live on Sorok Island through the colonial and Cold War eras, with stigmatization constructed by eugenic medical modernity and loss of their rights to reproduction and to parenting when they had children (see chapter 4). It is worth noting Kim’s close reading of a film about Han Haun, a poet with an illness who became well-known after presumably being cured. The film was produced during the time immediately after the Korean War and supported by the US military office and US-based Christian missionary force. By focusing on the film’s narrative and follow-up interviews with living US personnel from the film, Kim did an excellent job demonstrating the limitations of temporality of cures that idealize the future. The limitation was convincing in the explication of the discrepancy between Han’s enunciation of medical intervention (i.e., plastic surgery) in the film as a remedy that enabled him to be reunited with his lover as a marker of completion of healing to be a heteronormative man, on one hand, and his reality, revealed in his writing, of different kinds of disabilities after the surgery that continuously marginalized him in public and that kept the reunion with his lover from taking place.In addition to the example of how Han’s recovery was reduced to a heteronormative union, this book offers rich accounts of how heteronormativity, centered on masculinity with disability, is complicit with cure imperatives in intimate relationships and with social bonds in gender and familial dynamics as much as with nation-building discourses. To name a few: how nondisabled women’s sexual service (paid or voluntary) for disabled men emerged as a crucial ground of human rights for disabled people, erasing the voices and places of disabled women’s sexuality (see chapter 5); in what ways abled men’s violence against (mentally) disabled women has been presented as curative in Korean films (chapter 3); what facilitates the view of disabled women as not qualified to be mothers, idealizing their burdens of going through invasive measures and self-negation for the mandate of reproducing nondisabled babies (chapter 1).By illuminating that the heternormativity in the cure imperative or in advocacy of human rights for disabled people is uneven between disabled men and disabled women and is based on one’s familial position, age, and gender, the author also creatively deploys devices, such as “proxy” roles, for curing disability (see chapter 2). A proxy, as redefined by the author, is not the one who harms a disabled person out of self-interest (e.g., welfare provision or gaining social sympathy) but the one who is willing to sacrifice for healing a disabled person in the context of intimate relations. For example, Sim Ch’ŏng, in folk tales—the quintessence of a daughter with filial piety—who sacrificed herself for her blinded father to regain sight and reincarnated into a queen, is thoroughly analyzed, with attention to multiple versions of the films based on the story. This is also the case with other films popular during the military regimes that feature either a daughter’s sacrifice for her father (Ŏmma ŏmnŭn hanŭl arae [Mother Star in Heaven]) or that of a male lover for a disabled woman (Yŏngja ŭi chŏnsŏng sidae [Yŏngja’s Heyday]). Despite the involvement of sacrifices for loved ones, the book interrogates the violent nature of projecting the desire for a cure in the name of affection without pausing to listen to the opinions of the disabled themselves, who are inclined to voluntarily compromise in order to reduce the burdens on their family or in service of ideological narratives that consider betterment as monolithic and unitary, such as that of the abled body with employability and reproductivity contributing to nation building.Curative Violence would be pedagogically useful in the classroom for introducing students to the problematics of how modern Korean history, such as the treatment of disability, is a window through which to understand the construction of transnational knowledge production, whether medical, ideological, or material. It would also shed light on how a sense of social justice and reconciliation can be aligned with identity-based politics (e.g., disabled vs. nondisabled) and with frameworks of inclusion as well as why and how liberal capitalist modernity combines scientific authority with the appearance of hygiene and sanitariness.The book is a crucial addition to Korean studies because the subject of disability in humanities and humanistic social sciences is emerging in anglophone academia in conjunction with gender, sexuality, and indigenous studies. Further, the way Kim draws on Korean historical and cultural contexts as a way of exploring critical disability studies and engages with transnational and postcolonial feminist literature constitutes a great example of knowledge production that situates a singularity within planetary dialogues. I strongly recommend this book to anyone in the fields of Korean studies, gender and sexuality studies, transnational studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies.