Violence in the name of healing
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Description
Book Introduction
This book critically analyzes Korean history, policies, institutions, and cultural texts that have violently narrated the existence of bodies with disabilities and illnesses, denying them and treating them as objects of "healing" that must be rehabilitated and overcome.
This book, written by Eun-Jeong Kim, an associate professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and Disability Studies Program at Syracuse University, was published in the United States in 2017 and won the 2017 National Association for Women's Studies Allison Piffmeyer Award and the 2019 American Association for Asian Studies James B.
He won the Palais Prize and received acclaim from academics and critics.
This book examines the "violence" that destroys people and lives with disabilities and illnesses in the name of "healing" by examining novels, films, newspaper articles, policy documents, and activist writings that deal with disability in modern and contemporary Korea. By analyzing this violence within a social and political context, it proposes a different imagination of the social experience and cultural representation of disability and illness.
This book covers narratives from classics to the present, including "Simcheongjeon," "Old Maid," "Idiot Adada," "Over There, a Petal Falls Silently," "Your Heaven," "Manjong," "Flower Petals," "Pansies and Clematis," "Address Unknown," "Oasis," and "Pink Palace," as well as visual images such as commemorative stamps, advertisements, and photographs, analyzing them from the perspective of feminist disability studies and suggesting a new methodology for disability studies cultural criticism.
Through this book, readers can examine how nationalism in Korean society intersects with the cultural representation of disability, related policies, and social movements, using the author's characteristically sophisticated logic and meticulous language.
This book, written by Eun-Jeong Kim, an associate professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and Disability Studies Program at Syracuse University, was published in the United States in 2017 and won the 2017 National Association for Women's Studies Allison Piffmeyer Award and the 2019 American Association for Asian Studies James B.
He won the Palais Prize and received acclaim from academics and critics.
This book examines the "violence" that destroys people and lives with disabilities and illnesses in the name of "healing" by examining novels, films, newspaper articles, policy documents, and activist writings that deal with disability in modern and contemporary Korea. By analyzing this violence within a social and political context, it proposes a different imagination of the social experience and cultural representation of disability and illness.
This book covers narratives from classics to the present, including "Simcheongjeon," "Old Maid," "Idiot Adada," "Over There, a Petal Falls Silently," "Your Heaven," "Manjong," "Flower Petals," "Pansies and Clematis," "Address Unknown," "Oasis," and "Pink Palace," as well as visual images such as commemorative stamps, advertisements, and photographs, analyzing them from the perspective of feminist disability studies and suggesting a new methodology for disability studies cultural criticism.
Through this book, readers can examine how nationalism in Korean society intersects with the cultural representation of disability, related policies, and social movements, using the author's characteristically sophisticated logic and meticulous language.
- You can preview some of the book's contents.
Preview
index
Preface to the Korean edition
introduction
Chapter 1: Disabilities that should not be born
Chapter 2: Vicarious Healing
Chapter 3: Violence as a Way of Love
Chapter 4: A Place Where You Can't Stay, Family
Chapter 5: Sexual Experience as Healing
conclusion
Acknowledgements
Translator's Note
main
References
Search
introduction
Chapter 1: Disabilities that should not be born
Chapter 2: Vicarious Healing
Chapter 3: Violence as a Way of Love
Chapter 4: A Place Where You Can't Stay, Family
Chapter 5: Sexual Experience as Healing
conclusion
Acknowledgements
Translator's Note
main
References
Search
Detailed image
Into the book
Bodies that can be healed and healed are generally still disabled, not only because the history of disability is embedded in the body, but also because the hope of a better body in the future keeps the rehabilitation effort from stopping until old age.
Sara Ahmed, influenced by feminist Black queer feminist theorists, critiques the concept of happiness as a mechanism for oppression.
Ahmed says that happiness is a wish that “stays in place … by not being fulfilled.”
Healing also maintains its status as a destination that no one can reach.
---From the "Preface"
The suffering that is supposed to be experienced by those with critical illnesses cannot be separated from the way the lives of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses are portrayed.
The political judgment that views life with a fatal illness as a clear 'evil' that must be cured reinforces the discourse on physician-assisted suicide for people with incurable disabilities.
Furthermore, the argument that we should focus more on diseases that are fatal if left untreated but are easily curable can be used by those who ignore the need for long-term care for people with disabilities based on cost-effectiveness analyses.
Judgments and prognoses about what is fatal also involve political views that influence how we view an individual's life and whether we consider the life of a suffering individual to be worse than death.
---From the "Preface"
I use the term 'curative violence' to describe the exercise of power that seeks to erase the differences of others in the name of making them better.
Therapeutic violence occurs when healing defines the very existence of the disability as a problem and destroys its object in the healing process.
… … Violence related to healing exists on two levels.
First, it is a violence that eliminates the possibility of viewing disability and illness as a different way of life.
Second, it is physical violence inflicted on people with disabilities, justified in the name of healing.
---From the "Preface"
Solidarity is being built between various human rights movements and the disabled women's movement.
New solidarities are also being attempted, based on movements to depathologize non-normative families, asexuals, chronically ill people, transgender people, sexual minorities, and people living with HIV/AIDS.
The need for solidarity with sexual minorities, workers, and refugees has grown, and connections have been made with organizations for women in the sex industry.
The issues and discussions raised within these progressive anti-violence movements, the movement against ableism, and the temporary gatherings that emerged around these issues helped inform the analysis of the text and historical context contained in this book.
One of the purposes of this book is to explain how various norms of normalcy, including non-disability, gender conformity, family, and sexuality, construct and complicate notions of healing.
---From the "Preface"
In 1945, Korea was liberated when Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allied Forces, and the United States occupied the southern part of the Korean Peninsula, and the Soviet Union occupied the northern part.
The division between North and South Korea was solidified when Syngman Rhee was elected in the first presidential election held in South Korea in 1948.
In 1950, the Korean War broke out, leaving many people disabled or dead.
The category of 'disability' has been broadly applied to various minority groups, and because of the various conditions they face, they have been considered vulnerable and have been subject to control and protection since the Korean War.
Because the concept of disability is so diverse and broad, and because racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity, though often perceived as nonexistent, exists in Korean society, it is impossible to treat “Korean people with disabilities” and “Korean women with disabilities” as homogeneous groups with fixed conditions and characteristics.
---From the "Preface"
According to research by Ji-seong Hwang, who interviewed women with disabilities on the topic of reproduction, after the story of Seon-ah Yoon's successful birth using preimplantation genetic diagnosis became famous, there was a growing animosity toward women with disabilities who decided to have children with inherited disabilities without using preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and this has been linked to Seon-ah Yoon's case.
For example, a woman with osteogenesis imperfecta gave birth to a child with osteogenesis imperfecta.
After giving birth, she was sent to the hospital's genetics department for further testing, where she reportedly was asked a series of accusatory questions.
Hyunmi tells the researcher:
“You told me that I could have had a child without inheriting it, so why didn’t I have one?
Just say that.
Artificial insemination, I think you're talking about that television.
There are ways to prevent genetic inheritance, so why didn't you find out about it and give birth to me?
Genetics and doctors.” Feminist disability scholar Susan Wendell points out that while fetal screening and selective abortion on the basis of disability may initially be voluntary, these practices quickly become a social obligation.
The situation creates an atmosphere where someone being born with a disability is seen as evidence of the mother's negligence in not preventing the disability.
---From "Disabilities That Should Not Be Born"
Within a structure where disability and binary gender are intertwined, the institutions of marriage, sexuality, reproduction, and the nuclear family can serve as a platform for rehabilitating people with disabilities by alleviating the stigma associated with disability.
And this relaxation of stigma leads to the illusion that disability can be eliminated by performing gender-specific demands and patriarchal cultural conventions of heterosexuality.
This narrative formula reflects and reinforces a normative order that regulates even the most intimate aspects of disabled women's lives.
However, there are not only medical treatments aimed at reproducing non-disability (as in “The Little Princess”), but also attempts to dismantle this reality (as in “Pansy and Clematis”).
This highlights the potential for disabled bodies to exist outside of gendered obligations and thus disrupt normative order.
---From "Disabilities That Should Not Be Born"
Disabled mothers who give birth to children with disabilities, non-disabled mothers, and the children themselves may be criticized as irresponsible, ignorant, and immoral, but their existence and experiences, along with those of disabled women who choose not to become mothers and thus are not fully included in the gender binary as women, raise the question of whether the obligation to strive for non-disability is truly a morally sound value.
Violence committed in the name of healing is often not directed at disability directly, but rather at the reproduction of the potential for disability, or more precisely, at the reproduction of disability as a harmful effect.
Cultural texts can be seen as a clear medium for examining the complex scientific, medical, historical, moral, and emotional terrain that underpins the vision of a reproductive future that does not produce disability.
---From "Disabilities That Should Not Be Born"
If we consider that disability undermines the so-called wholeness of being a human being, then 'improvement' in that condition is portrayed as requiring moral, mental, psychological, and physical changes.
In such cases, the disability becomes not a characteristic of one person's body, but of the entire family united with that person, and the family's common body has a duty to support, improve, and cure it.
When we connect the story of Simcheong, which shows what it means to live as a Korean with Korean virtues, to nationalism, we see that it not only demands women's sacrifice for the collective good of the family, but also imagines their disabilities as objects in constant need of treatment, and morally tests family members.
Healing doesn't stop people from thinking that there is a life worth living for people with disabilities.
The fact that the Simcheong story has been repeated countless times demonstrates the cultural influence and importance of the healing narrative that reinforces the role of the daughter who "practices filial piety by sacrificing herself."
---From "Vicarious Healing"
There have been numerous cases of suicides in which people faced the prospect of losing basic government welfare support because the income of a family member with whom they had a duty of support increased.
In 2011, a 74-year-old man living in a nursing home in Namhae, Gyeongsangnam-do, lost his government welfare benefits because his five daughters started earning income, and he was forced to ask his daughters to pay the nursing home fees every month.
The old man chose suicide so as not to burden his daughters.
A man in his 60s living in Cheongju was notified that he would lose his allowance because his children's income had increased, even though he had not had contact with them for over 30 years.
He could have appealed the dissolution of his family relationship through a petition, but he also chose suicide.
In 2012, a 78-year-old woman committed suicide after she was no longer eligible for welfare benefits because her daughter and son-in-law, who lived separately, had increased their income.
In 2011, South Korea's suicide rate reached 33.3 per 100,000 people, which is almost three times higher than the World Health Organization's average of 11.2 per 100,000 low- and middle-income countries (2012).
These and other statistics reveal the difficulties people with disabilities face in their struggle to survive and the need for expanded social support.
It also provides context for how we interpret the various forms of violence exhibited by cultural representations that interact with the social-structural factors that influence these statistics.
---From "Vicarious Healing"
Scholars Robert McLure and Allison Keifer, who study crippling and queer theory, show that enforced body normality makes the very existence of non-normative bodies unsustainable.
Eun-ok's physical normalcy cannot last because of the price she must continue to pay.
Because of the hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and race, and the ideological division between North and South Korea, Eun-ok's healed body continues to become a battlefield.
Eun-ok must find a new chance in life by regaining her disability.
Healing emerges as a solution to the perceived problem of bodily differences, and is based on speculative risk, which carries with it the possibility of both loss and gain.
These risks include returning to a disabled state because the damage that comes with healing cannot be tolerated any longer.
---From "Violence in the Form of Love"
How would our analysis change if we took mental illness as the starting point of our discussion, treating it not as a detached symbol or byproduct of reality, but as a subject experiencing "violence, abuse, beatings, rape, political unrest, and discrimination"? My primary interest here is the relationship between violence and the change that occurs through healing.
Violence demands that we perceive it as having some meaning, and the changes that occur through healing reinforce the ableist notion that only the able-bodied mind can have agency, foreclose the possibility of living in a different way in one space.
---From "Violence in the Form of Love"
To develop a disability-based approach to infectious diseases, it is necessary to understand more comprehensively the various cultural and social elements embedded in the experiences of people with Hansen's disease and the points at which these elements cannot be separated from the experiences of other disabilities or infectious diseases.
The image of leprosy as a disease of the past is contradicted by the perception that people undergoing treatment need to be isolated until or even after they are cured.
Such an image also contradicts the assumption that integration is always a future event, even though we have already reached the “age of rationality in leprosy” half a century ago.
The possibility of cure, rationality, universal access to treatment, and the global eradication of disease do not signal the disappearance of stigma.
In a situation where stigma and isolation persist, integration is merely operating as a mirage in the name of hope.
Apart from the work to promote integration and eliminate stigma, the community, the intimate, familial relationships that emerge from the experience of the disease, and the connection that people with Hansen's disease feel to the land they have lived in, demonstrate that they have a right to the space they have lived in isolation.
---From "A Place Where You Can't Stay, Family"
Framing the sexuality of men and women with physical or intellectual disabilities as a problem to be solved reflects a complex prejudice based on the assumption that normal sexuality occurs within the context of loving, private relationships within the context of marriage.
Disabled men are more likely to evoke empathy for those whose sexual accessibility is institutionally denied in society than other sexually marginalized groups, such as migrant workers or the elderly, or even soldiers or prisoners.
Thus, the logic of sexual desire is selectively applied to morally justify exceptionally designed supports, which solidifies normative sexuality as inaccessible to people with disabilities.
In this solution, not only is heterosexual desire presented as the normal norm, but the universal claim that all people are sexual beings is emphasized as a counter-narrative to the stereotype that disabled people are asexual.
Thus, prescribed sexuality emerges as a new norm.
The possibility that disabled people may be asexual is not considered, and such ideas are simply considered a misconception that oppresses disabled people.
Moreover, the othering and distancing that occurs when imagining someone who has never had sexual experience is based on the assumption of heteronormative sexuality and a cultural climate that solidifies this assumption as natural.
---From "Sexual Experience as Healing"
The gendered terrain presented by discourses on disability and sexuality demands a closer examination of the social dynamics and the workings of power across diverse marginalized groups, including disabled and non-disabled transgender workers within the sex industry.
Furthermore, the dichotomy that emphasizes “male sexuality” and “female vulnerability” based on gender does not adequately explain the diverse sexual lives of people with disabilities, nor does it address issues that do not adequately reflect such diversity.
In this way, the sexuality of disabled people becomes a problem that can be solved—and at the same time becomes more difficult—through the prescription of prostitution, which has been instrumentalized socially, culturally, and historically, without deep consideration of the experiences of disabled men and women and the structural violence.
---From "Sexual Experience as Healing"
Bae Bok-ju believes that he has avoided such damage.
Rather than thinking that her leg was damaged by the polio virus and needed to be repaired, she thinks that it is just changing its function with age while maintaining its original shape and beauty.
The fact that people attribute pain and discomfort to corrective surgery reveals how individuals perceive the exaggerated efficacy of the treatment and the political nature of its potential.
But I think they're telling us that, regardless of the outcome, rather than thinking that people who have had surgery have simply been tricked or harmed or damaged, they're experiencing another form of disability that the intervention and time for treatment have created, and that we need to acknowledge the existence of that disability.
Although I have argued that healing ideologies are used to facilitate violent acts, and that healing itself has violent effects that we may not be aware of, in some narratives healing acts are depicted as producing changes that are perceived as having positive benefits.
Therefore, theorizing healing requires exploring the complex narratives and meanings of disability and illness without diluting their political, ethical, and aesthetic significance.
I believe that we cannot simply reject healing as something hostile to the presence of disability, ignoring the aspirations of those who expect it to work and want change.
I also believe that approaching normalcy, or even completely curing a disability, can create new forms of disability and coexist with the indelible history of disability.
---From "Conclusion"
Can we truly see the disabled body as it is, not as a past body or a future body it should be? What makes present life with a disability possible, impossible, or something in between? Because we focus solely on the past and the future, projecting nostalgia for a "good" past or hope for a "better" future onto the disabled body, we struggle to remain present, with the body's history and its future after aging. This is a characteristic of life lived within folded time.
In this sense, folded time is a time machine with the purpose of allowing someone to leave the present.
This problem awareness does not mean simply arguing for presentism, dismissing the importance of the past and the future, or that we should all live only for this moment and do nothing. Rather, it means examining how the meaning of improvement and deterioration is formed.
It also seeks to imagine a future that exists outside the dichotomous schema of grand hope and despair, a future where we can live without violence.
Healing and death are not contradictory, but inseparable elements when approaching the body as a problem.
When it is difficult to imagine living with a chronic illness or disability, when such a life is considered not to be alive, risking death for a chance at healing is seen as a rational choice and expected behavior.
---From "Conclusion"
Those who write for Western readers about disability and disabled people in non-Western cultures often experience the interpretation that the low social status of disabled people symbolizes the backwardness of those cultures.
When I first came to the United States for graduate school, someone I met on the President's Committee on the Status of Persons with Disabilities asked me about the situation of people with disabilities in Korea.
I explained that overall, the environment is very inaccessible and there is a lot of discrimination against people with disabilities.
The person reacted immediately.
“It seems exactly like the situation in America 20 years ago.” That was the end of our brief conversation, but it left me with many questions.
For example, how do we explain the fact that advanced technologies that could provide accessibility for people with disabilities, unavailable in the United States 20 years ago, are available in Korea today, yet most people with disabilities cannot afford them? How do decisions made in Washington, D.C. connect people with disabilities in Korea and the United States? If discrimination against people with disabilities in the United States is considered a thing of the past, how can we address the discrimination that still occurs in the United States based on disability? How can we build a decolonial, transnational solidarity against disability discrimination, transcending distance and culture, and the perceived 20-year gap in development? More than a decade after that conversation, I still wonder about these questions.
---From "Conclusion"
Just as non-disabled Korean viewers who believe his disabled body can only exist in the past, as seen from the future, cannot coexist with disabled Kang Won-rae, this temporal dislocation denies that disabled people in non-Western cultures live in the same era as disabled people in Western cultures.
The expectation that the United States is a better place for people with disabilities diverges from the reality faced by many marginalized groups living in the United States and disappoints visitors with disabilities who visit the country.
Moreover, these expectations continue to hinder communication between people with disabilities living in different societies.
If, when one becomes disabled, one way to fold time is to call upon one's non-disabled body from the past and the healed body from the future to make this disability disappear, then another form of folding time occurs when one equates the present state of non-Western society with the past state of Western society.
… … Postcolonial feminist scholars have criticized similar logic that sees non-Western cultures as “lagging behind” in addressing women’s oppression.
This logic fails to create solidarity between Western and non-Western women whose lives are interconnected.
---From "Conclusion"
But even if the healing time machine continues to move toward a 'better' future or a 'no worse' future, the embodied disability remains in the present, whether or not it is damaged by healing.
That is, even in frozen time, the obstacles are still alive and moving.
So how can we envision the workings of time, allowing the relationship between healing and disability to be “interpreted, rewritten, and rewritten,” beyond the rigid, non-disability-centered framework of what is better and what is worse?
---From "Conclusion"
He said that the desire to be without a disability is created and cannot be expressed without the continued presence of a disability and without damaging that disability.
Therefore, focusing on the presence of disability in representations that seek to eliminate disability is an ethical and political exercise that does not condemn individuals who negotiate their circumstances at great risk in a non-disabled society.
For example, the documentary "I Want to Be Thumb Princess's Mom" shows Yoon Seon-ah's painful and enormous effort to use reproductive technology to give birth to a non-disabled child (the only way she can become a mother).
On the one hand, this broadcast could be interpreted as having a hostile view toward disability, and it even led to the criticism of disabled mothers who gave birth to disabled children without choosing the same path.
But at the same time, showing a mother with a disability is also a significant challenge to the normative motherhood and family that is only acceptable to women with able bodies.
Sara Ahmed, influenced by feminist Black queer feminist theorists, critiques the concept of happiness as a mechanism for oppression.
Ahmed says that happiness is a wish that “stays in place … by not being fulfilled.”
Healing also maintains its status as a destination that no one can reach.
---From the "Preface"
The suffering that is supposed to be experienced by those with critical illnesses cannot be separated from the way the lives of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses are portrayed.
The political judgment that views life with a fatal illness as a clear 'evil' that must be cured reinforces the discourse on physician-assisted suicide for people with incurable disabilities.
Furthermore, the argument that we should focus more on diseases that are fatal if left untreated but are easily curable can be used by those who ignore the need for long-term care for people with disabilities based on cost-effectiveness analyses.
Judgments and prognoses about what is fatal also involve political views that influence how we view an individual's life and whether we consider the life of a suffering individual to be worse than death.
---From the "Preface"
I use the term 'curative violence' to describe the exercise of power that seeks to erase the differences of others in the name of making them better.
Therapeutic violence occurs when healing defines the very existence of the disability as a problem and destroys its object in the healing process.
… … Violence related to healing exists on two levels.
First, it is a violence that eliminates the possibility of viewing disability and illness as a different way of life.
Second, it is physical violence inflicted on people with disabilities, justified in the name of healing.
---From the "Preface"
Solidarity is being built between various human rights movements and the disabled women's movement.
New solidarities are also being attempted, based on movements to depathologize non-normative families, asexuals, chronically ill people, transgender people, sexual minorities, and people living with HIV/AIDS.
The need for solidarity with sexual minorities, workers, and refugees has grown, and connections have been made with organizations for women in the sex industry.
The issues and discussions raised within these progressive anti-violence movements, the movement against ableism, and the temporary gatherings that emerged around these issues helped inform the analysis of the text and historical context contained in this book.
One of the purposes of this book is to explain how various norms of normalcy, including non-disability, gender conformity, family, and sexuality, construct and complicate notions of healing.
---From the "Preface"
In 1945, Korea was liberated when Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allied Forces, and the United States occupied the southern part of the Korean Peninsula, and the Soviet Union occupied the northern part.
The division between North and South Korea was solidified when Syngman Rhee was elected in the first presidential election held in South Korea in 1948.
In 1950, the Korean War broke out, leaving many people disabled or dead.
The category of 'disability' has been broadly applied to various minority groups, and because of the various conditions they face, they have been considered vulnerable and have been subject to control and protection since the Korean War.
Because the concept of disability is so diverse and broad, and because racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity, though often perceived as nonexistent, exists in Korean society, it is impossible to treat “Korean people with disabilities” and “Korean women with disabilities” as homogeneous groups with fixed conditions and characteristics.
---From the "Preface"
According to research by Ji-seong Hwang, who interviewed women with disabilities on the topic of reproduction, after the story of Seon-ah Yoon's successful birth using preimplantation genetic diagnosis became famous, there was a growing animosity toward women with disabilities who decided to have children with inherited disabilities without using preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and this has been linked to Seon-ah Yoon's case.
For example, a woman with osteogenesis imperfecta gave birth to a child with osteogenesis imperfecta.
After giving birth, she was sent to the hospital's genetics department for further testing, where she reportedly was asked a series of accusatory questions.
Hyunmi tells the researcher:
“You told me that I could have had a child without inheriting it, so why didn’t I have one?
Just say that.
Artificial insemination, I think you're talking about that television.
There are ways to prevent genetic inheritance, so why didn't you find out about it and give birth to me?
Genetics and doctors.” Feminist disability scholar Susan Wendell points out that while fetal screening and selective abortion on the basis of disability may initially be voluntary, these practices quickly become a social obligation.
The situation creates an atmosphere where someone being born with a disability is seen as evidence of the mother's negligence in not preventing the disability.
---From "Disabilities That Should Not Be Born"
Within a structure where disability and binary gender are intertwined, the institutions of marriage, sexuality, reproduction, and the nuclear family can serve as a platform for rehabilitating people with disabilities by alleviating the stigma associated with disability.
And this relaxation of stigma leads to the illusion that disability can be eliminated by performing gender-specific demands and patriarchal cultural conventions of heterosexuality.
This narrative formula reflects and reinforces a normative order that regulates even the most intimate aspects of disabled women's lives.
However, there are not only medical treatments aimed at reproducing non-disability (as in “The Little Princess”), but also attempts to dismantle this reality (as in “Pansy and Clematis”).
This highlights the potential for disabled bodies to exist outside of gendered obligations and thus disrupt normative order.
---From "Disabilities That Should Not Be Born"
Disabled mothers who give birth to children with disabilities, non-disabled mothers, and the children themselves may be criticized as irresponsible, ignorant, and immoral, but their existence and experiences, along with those of disabled women who choose not to become mothers and thus are not fully included in the gender binary as women, raise the question of whether the obligation to strive for non-disability is truly a morally sound value.
Violence committed in the name of healing is often not directed at disability directly, but rather at the reproduction of the potential for disability, or more precisely, at the reproduction of disability as a harmful effect.
Cultural texts can be seen as a clear medium for examining the complex scientific, medical, historical, moral, and emotional terrain that underpins the vision of a reproductive future that does not produce disability.
---From "Disabilities That Should Not Be Born"
If we consider that disability undermines the so-called wholeness of being a human being, then 'improvement' in that condition is portrayed as requiring moral, mental, psychological, and physical changes.
In such cases, the disability becomes not a characteristic of one person's body, but of the entire family united with that person, and the family's common body has a duty to support, improve, and cure it.
When we connect the story of Simcheong, which shows what it means to live as a Korean with Korean virtues, to nationalism, we see that it not only demands women's sacrifice for the collective good of the family, but also imagines their disabilities as objects in constant need of treatment, and morally tests family members.
Healing doesn't stop people from thinking that there is a life worth living for people with disabilities.
The fact that the Simcheong story has been repeated countless times demonstrates the cultural influence and importance of the healing narrative that reinforces the role of the daughter who "practices filial piety by sacrificing herself."
---From "Vicarious Healing"
There have been numerous cases of suicides in which people faced the prospect of losing basic government welfare support because the income of a family member with whom they had a duty of support increased.
In 2011, a 74-year-old man living in a nursing home in Namhae, Gyeongsangnam-do, lost his government welfare benefits because his five daughters started earning income, and he was forced to ask his daughters to pay the nursing home fees every month.
The old man chose suicide so as not to burden his daughters.
A man in his 60s living in Cheongju was notified that he would lose his allowance because his children's income had increased, even though he had not had contact with them for over 30 years.
He could have appealed the dissolution of his family relationship through a petition, but he also chose suicide.
In 2012, a 78-year-old woman committed suicide after she was no longer eligible for welfare benefits because her daughter and son-in-law, who lived separately, had increased their income.
In 2011, South Korea's suicide rate reached 33.3 per 100,000 people, which is almost three times higher than the World Health Organization's average of 11.2 per 100,000 low- and middle-income countries (2012).
These and other statistics reveal the difficulties people with disabilities face in their struggle to survive and the need for expanded social support.
It also provides context for how we interpret the various forms of violence exhibited by cultural representations that interact with the social-structural factors that influence these statistics.
---From "Vicarious Healing"
Scholars Robert McLure and Allison Keifer, who study crippling and queer theory, show that enforced body normality makes the very existence of non-normative bodies unsustainable.
Eun-ok's physical normalcy cannot last because of the price she must continue to pay.
Because of the hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and race, and the ideological division between North and South Korea, Eun-ok's healed body continues to become a battlefield.
Eun-ok must find a new chance in life by regaining her disability.
Healing emerges as a solution to the perceived problem of bodily differences, and is based on speculative risk, which carries with it the possibility of both loss and gain.
These risks include returning to a disabled state because the damage that comes with healing cannot be tolerated any longer.
---From "Violence in the Form of Love"
How would our analysis change if we took mental illness as the starting point of our discussion, treating it not as a detached symbol or byproduct of reality, but as a subject experiencing "violence, abuse, beatings, rape, political unrest, and discrimination"? My primary interest here is the relationship between violence and the change that occurs through healing.
Violence demands that we perceive it as having some meaning, and the changes that occur through healing reinforce the ableist notion that only the able-bodied mind can have agency, foreclose the possibility of living in a different way in one space.
---From "Violence in the Form of Love"
To develop a disability-based approach to infectious diseases, it is necessary to understand more comprehensively the various cultural and social elements embedded in the experiences of people with Hansen's disease and the points at which these elements cannot be separated from the experiences of other disabilities or infectious diseases.
The image of leprosy as a disease of the past is contradicted by the perception that people undergoing treatment need to be isolated until or even after they are cured.
Such an image also contradicts the assumption that integration is always a future event, even though we have already reached the “age of rationality in leprosy” half a century ago.
The possibility of cure, rationality, universal access to treatment, and the global eradication of disease do not signal the disappearance of stigma.
In a situation where stigma and isolation persist, integration is merely operating as a mirage in the name of hope.
Apart from the work to promote integration and eliminate stigma, the community, the intimate, familial relationships that emerge from the experience of the disease, and the connection that people with Hansen's disease feel to the land they have lived in, demonstrate that they have a right to the space they have lived in isolation.
---From "A Place Where You Can't Stay, Family"
Framing the sexuality of men and women with physical or intellectual disabilities as a problem to be solved reflects a complex prejudice based on the assumption that normal sexuality occurs within the context of loving, private relationships within the context of marriage.
Disabled men are more likely to evoke empathy for those whose sexual accessibility is institutionally denied in society than other sexually marginalized groups, such as migrant workers or the elderly, or even soldiers or prisoners.
Thus, the logic of sexual desire is selectively applied to morally justify exceptionally designed supports, which solidifies normative sexuality as inaccessible to people with disabilities.
In this solution, not only is heterosexual desire presented as the normal norm, but the universal claim that all people are sexual beings is emphasized as a counter-narrative to the stereotype that disabled people are asexual.
Thus, prescribed sexuality emerges as a new norm.
The possibility that disabled people may be asexual is not considered, and such ideas are simply considered a misconception that oppresses disabled people.
Moreover, the othering and distancing that occurs when imagining someone who has never had sexual experience is based on the assumption of heteronormative sexuality and a cultural climate that solidifies this assumption as natural.
---From "Sexual Experience as Healing"
The gendered terrain presented by discourses on disability and sexuality demands a closer examination of the social dynamics and the workings of power across diverse marginalized groups, including disabled and non-disabled transgender workers within the sex industry.
Furthermore, the dichotomy that emphasizes “male sexuality” and “female vulnerability” based on gender does not adequately explain the diverse sexual lives of people with disabilities, nor does it address issues that do not adequately reflect such diversity.
In this way, the sexuality of disabled people becomes a problem that can be solved—and at the same time becomes more difficult—through the prescription of prostitution, which has been instrumentalized socially, culturally, and historically, without deep consideration of the experiences of disabled men and women and the structural violence.
---From "Sexual Experience as Healing"
Bae Bok-ju believes that he has avoided such damage.
Rather than thinking that her leg was damaged by the polio virus and needed to be repaired, she thinks that it is just changing its function with age while maintaining its original shape and beauty.
The fact that people attribute pain and discomfort to corrective surgery reveals how individuals perceive the exaggerated efficacy of the treatment and the political nature of its potential.
But I think they're telling us that, regardless of the outcome, rather than thinking that people who have had surgery have simply been tricked or harmed or damaged, they're experiencing another form of disability that the intervention and time for treatment have created, and that we need to acknowledge the existence of that disability.
Although I have argued that healing ideologies are used to facilitate violent acts, and that healing itself has violent effects that we may not be aware of, in some narratives healing acts are depicted as producing changes that are perceived as having positive benefits.
Therefore, theorizing healing requires exploring the complex narratives and meanings of disability and illness without diluting their political, ethical, and aesthetic significance.
I believe that we cannot simply reject healing as something hostile to the presence of disability, ignoring the aspirations of those who expect it to work and want change.
I also believe that approaching normalcy, or even completely curing a disability, can create new forms of disability and coexist with the indelible history of disability.
---From "Conclusion"
Can we truly see the disabled body as it is, not as a past body or a future body it should be? What makes present life with a disability possible, impossible, or something in between? Because we focus solely on the past and the future, projecting nostalgia for a "good" past or hope for a "better" future onto the disabled body, we struggle to remain present, with the body's history and its future after aging. This is a characteristic of life lived within folded time.
In this sense, folded time is a time machine with the purpose of allowing someone to leave the present.
This problem awareness does not mean simply arguing for presentism, dismissing the importance of the past and the future, or that we should all live only for this moment and do nothing. Rather, it means examining how the meaning of improvement and deterioration is formed.
It also seeks to imagine a future that exists outside the dichotomous schema of grand hope and despair, a future where we can live without violence.
Healing and death are not contradictory, but inseparable elements when approaching the body as a problem.
When it is difficult to imagine living with a chronic illness or disability, when such a life is considered not to be alive, risking death for a chance at healing is seen as a rational choice and expected behavior.
---From "Conclusion"
Those who write for Western readers about disability and disabled people in non-Western cultures often experience the interpretation that the low social status of disabled people symbolizes the backwardness of those cultures.
When I first came to the United States for graduate school, someone I met on the President's Committee on the Status of Persons with Disabilities asked me about the situation of people with disabilities in Korea.
I explained that overall, the environment is very inaccessible and there is a lot of discrimination against people with disabilities.
The person reacted immediately.
“It seems exactly like the situation in America 20 years ago.” That was the end of our brief conversation, but it left me with many questions.
For example, how do we explain the fact that advanced technologies that could provide accessibility for people with disabilities, unavailable in the United States 20 years ago, are available in Korea today, yet most people with disabilities cannot afford them? How do decisions made in Washington, D.C. connect people with disabilities in Korea and the United States? If discrimination against people with disabilities in the United States is considered a thing of the past, how can we address the discrimination that still occurs in the United States based on disability? How can we build a decolonial, transnational solidarity against disability discrimination, transcending distance and culture, and the perceived 20-year gap in development? More than a decade after that conversation, I still wonder about these questions.
---From "Conclusion"
Just as non-disabled Korean viewers who believe his disabled body can only exist in the past, as seen from the future, cannot coexist with disabled Kang Won-rae, this temporal dislocation denies that disabled people in non-Western cultures live in the same era as disabled people in Western cultures.
The expectation that the United States is a better place for people with disabilities diverges from the reality faced by many marginalized groups living in the United States and disappoints visitors with disabilities who visit the country.
Moreover, these expectations continue to hinder communication between people with disabilities living in different societies.
If, when one becomes disabled, one way to fold time is to call upon one's non-disabled body from the past and the healed body from the future to make this disability disappear, then another form of folding time occurs when one equates the present state of non-Western society with the past state of Western society.
… … Postcolonial feminist scholars have criticized similar logic that sees non-Western cultures as “lagging behind” in addressing women’s oppression.
This logic fails to create solidarity between Western and non-Western women whose lives are interconnected.
---From "Conclusion"
But even if the healing time machine continues to move toward a 'better' future or a 'no worse' future, the embodied disability remains in the present, whether or not it is damaged by healing.
That is, even in frozen time, the obstacles are still alive and moving.
So how can we envision the workings of time, allowing the relationship between healing and disability to be “interpreted, rewritten, and rewritten,” beyond the rigid, non-disability-centered framework of what is better and what is worse?
---From "Conclusion"
He said that the desire to be without a disability is created and cannot be expressed without the continued presence of a disability and without damaging that disability.
Therefore, focusing on the presence of disability in representations that seek to eliminate disability is an ethical and political exercise that does not condemn individuals who negotiate their circumstances at great risk in a non-disabled society.
For example, the documentary "I Want to Be Thumb Princess's Mom" shows Yoon Seon-ah's painful and enormous effort to use reproductive technology to give birth to a non-disabled child (the only way she can become a mother).
On the one hand, this broadcast could be interpreted as having a hostile view toward disability, and it even led to the criticism of disabled mothers who gave birth to disabled children without choosing the same path.
But at the same time, showing a mother with a disability is also a significant challenge to the normative motherhood and family that is only acceptable to women with able bodies.
---From "Conclusion"
Publisher's Review
『Violence in the Name of Healing』 (subtitle: Rehabilitation and Politics of Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern and Contemporary Korea) is a book that critically analyzes Korean history, policies, institutions, and cultural texts that have denied the existence of bodies with disabilities and illnesses and violently narrated them as objects of "healing" that must be rehabilitated and overcome.
This book, written by Eun-Jung Kim, an associate professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and Disability Studies Program at Syracuse University in the United States, has attracted attention from academia in women's studies, disability studies, and Korean studies since its publication in the United States in 2017, and has won the 2017 National Association for Women's Studies Allison Piffmeyer Award and the 2019 American Association for Asian Studies James B.
It won the Palais Award and received critical acclaim.
This book examines the "violence" that destroys people and lives with disabilities and illnesses in the name of "healing" by examining novels, films, newspaper articles, policy documents, and activist writings that deal with disability in modern and contemporary Korea. By analyzing this violence within a social and political context, it proposes a different imagination of the social experience and cultural representation of disability and illness.
This book covers narratives from classics to the present, including "Simcheongjeon," "Old Maid," "Idiot Adada," "Over There, a Petal Falls Silently," "Your Heaven," "Manjong," "Flower Petals," "Pansies and Clematis," "Address Unknown," "Oasis," and "Pink Palace," as well as visual images such as commemorative stamps, advertisements, and photographs, analyzing them from the perspective of feminist disability studies and suggesting a new methodology for disability studies cultural criticism.
Film critic Jo Hye-young recommends this book as a must-read not only for disability studies but also for those involved in narrative-related activities and research, including literature, film, and drama.
Through this book, readers can examine how nationalism in Korean society intersects with the cultural representation of disability, related policies, and social movements, using the author's characteristically sophisticated logic and meticulous language.
“This book focuses on the obstacles that exist between past and future, between otherness and normality, before and after healing.
In this middle ground, healing and disability coexist as processes.
I will examine how disability and healing are interwoven in Korean cultural representations within a historical and transnational context.
At this juncture, violence disguised as healing emerges as an important topic.
“The disabled body is visualized and narrated within a terrain composed of the boundaries of otherness and normality, multi-layered within folded time.” (p. 30)
“The author’s disability studies reading not only unfolds ‘folded time’ and critiques disability as a metaphor, but also allows us to sense the physicality and materiality of disability that brought the story to life, and recognize the agency of disability that transacts and negotiates.
“The book’s disability studies critique shines particularly when it intersects with feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives that question normality and normativity.” (Hyeyoung Cho, Recommendation)
Violence in the name of healing
'Healing' as a political concept
In this book, 'healing' means achieving mental, functional, and physical structural normality, eliminating disabilities, and transforming a sick body into a healthy one.
Because the categories of normality and health are fluid, even if cured, people may remain stigmatized due to their medical history or remain a minority due to failure to achieve social healing. Even if disabilities and illnesses remain, people may no longer be considered disabled based on class and gender.
Categories of normality and health influence not only the definitions of disability and disease, but also the definition of healing.
Therefore, healing can be said to be a political concept rather than a moral imperative (p. 11).
In the preface to the Korean edition, Kim Eun-jung explains that healing is “an act that creates boundaries of normality and health” and “a process of strengthening boundaries by selectively incorporating parts of exiled bodies” (p. 10).
He also uses the term “therapeutic violence” to express a critical view of a society that defines disability and illness as something that should be eliminated and justifies violence that destroys people with disabilities and illnesses.
Therapeutic violence can manifest as direct violence against disability and illness, or it can be exerted by erasing the differences between disability and illness.
The more the necessity of healing is emphasized, the more it becomes for the family, society, and national community rather than the individual.
At this time, individuals negotiate by considering the rewards they will receive and the price they will have to pay, and in the process, they may even risk death for the sake of the community (p. 10).
“I use the term ‘curative violence’ to describe the exercise of power that seeks to erase the differences of others under the pretext of making them better.
Therapeutic violence occurs when healing defines the very existence of the disability as a problem and destroys its object in the healing process.
… … Violence related to healing exists on two levels.
First, it is a violence that eliminates the possibility of viewing disability and illness as a different way of life.
Second, it is physical violence inflicted on people with disabilities, justified in the name of healing.” (p. 38)
The present lost between the past and the future
Unfolding 'Folded Time'
Singer Kang Won-rae and scientist Hwang Woo-suk appeared on KBS's "Open Concert" aired on July 31, 2005.
After Kang Won-rae, who has a spinal cord injury, came on stage in a wheelchair and danced, Hwang Woo-suk, who appeared on stage with the Minister of Science and Technology, asked for support for his research and “jumped Kang up”, saying he hoped to see him dance “nimbly” again as he did in the past.
In a music video released that same year, Kang Won-rae used a body double and special effects to recreate his "past" self "getting up" and dancing, and the media focused on his "future" after being healed, reporting that he "got up from his wheelchair."
Hwang Woo-suk said that he was contacted by American actor Christopher Reeve (the lead actor in "Superman"), who, like Kang Won-rae, suffered a spinal cord injury in an accident, saying that his research would be beneficial to the "national interest." Reeve also appeared in a 2000 advertisement for the American investment firm Nuveen as a "cured" person.
In this ad, which depicts a near-future disability-related event, the camera pans from the lower body, feet, and then the entire body of a man who "stands up" from a chair and walks away (only after the full body is shown do viewers recognize Liv).
When the host in the commercial greets Reeve with a handshake, the audience 'stands' and applauds.
Even though Liv's head looked "different" because it was composited onto another body, the ad misled viewers because it "looked so real" (several viewers asked about Liv's healing).
Meanwhile, Hwang Woo-suk's therapeutic embryo cloning research received government support and international attention even after research manipulation was revealed.
Kim Eun-jung explains this healing logic surrounding Kang Won-rae, Hwang Woo-suk, and Christopher Reeve through the temporality of “folded time.”
Folded time “replaces the present with the normal past and … makes the present disappear by projecting the normal future onto it” (p. 23).
Only the past before the disability and the future after the treatment have meaning.
This reinforces the social imperative that disabled people must be healed before they can be 'returned' to society, and maintains the non-disability-centered premise contained within it.
In such a society, healing becomes an excuse for violence.
It eliminates the possibility of viewing disability and illness as a different way of life, and justifies violence in the name of healing.
“The emphasis on healing as the only way obscures the fact that healing is a multifaceted process of negotiation that may always make something possible, but may also make something impossible, and that may result in suffering, loss, and death” (p. 27).
"Can we truly see the disabled body as its present state, rather than as a past body or a future body to be? What makes present life with a disability possible, impossible, or something in between? Because we focus solely on the past and the future, projecting nostalgia for a 'good' past or hope for a 'better' future onto the disabled body, it's difficult to remain present, with the body's history and its future after aging. This is a characteristic of life lived in folded time." (p. 358)
Families that view life with disability and illness as lost time
Unstoppable training and rehabilitation
Kim Eun-jung points out the limitations of the World Health Organization's (WHO) disability-adjusted life year (DALY) indicator and the definition in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The WHO's DAL is a measure that combines "years of life lost due to premature death" (YLL) and "years of life lost due to disability" (YLD) among people living with health problems or their aftereffects.
Through this assumption that years lived with disability and illness are “lost time,” the meaning of time lived with disability and illness is “undermined by being measured against a nonexistent time and space in which the entire population could live to old age without disability and illness” (p. 359).
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities distinguishes between “training” and “rehabilitation” (what non-disabled people would call “learning” or “education” is called “training”), and states should ensure that through training and rehabilitation “people with disabilities can achieve and maintain maximum independence, full physical, mental, social and vocational ability, full inclusion and participation in all aspects of life.”
The author notes that independence, competence, and integration are juxtaposed here, confirming that “independence and competence are not prerequisites for integration,” but that “the emphasis is still on getting as close to normality as possible, rather than guaranteeing full integration and participation regardless of ability level” (p. 360).
The idea that people with disabilities must be cured back to their previous 'proper' body and that they must continue training and rehabilitation to achieve this isolates them from their families and communities and makes their 'present' life, their presence, impossible.
“Body that can be healed and body that has been healed are still disabled because the history of disability is embedded in the body, and because the expectation of a better body in the future keeps the rehabilitation effort from stopping until old age.
… … In that sense, for people with disabilities, normality always exists a moment ahead in the future, which causes them to postpone their present lives and not attempt social change.” (p. 30)
"Must we begin to adjust our social and physical environments only after reaching a "maximum" or "optimal" level of potential and independence? The idea that individuals must acquire abilities through training, that rehabilitation must restore their former "proper" bodies, and that disabilities and chronic illnesses must be cured through spiritual, familial, and medical interventions—all of these ideas not only separate people with disabilities from their families and communities, but also, by postponing their lives, separate them from the present." (p. 360)
Korean context
Healing as a function of nationalism
In the introduction, Eun-Jeong Kim cross-references key moments in Korean history with disability rights issues (pp. 45, 62-71).
When the Korean Empire's diplomatic rights were transferred to Japan in 1905 and annexed by Japan in 1910, a tendency arose in literature to portray the nation as a disabled body.
When the Joseon Exposition was held in 1929, Japanese police arrested and deported homeless people and beggars with disabilities from downtown Seoul.
In the 1930s, eugenics discourse appeared in the mass media, arguing that "bad elements" and "the disabled" should be sterilized and isolated.
The Japanese Government-General of Korea established the Japanese Government-General Orphanage to accommodate orphans and children with hearing or mental disabilities, and the Jahye Hospital on Sorok Island to institutionalize leprosy patients.
After the liberation and division in 1945 and the Korean War in 1950, many people became disabled or died.
From this time on, the category of 'disability' was widely applied to various minority groups, who were considered vulnerable due to their conditions and became objects of protection and control.
In 1954, the Korean Ministry of Health and Social Affairs began publishing annual statistical reports on vulnerable population groups.
The first report included “lepers, mulattoes, widows, drug addicts, contagious disease patients, and prostitutes.”
In 1955, “disabled persons, disabled veterans” were added.
The first national census of 'disabled' children, conducted in 1961, included 'mixed-race' children along with children with various physical and sensory disabilities.
In 1964, during the Park Chung-hee regime, South Korean troops were first dispatched to Vietnam.
Later, war films featuring disabled veterans were made, and their rehabilitation was linked to Korea's economic growth and industrial development.
The concept of modern eugenics, which spread during the Japanese colonial period, resurfaced and was further strengthened during the Park Chung-hee military regime, driven by the desire to build a strong and capable nation.
In 1973, the Maternal and Child Health Act was enacted, legitimizing state control over reproduction.
It established exceptions to abortion and permitted forced sterilization of people with disabilities.
In 1980, Chun Doo-hwan claimed that North Korea was behind the Gwangju Uprising and used military force, resulting in mass killings, injuries, and disappearances.
The Chun Doo-hwan regime tried to package it as a ‘welfare state.’
In 1981, the 'Welfare of Persons with Mental and Physical Disabilities Act' was enacted and the country joined the International Federation of Persons with Disabilities.
In the same year, the International Year of Persons with Disabilities was designated, and the principles of human rights and anti-discrimination for persons with disabilities were declared, which served as a catalyst for the disability movement in Korea.
Beginning with the passage of the "Act on Promotion of Employment of Persons with Disabilities" in 1990, disability groups and activists have fought to enact new laws regarding persons with disabilities and to review and abolish flawed systems.
The disability registration system, established in 1988, was abolished in 2019 after 20 years, but still faces many challenges.
The author also discusses the shift in cultural narratives representing disability since democratization and the launch of the National Human Rights Commission, among other issues. Following the IMF economic crisis, South Korea's neoliberalism elected a leader (Lee Myung-bak) whom I refer to as the "CEO of Republic of Korea Corporation." Over the next decade, "healing," "cure," and "therapy" emerged as key words in Korean popular culture.
These words have almost replaced the widely used term 'well-being'.
“In situations where human rights are continually violated and resources are not adequately provided to all who have rights, discourses that aim for healing and remediation often lead to psychological consolation and call for self-development” (p. 45).
“If we look at the material conditions of debilitation and the modus operandi of healing in the Korean context, we see that rehabilitation has been used as both a goal and a form of power to govern the population.
So, in Korea's history, marked by colonial exploitation, wars, and oppressive regimes, how can we critically think about disability and healing beyond the dichotomous, positive-negative notions? This question is crucial, especially when debilitation is directly linked to colonial rule, racism, exploitation, war, and violence, because the disabled body is too easily consumed to satisfy the unwavering desire for health and normalcy.
These aspirations are intricately intertwined with the concept of national sovereignty.
“To overcome the causal frame of thinking that views disability as merely the result of injustice and fixates on the moment of its occurrence, it is important to simultaneously strive to eliminate the violence that creates disability and to understand the complex ways in which meaning is imprinted on disabled bodies.” (p. 46)
transnational context
Coexisting and sharing in the same time
When we talk about the situation of people with disabilities in Korean society, we often compare it to the conditions in Western societies.
Kim Eun-jung recalls an old conversation she had with him when he first entered graduate school in the United States.
To Kim Eun-jung's comment that in Korea, people with disabilities have "low environmental accessibility and face severe discrimination," the other person responds, "It's the same as the situation in the United States 20 years ago."
This conversation still leaves valid questions.
Why are advanced technologies for the convenience of people with disabilities that were impossible in the United States 20 years ago not widespread in Korea today? How do decisions made in Washington, D.C. connect people with disabilities in Korea and the United States? If discrimination against people with disabilities in the United States is a thing of the past, how can we address discrimination that occurs in the United States today? How can we build transnational solidarity across physical distance, cultural differences, and the perceived 20-year gap in development?
Kim Eun-jung cites the “denial of contemporaneity” (Johannes Fabian), which refers to the tendency to place the object of anthropology in a time different from the present of the producer of anthropological discourse, and analyzes that equating the present state of non-Western societies with the past state of Western societies and denying that disabled people in two cultures live in the same era are also acts of folding temporality.
For example, the expectation that the United States is a better place for people with disabilities fails to reflect the realities faced by many marginalized groups living in the United States, disappoints disabled visitors to the United States, and hinders communication between people with disabilities in other societies.
Citing Homi Bhabha, Donna Haraway, and Bina Das, Kim Eun-jung suggests that rather than viewing Korean culture in relation to disability as a stereotypical generalization of East Asian culture or a difference in preconceived notions that imagine gendered violence against people with disabilities, “we should focus on what is produced in the moment of expressing cultural difference” (Homi Bhabha).
Wary of the Western logic of “making other cultural possibilities into resources for Western needs and actions,” Donna Haraway argues that “we must refuse to position non-Western representations of disability as exotic others.”
“Time is not something that is simply reproduced.
As an agent who creates relationships, we allow these relationships to be interpreted, rewritten, and overwritten.
“In the process, community is created and recreated as other actors strive to create stories” (Vina Das).
The affirmation of contemporaneity, which shares the time in which disability exists, becomes an important strategy for unfolding the folded time in which the present with disability is erased.
Postcolonial feminist scholars have criticized similar logic that sees non-Western cultures as “lagging behind” in addressing women’s oppression.
This logic fails to create solidarity between Western and non-Western women whose lives are interconnected.
The situation of people with disabilities living in and around the Global South is determined by international institutions and political decisions of each country.
Meanwhile, technologies that provide convenience for everyday difficulties exist for those who can afford to use them.
In other words, the difficulties faced by people with disabilities are not simply indicators of being 20 years behind, but are closely related to the conditions that enable them to live prosperously elsewhere.
Contemporaneity, which “shares the present time,” is a “condition for communication,” creates ethnographic knowledge from everyday life, and allows us to unfold time and exist together.
“The contemporaneity of disability—the shared time in which disability exists across cultures and across scientific, rhetorical, visual, and spiritual domains—offers another important strategy for unfolding time to counteract the erasure of the disabled present.” (p. 363)
Reflections on the Causes of Death
A condition that cannot be lived without healing
Recently, a woman in her 40s jumped from an apartment while holding her 6-year-old son with a developmental disability.
On the same day, a woman in her 60s who was diagnosed with colon cancer attempted to take her own life with her severely disabled daughter in her 30s, but survived alone.
The next day, the National Association of Parents of Persons with Disabilities issued a statement titled “A Cry from Those for Whom Choosing ‘Death’ Is Easier Than Choosing ‘Life,’” listing a series of tragic incidents that had occurred over the past three years.
“An incident that should not have happened has happened again.” The struggle for the right to mobility for the disabled, which was triggered by the death of a disabled person in a wheelchair lift accident at Oido Station in January 2001, has continued for 20 years.
The law was enacted in 2004, a new plan has been released every five years since 2007, and a revised bill was passed last year. However, due to issues such as budgetary reflection, the 'improvement of transportation convenience' has not been realized.
Meanwhile, accidents in which disabled people were injured or killed while trying to 'move' continued.
The death of a disabled person trying to use an escalator in a wheelchair, which occurred in April when public opinion was divided between support for the struggle for the right to move for the convenience of the disabled and criticism that it was impeding the convenience of the non-disabled, caused some who were more aware of the right to move for the disabled to carefully consider the cause and effect of the accident.
"Why did he take the escalator instead of the elevator?" "Why weren't there any barriers installed on the subway station escalators to prevent wheelchairs or strollers from entering?" "Isn't this clearly a case of individual negligence?" "What do disability rights activists and politicians say about this issue now?"
But this is not all there is to it.
“The assumption that people with disabilities are a ‘burden’ on their families and society as a whole supports a non-disabled-centered logic that justifies driving people with disabilities to their deaths and denying them the resources that society should rightfully provide to everyone” (p. 142).
The more the logic that disability creates a 'burden' is emphasized, the more 'healing' becomes a transactional matter that negotiates the interests of the community and the sacrifice of the individual.
Because the state reinforces the assumption that people with disabilities are a "burden" on their families and society and delays social support, people with disabilities are unable to live without being "cured."
As a result, people with disabilities are often driven to death rather than life.
“If healing is deemed necessary for the survival of the patriarchal family, the act of healing moves beyond the dichotomy of individual choice versus social coercion into the realm of transaction, negotiating the interests and sacrifices of the family community.
At this time, moral values such as self-sacrifice, purity, chastity, and religious faith, as well as a sense of duty to socially constructed commitments and an emotional feeling of having to do something, lead to actions that are considered altruistic.
The argument that disability creates a 'burden' has emphasized the economic, physical, and emotional costs of care.
“The assumption that people with disabilities are a ‘burden’ on their families and society as a whole supports a non-disabled-centered logic that justifies driving people with disabilities to their deaths and denying society the resources it should rightfully provide to everyone.” (pp. 141-142)
Chapter 2 of this book, “Vicarious Healing,” also lists a series of deaths.
In 2010, a construction worker was found hanged in a park in Seoul.
In his pocket was a note that read, “When I die, please make sure that the people in the community center will take care of my son’s benefits.”
He committed suicide out of pessimism that his disabled son would not be able to receive government assistance due to his own income.
There have been numerous cases of people with disabilities dying to avoid becoming a burden to their families, or after being informed that they would lose their benefits due to their children's increased income.
The abolition of the support obligation system was a campaign promise of former President Moon Jae-in, and was later promised by Minister of Health and Welfare Park Neung-hoo when he visited the Gwanghwamun protest site. However, this promise was not kept, and it is still driving bodies connected as "family" to death.
Because the state has failed to fulfill its obligation to provide social support and has instead turned care into a legal obligation for families.
“The father’s suicide occurred within a system where family members’ income was insufficient to support other family members (especially families with disabilities) without receiving support.
Whether his actions were rational, whether they were truly helpful to his son, or whether he could have qualified for services some other way are separate questions.
Because the father may not have been aware of all the legal options available to his son for eligibility.
The anguish behind his decision is a familiar one for people with disabilities who must weigh the pros and cons of administratively imposed balances between their own income, their eligibility for welfare services, and the incomes of their family members.” (pp. 192-193)
Reliving traumatic memories and madness
The idea that vulnerability leads to violence
Chapter 3 presents an analysis of Choi Yun's novella "A Petal Falls Silently Over There" (1988) and the film "A Petal" (1996).
Film critic Cho Hye-young cites Kim Eun-jung's analysis of "Petals" as the pinnacle of cultural criticism in this book, saying it offers a completely new, never-before-seen interpretation of the work and trauma.
Kim Eun-jung cautions against allowing the body of a mentally disabled girl to become a mere metaphor for the traumatic memories left behind by Gwangju, and connects the violence she experienced to the violence experienced by other women with mental disabilities.
“Mentally ill women are attacked not only because they are seen as a threat due to their incurable abnormality and gender, but also because violence is seen as necessary to ‘bring them back to their senses’ or ‘cure them’” (p. 236).
In "Petal," the violence that stems from Jang's desire to heal the girl serves to evoke the girl's traumatic memories and transform Jang.
What concerns the author is not the metaphor itself, but the way in which the ongoing violence suffered by individuals after experiencing trauma is hidden in the process of emphasizing the meaning of state violence.
Chapter 3 moves from "Petal" to the film "Peppermint Candy," through photographer Park Young-sook's "Crazy Girl Project," to the film "Silenced" and the Gwangju Inhwa School sexual assault incident, and to the disabled women's movement's response to it, dealing with keywords such as violence, trauma, madness, metaphor, representation, sexual violence, legal system, and institutionalization.
“Even if in a patriarchal society, resistant feminists are condemned as ‘mentally ill,’ the differences between the woman in the hallway of a mental hospital, the person playing that woman in the photograph, the girl wandering through a graveyard in the film chasing the man who raped her, and the photographer trying to redefine the label ‘crazy bitch’ are far more complex than these images suggest.
Calling someone 'crazy' may actually be an act of violence against women who exist outside of 'normality'.
For example, in the film "A Petal," there is a scene where a doctor turns his index finger next to his head—a typical gesture that indicates insanity—after female residents, angry at the girl's presence, throw rocks at the hospital window.
Although their cries are not clearly audible, their actions of dismissing the female villagers who believe the girl is possessed as crazy are clearly depicted.
But just because non-disabled women experience being labeled as crazy doesn't automatically make us understand how women who exist outside of "normalcy" are subjected to violence and erasure, nor does it increase the potential for social justice and ethical responses.
“When we re-enact madness, we fail to examine the experience of living with an unhealed disability and the experience of ongoing oppression and violence because we assume the damage is already done.” (pp. 258-259)
Sexual Rights and Representation of People with Disabilities
Sexual experience as healing
Chapter 5 features the films "Pink Palace" and "Daddy," which raise controversy about the sexual rights of people with disabilities.
In "Pink Palace," which depicts a visit to a brothel by a single man with cerebral palsy, the disabled man is depicted as a subject who expresses sexual desire and seeks sexual experiences. However, in "Dad," a disabled woman is raped therapeutically by her father, who assumes that his daughter is engaging in self-harming behavior due to sexual desire, and the rape of disabled women is depicted as inevitable and objectified.
Kim Eun-jung pays particular attention to the sexuality of women with disabilities, stating that because existing discussions have focused on men with disabilities, women with disabilities have been discussed primarily in the context of sexual violence or reproductive control.
Moreover, sexual pleasure itself has been less emphasized and has been defined primarily in terms of intimacy with people or marital relationships.
The author argues that rather than offering a single, immediate solution and hastily institutionalizing it, efforts are needed to consider sexual diversity and change, expanded public support and networks, and legal protections, centering on the voices of women with disabilities, sexual and gender minorities with disabilities, activists with disabilities, and sex workers.
“Constructing the sexuality of men and women with physical or intellectual disabilities as a problem to be solved reflects a complex prejudice based on the assumption that normal sexuality occurs within the context of loving, private relationships within the context of marriage.
Disabled men are more likely to evoke empathy for those whose sexual accessibility is institutionally denied in society than other sexually marginalized groups, such as migrant workers or the elderly, or even soldiers or prisoners.
Thus, the logic of sexual desire is selectively applied to morally justify exceptionally designed supports, which solidifies normative sexuality as inaccessible to people with disabilities.
“In this solution, not only is heterosexual desire presented as the normal norm, but the universal claim that all people are sexual beings is emphasized as a counternarrative to the stereotype that disabled people are asexual.” (pp. 320, 321)
“The gendered terrain presented by discourses on disability and sexuality calls for a closer examination of the social dynamics and the workings of power across diverse marginalized groups, including disabled and non-disabled transgender workers in the sex industry.
Furthermore, the dichotomy that emphasizes “male sexuality” and “female vulnerability” based on gender does not adequately explain the diverse sexual lives of people with disabilities, nor does it address issues that do not adequately reflect such diversity.
“In this way, the sexuality of disabled people becomes a problem that can be solved—and at the same time becomes more difficult—through the prescription of prostitution, which has been instrumentalized socially, culturally, and historically, without deep consideration of the experiences of disabled men and women and the structural violence.” (p. 329)
A book that connects by asking ten thousand questions
The significance and utility of this book
By detailing the boundaries and overlapping spaces that exist between disability, healing, and normalcy, this book analyzes how gender, sexuality, family, and nation intervene in healing, using markers such as reproduction, family, class, race, nation, marriage, and heterosexuality.
The greatest significance of this book, which analyzes the existing discourse of feminist disability studies and verbalizes the Korean context into a transnational discourse, is that it covers stories that resonate with the practices of the disability women's movement.
When we unfold "folded time" so that bodies with disabilities and illnesses can exist in their own right, and create a more political and ethical logic of "healing" from the perspective of women with disabilities, new possibilities for transnational feminist disability studies open up.
I hope that readers will now continue to explore the questions this book raises, which, because they are based on intersectionality, can be connected in many ways.
"How does Korean society narrate the time of disability? With this book, which asks these questions, let's embark on a journey through time that transcends able-centered thinking" (Cho Hye-young).
“I recommend this book to everyone who wants to face the roots of discrimination and hatred prevalent in Korean society and contribute to social change, to overcome the history of discrimination and to open up the time that has been reserved for the future” (Na Young-jeong).
“Solidarity is being built between various human rights movements and the disabled women’s movement.
New solidarities are also being attempted, based on movements to depathologize non-normative families, asexuals, chronically ill people, transgender people, sexual minorities, and people living with HIV/AIDS.
The need for solidarity with sexual minorities, workers, and refugees has grown, and connections have been made with organizations for women in the sex industry.
The issues and discussions raised within these progressive anti-violence movements, the movement against ableism, and the temporary gatherings that emerged around these issues helped inform the analysis of the text and historical context contained in this book.
One of the purposes of this book is to explain how various norms of normalcy, including non-disability, gender conformity, family, and sexuality, construct and complicate notions of healing.” (pp. 52, 53)
“I would like to read this book together with colleagues from the disability movement, the LGBTQ+ movement, the migrant movement, the refugee movement, the movement to abolish foreign shelters, the HIV/AIDS human rights movement, the sex worker movement, and the cultural movement, all demanding the right to health, sexual and reproductive rights, the right to form a family, the right not to be detained in institutions, the right to move, and the right to access non-discriminatory public health care.” (Na Young-jeong, Recommendation)
This book, written by Eun-Jung Kim, an associate professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and Disability Studies Program at Syracuse University in the United States, has attracted attention from academia in women's studies, disability studies, and Korean studies since its publication in the United States in 2017, and has won the 2017 National Association for Women's Studies Allison Piffmeyer Award and the 2019 American Association for Asian Studies James B.
It won the Palais Award and received critical acclaim.
This book examines the "violence" that destroys people and lives with disabilities and illnesses in the name of "healing" by examining novels, films, newspaper articles, policy documents, and activist writings that deal with disability in modern and contemporary Korea. By analyzing this violence within a social and political context, it proposes a different imagination of the social experience and cultural representation of disability and illness.
This book covers narratives from classics to the present, including "Simcheongjeon," "Old Maid," "Idiot Adada," "Over There, a Petal Falls Silently," "Your Heaven," "Manjong," "Flower Petals," "Pansies and Clematis," "Address Unknown," "Oasis," and "Pink Palace," as well as visual images such as commemorative stamps, advertisements, and photographs, analyzing them from the perspective of feminist disability studies and suggesting a new methodology for disability studies cultural criticism.
Film critic Jo Hye-young recommends this book as a must-read not only for disability studies but also for those involved in narrative-related activities and research, including literature, film, and drama.
Through this book, readers can examine how nationalism in Korean society intersects with the cultural representation of disability, related policies, and social movements, using the author's characteristically sophisticated logic and meticulous language.
“This book focuses on the obstacles that exist between past and future, between otherness and normality, before and after healing.
In this middle ground, healing and disability coexist as processes.
I will examine how disability and healing are interwoven in Korean cultural representations within a historical and transnational context.
At this juncture, violence disguised as healing emerges as an important topic.
“The disabled body is visualized and narrated within a terrain composed of the boundaries of otherness and normality, multi-layered within folded time.” (p. 30)
“The author’s disability studies reading not only unfolds ‘folded time’ and critiques disability as a metaphor, but also allows us to sense the physicality and materiality of disability that brought the story to life, and recognize the agency of disability that transacts and negotiates.
“The book’s disability studies critique shines particularly when it intersects with feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives that question normality and normativity.” (Hyeyoung Cho, Recommendation)
Violence in the name of healing
'Healing' as a political concept
In this book, 'healing' means achieving mental, functional, and physical structural normality, eliminating disabilities, and transforming a sick body into a healthy one.
Because the categories of normality and health are fluid, even if cured, people may remain stigmatized due to their medical history or remain a minority due to failure to achieve social healing. Even if disabilities and illnesses remain, people may no longer be considered disabled based on class and gender.
Categories of normality and health influence not only the definitions of disability and disease, but also the definition of healing.
Therefore, healing can be said to be a political concept rather than a moral imperative (p. 11).
In the preface to the Korean edition, Kim Eun-jung explains that healing is “an act that creates boundaries of normality and health” and “a process of strengthening boundaries by selectively incorporating parts of exiled bodies” (p. 10).
He also uses the term “therapeutic violence” to express a critical view of a society that defines disability and illness as something that should be eliminated and justifies violence that destroys people with disabilities and illnesses.
Therapeutic violence can manifest as direct violence against disability and illness, or it can be exerted by erasing the differences between disability and illness.
The more the necessity of healing is emphasized, the more it becomes for the family, society, and national community rather than the individual.
At this time, individuals negotiate by considering the rewards they will receive and the price they will have to pay, and in the process, they may even risk death for the sake of the community (p. 10).
“I use the term ‘curative violence’ to describe the exercise of power that seeks to erase the differences of others under the pretext of making them better.
Therapeutic violence occurs when healing defines the very existence of the disability as a problem and destroys its object in the healing process.
… … Violence related to healing exists on two levels.
First, it is a violence that eliminates the possibility of viewing disability and illness as a different way of life.
Second, it is physical violence inflicted on people with disabilities, justified in the name of healing.” (p. 38)
The present lost between the past and the future
Unfolding 'Folded Time'
Singer Kang Won-rae and scientist Hwang Woo-suk appeared on KBS's "Open Concert" aired on July 31, 2005.
After Kang Won-rae, who has a spinal cord injury, came on stage in a wheelchair and danced, Hwang Woo-suk, who appeared on stage with the Minister of Science and Technology, asked for support for his research and “jumped Kang up”, saying he hoped to see him dance “nimbly” again as he did in the past.
In a music video released that same year, Kang Won-rae used a body double and special effects to recreate his "past" self "getting up" and dancing, and the media focused on his "future" after being healed, reporting that he "got up from his wheelchair."
Hwang Woo-suk said that he was contacted by American actor Christopher Reeve (the lead actor in "Superman"), who, like Kang Won-rae, suffered a spinal cord injury in an accident, saying that his research would be beneficial to the "national interest." Reeve also appeared in a 2000 advertisement for the American investment firm Nuveen as a "cured" person.
In this ad, which depicts a near-future disability-related event, the camera pans from the lower body, feet, and then the entire body of a man who "stands up" from a chair and walks away (only after the full body is shown do viewers recognize Liv).
When the host in the commercial greets Reeve with a handshake, the audience 'stands' and applauds.
Even though Liv's head looked "different" because it was composited onto another body, the ad misled viewers because it "looked so real" (several viewers asked about Liv's healing).
Meanwhile, Hwang Woo-suk's therapeutic embryo cloning research received government support and international attention even after research manipulation was revealed.
Kim Eun-jung explains this healing logic surrounding Kang Won-rae, Hwang Woo-suk, and Christopher Reeve through the temporality of “folded time.”
Folded time “replaces the present with the normal past and … makes the present disappear by projecting the normal future onto it” (p. 23).
Only the past before the disability and the future after the treatment have meaning.
This reinforces the social imperative that disabled people must be healed before they can be 'returned' to society, and maintains the non-disability-centered premise contained within it.
In such a society, healing becomes an excuse for violence.
It eliminates the possibility of viewing disability and illness as a different way of life, and justifies violence in the name of healing.
“The emphasis on healing as the only way obscures the fact that healing is a multifaceted process of negotiation that may always make something possible, but may also make something impossible, and that may result in suffering, loss, and death” (p. 27).
"Can we truly see the disabled body as its present state, rather than as a past body or a future body to be? What makes present life with a disability possible, impossible, or something in between? Because we focus solely on the past and the future, projecting nostalgia for a 'good' past or hope for a 'better' future onto the disabled body, it's difficult to remain present, with the body's history and its future after aging. This is a characteristic of life lived in folded time." (p. 358)
Families that view life with disability and illness as lost time
Unstoppable training and rehabilitation
Kim Eun-jung points out the limitations of the World Health Organization's (WHO) disability-adjusted life year (DALY) indicator and the definition in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The WHO's DAL is a measure that combines "years of life lost due to premature death" (YLL) and "years of life lost due to disability" (YLD) among people living with health problems or their aftereffects.
Through this assumption that years lived with disability and illness are “lost time,” the meaning of time lived with disability and illness is “undermined by being measured against a nonexistent time and space in which the entire population could live to old age without disability and illness” (p. 359).
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities distinguishes between “training” and “rehabilitation” (what non-disabled people would call “learning” or “education” is called “training”), and states should ensure that through training and rehabilitation “people with disabilities can achieve and maintain maximum independence, full physical, mental, social and vocational ability, full inclusion and participation in all aspects of life.”
The author notes that independence, competence, and integration are juxtaposed here, confirming that “independence and competence are not prerequisites for integration,” but that “the emphasis is still on getting as close to normality as possible, rather than guaranteeing full integration and participation regardless of ability level” (p. 360).
The idea that people with disabilities must be cured back to their previous 'proper' body and that they must continue training and rehabilitation to achieve this isolates them from their families and communities and makes their 'present' life, their presence, impossible.
“Body that can be healed and body that has been healed are still disabled because the history of disability is embedded in the body, and because the expectation of a better body in the future keeps the rehabilitation effort from stopping until old age.
… … In that sense, for people with disabilities, normality always exists a moment ahead in the future, which causes them to postpone their present lives and not attempt social change.” (p. 30)
"Must we begin to adjust our social and physical environments only after reaching a "maximum" or "optimal" level of potential and independence? The idea that individuals must acquire abilities through training, that rehabilitation must restore their former "proper" bodies, and that disabilities and chronic illnesses must be cured through spiritual, familial, and medical interventions—all of these ideas not only separate people with disabilities from their families and communities, but also, by postponing their lives, separate them from the present." (p. 360)
Korean context
Healing as a function of nationalism
In the introduction, Eun-Jeong Kim cross-references key moments in Korean history with disability rights issues (pp. 45, 62-71).
When the Korean Empire's diplomatic rights were transferred to Japan in 1905 and annexed by Japan in 1910, a tendency arose in literature to portray the nation as a disabled body.
When the Joseon Exposition was held in 1929, Japanese police arrested and deported homeless people and beggars with disabilities from downtown Seoul.
In the 1930s, eugenics discourse appeared in the mass media, arguing that "bad elements" and "the disabled" should be sterilized and isolated.
The Japanese Government-General of Korea established the Japanese Government-General Orphanage to accommodate orphans and children with hearing or mental disabilities, and the Jahye Hospital on Sorok Island to institutionalize leprosy patients.
After the liberation and division in 1945 and the Korean War in 1950, many people became disabled or died.
From this time on, the category of 'disability' was widely applied to various minority groups, who were considered vulnerable due to their conditions and became objects of protection and control.
In 1954, the Korean Ministry of Health and Social Affairs began publishing annual statistical reports on vulnerable population groups.
The first report included “lepers, mulattoes, widows, drug addicts, contagious disease patients, and prostitutes.”
In 1955, “disabled persons, disabled veterans” were added.
The first national census of 'disabled' children, conducted in 1961, included 'mixed-race' children along with children with various physical and sensory disabilities.
In 1964, during the Park Chung-hee regime, South Korean troops were first dispatched to Vietnam.
Later, war films featuring disabled veterans were made, and their rehabilitation was linked to Korea's economic growth and industrial development.
The concept of modern eugenics, which spread during the Japanese colonial period, resurfaced and was further strengthened during the Park Chung-hee military regime, driven by the desire to build a strong and capable nation.
In 1973, the Maternal and Child Health Act was enacted, legitimizing state control over reproduction.
It established exceptions to abortion and permitted forced sterilization of people with disabilities.
In 1980, Chun Doo-hwan claimed that North Korea was behind the Gwangju Uprising and used military force, resulting in mass killings, injuries, and disappearances.
The Chun Doo-hwan regime tried to package it as a ‘welfare state.’
In 1981, the 'Welfare of Persons with Mental and Physical Disabilities Act' was enacted and the country joined the International Federation of Persons with Disabilities.
In the same year, the International Year of Persons with Disabilities was designated, and the principles of human rights and anti-discrimination for persons with disabilities were declared, which served as a catalyst for the disability movement in Korea.
Beginning with the passage of the "Act on Promotion of Employment of Persons with Disabilities" in 1990, disability groups and activists have fought to enact new laws regarding persons with disabilities and to review and abolish flawed systems.
The disability registration system, established in 1988, was abolished in 2019 after 20 years, but still faces many challenges.
The author also discusses the shift in cultural narratives representing disability since democratization and the launch of the National Human Rights Commission, among other issues. Following the IMF economic crisis, South Korea's neoliberalism elected a leader (Lee Myung-bak) whom I refer to as the "CEO of Republic of Korea Corporation." Over the next decade, "healing," "cure," and "therapy" emerged as key words in Korean popular culture.
These words have almost replaced the widely used term 'well-being'.
“In situations where human rights are continually violated and resources are not adequately provided to all who have rights, discourses that aim for healing and remediation often lead to psychological consolation and call for self-development” (p. 45).
“If we look at the material conditions of debilitation and the modus operandi of healing in the Korean context, we see that rehabilitation has been used as both a goal and a form of power to govern the population.
So, in Korea's history, marked by colonial exploitation, wars, and oppressive regimes, how can we critically think about disability and healing beyond the dichotomous, positive-negative notions? This question is crucial, especially when debilitation is directly linked to colonial rule, racism, exploitation, war, and violence, because the disabled body is too easily consumed to satisfy the unwavering desire for health and normalcy.
These aspirations are intricately intertwined with the concept of national sovereignty.
“To overcome the causal frame of thinking that views disability as merely the result of injustice and fixates on the moment of its occurrence, it is important to simultaneously strive to eliminate the violence that creates disability and to understand the complex ways in which meaning is imprinted on disabled bodies.” (p. 46)
transnational context
Coexisting and sharing in the same time
When we talk about the situation of people with disabilities in Korean society, we often compare it to the conditions in Western societies.
Kim Eun-jung recalls an old conversation she had with him when he first entered graduate school in the United States.
To Kim Eun-jung's comment that in Korea, people with disabilities have "low environmental accessibility and face severe discrimination," the other person responds, "It's the same as the situation in the United States 20 years ago."
This conversation still leaves valid questions.
Why are advanced technologies for the convenience of people with disabilities that were impossible in the United States 20 years ago not widespread in Korea today? How do decisions made in Washington, D.C. connect people with disabilities in Korea and the United States? If discrimination against people with disabilities in the United States is a thing of the past, how can we address discrimination that occurs in the United States today? How can we build transnational solidarity across physical distance, cultural differences, and the perceived 20-year gap in development?
Kim Eun-jung cites the “denial of contemporaneity” (Johannes Fabian), which refers to the tendency to place the object of anthropology in a time different from the present of the producer of anthropological discourse, and analyzes that equating the present state of non-Western societies with the past state of Western societies and denying that disabled people in two cultures live in the same era are also acts of folding temporality.
For example, the expectation that the United States is a better place for people with disabilities fails to reflect the realities faced by many marginalized groups living in the United States, disappoints disabled visitors to the United States, and hinders communication between people with disabilities in other societies.
Citing Homi Bhabha, Donna Haraway, and Bina Das, Kim Eun-jung suggests that rather than viewing Korean culture in relation to disability as a stereotypical generalization of East Asian culture or a difference in preconceived notions that imagine gendered violence against people with disabilities, “we should focus on what is produced in the moment of expressing cultural difference” (Homi Bhabha).
Wary of the Western logic of “making other cultural possibilities into resources for Western needs and actions,” Donna Haraway argues that “we must refuse to position non-Western representations of disability as exotic others.”
“Time is not something that is simply reproduced.
As an agent who creates relationships, we allow these relationships to be interpreted, rewritten, and overwritten.
“In the process, community is created and recreated as other actors strive to create stories” (Vina Das).
The affirmation of contemporaneity, which shares the time in which disability exists, becomes an important strategy for unfolding the folded time in which the present with disability is erased.
Postcolonial feminist scholars have criticized similar logic that sees non-Western cultures as “lagging behind” in addressing women’s oppression.
This logic fails to create solidarity between Western and non-Western women whose lives are interconnected.
The situation of people with disabilities living in and around the Global South is determined by international institutions and political decisions of each country.
Meanwhile, technologies that provide convenience for everyday difficulties exist for those who can afford to use them.
In other words, the difficulties faced by people with disabilities are not simply indicators of being 20 years behind, but are closely related to the conditions that enable them to live prosperously elsewhere.
Contemporaneity, which “shares the present time,” is a “condition for communication,” creates ethnographic knowledge from everyday life, and allows us to unfold time and exist together.
“The contemporaneity of disability—the shared time in which disability exists across cultures and across scientific, rhetorical, visual, and spiritual domains—offers another important strategy for unfolding time to counteract the erasure of the disabled present.” (p. 363)
Reflections on the Causes of Death
A condition that cannot be lived without healing
Recently, a woman in her 40s jumped from an apartment while holding her 6-year-old son with a developmental disability.
On the same day, a woman in her 60s who was diagnosed with colon cancer attempted to take her own life with her severely disabled daughter in her 30s, but survived alone.
The next day, the National Association of Parents of Persons with Disabilities issued a statement titled “A Cry from Those for Whom Choosing ‘Death’ Is Easier Than Choosing ‘Life,’” listing a series of tragic incidents that had occurred over the past three years.
“An incident that should not have happened has happened again.” The struggle for the right to mobility for the disabled, which was triggered by the death of a disabled person in a wheelchair lift accident at Oido Station in January 2001, has continued for 20 years.
The law was enacted in 2004, a new plan has been released every five years since 2007, and a revised bill was passed last year. However, due to issues such as budgetary reflection, the 'improvement of transportation convenience' has not been realized.
Meanwhile, accidents in which disabled people were injured or killed while trying to 'move' continued.
The death of a disabled person trying to use an escalator in a wheelchair, which occurred in April when public opinion was divided between support for the struggle for the right to move for the convenience of the disabled and criticism that it was impeding the convenience of the non-disabled, caused some who were more aware of the right to move for the disabled to carefully consider the cause and effect of the accident.
"Why did he take the escalator instead of the elevator?" "Why weren't there any barriers installed on the subway station escalators to prevent wheelchairs or strollers from entering?" "Isn't this clearly a case of individual negligence?" "What do disability rights activists and politicians say about this issue now?"
But this is not all there is to it.
“The assumption that people with disabilities are a ‘burden’ on their families and society as a whole supports a non-disabled-centered logic that justifies driving people with disabilities to their deaths and denying them the resources that society should rightfully provide to everyone” (p. 142).
The more the logic that disability creates a 'burden' is emphasized, the more 'healing' becomes a transactional matter that negotiates the interests of the community and the sacrifice of the individual.
Because the state reinforces the assumption that people with disabilities are a "burden" on their families and society and delays social support, people with disabilities are unable to live without being "cured."
As a result, people with disabilities are often driven to death rather than life.
“If healing is deemed necessary for the survival of the patriarchal family, the act of healing moves beyond the dichotomy of individual choice versus social coercion into the realm of transaction, negotiating the interests and sacrifices of the family community.
At this time, moral values such as self-sacrifice, purity, chastity, and religious faith, as well as a sense of duty to socially constructed commitments and an emotional feeling of having to do something, lead to actions that are considered altruistic.
The argument that disability creates a 'burden' has emphasized the economic, physical, and emotional costs of care.
“The assumption that people with disabilities are a ‘burden’ on their families and society as a whole supports a non-disabled-centered logic that justifies driving people with disabilities to their deaths and denying society the resources it should rightfully provide to everyone.” (pp. 141-142)
Chapter 2 of this book, “Vicarious Healing,” also lists a series of deaths.
In 2010, a construction worker was found hanged in a park in Seoul.
In his pocket was a note that read, “When I die, please make sure that the people in the community center will take care of my son’s benefits.”
He committed suicide out of pessimism that his disabled son would not be able to receive government assistance due to his own income.
There have been numerous cases of people with disabilities dying to avoid becoming a burden to their families, or after being informed that they would lose their benefits due to their children's increased income.
The abolition of the support obligation system was a campaign promise of former President Moon Jae-in, and was later promised by Minister of Health and Welfare Park Neung-hoo when he visited the Gwanghwamun protest site. However, this promise was not kept, and it is still driving bodies connected as "family" to death.
Because the state has failed to fulfill its obligation to provide social support and has instead turned care into a legal obligation for families.
“The father’s suicide occurred within a system where family members’ income was insufficient to support other family members (especially families with disabilities) without receiving support.
Whether his actions were rational, whether they were truly helpful to his son, or whether he could have qualified for services some other way are separate questions.
Because the father may not have been aware of all the legal options available to his son for eligibility.
The anguish behind his decision is a familiar one for people with disabilities who must weigh the pros and cons of administratively imposed balances between their own income, their eligibility for welfare services, and the incomes of their family members.” (pp. 192-193)
Reliving traumatic memories and madness
The idea that vulnerability leads to violence
Chapter 3 presents an analysis of Choi Yun's novella "A Petal Falls Silently Over There" (1988) and the film "A Petal" (1996).
Film critic Cho Hye-young cites Kim Eun-jung's analysis of "Petals" as the pinnacle of cultural criticism in this book, saying it offers a completely new, never-before-seen interpretation of the work and trauma.
Kim Eun-jung cautions against allowing the body of a mentally disabled girl to become a mere metaphor for the traumatic memories left behind by Gwangju, and connects the violence she experienced to the violence experienced by other women with mental disabilities.
“Mentally ill women are attacked not only because they are seen as a threat due to their incurable abnormality and gender, but also because violence is seen as necessary to ‘bring them back to their senses’ or ‘cure them’” (p. 236).
In "Petal," the violence that stems from Jang's desire to heal the girl serves to evoke the girl's traumatic memories and transform Jang.
What concerns the author is not the metaphor itself, but the way in which the ongoing violence suffered by individuals after experiencing trauma is hidden in the process of emphasizing the meaning of state violence.
Chapter 3 moves from "Petal" to the film "Peppermint Candy," through photographer Park Young-sook's "Crazy Girl Project," to the film "Silenced" and the Gwangju Inhwa School sexual assault incident, and to the disabled women's movement's response to it, dealing with keywords such as violence, trauma, madness, metaphor, representation, sexual violence, legal system, and institutionalization.
“Even if in a patriarchal society, resistant feminists are condemned as ‘mentally ill,’ the differences between the woman in the hallway of a mental hospital, the person playing that woman in the photograph, the girl wandering through a graveyard in the film chasing the man who raped her, and the photographer trying to redefine the label ‘crazy bitch’ are far more complex than these images suggest.
Calling someone 'crazy' may actually be an act of violence against women who exist outside of 'normality'.
For example, in the film "A Petal," there is a scene where a doctor turns his index finger next to his head—a typical gesture that indicates insanity—after female residents, angry at the girl's presence, throw rocks at the hospital window.
Although their cries are not clearly audible, their actions of dismissing the female villagers who believe the girl is possessed as crazy are clearly depicted.
But just because non-disabled women experience being labeled as crazy doesn't automatically make us understand how women who exist outside of "normalcy" are subjected to violence and erasure, nor does it increase the potential for social justice and ethical responses.
“When we re-enact madness, we fail to examine the experience of living with an unhealed disability and the experience of ongoing oppression and violence because we assume the damage is already done.” (pp. 258-259)
Sexual Rights and Representation of People with Disabilities
Sexual experience as healing
Chapter 5 features the films "Pink Palace" and "Daddy," which raise controversy about the sexual rights of people with disabilities.
In "Pink Palace," which depicts a visit to a brothel by a single man with cerebral palsy, the disabled man is depicted as a subject who expresses sexual desire and seeks sexual experiences. However, in "Dad," a disabled woman is raped therapeutically by her father, who assumes that his daughter is engaging in self-harming behavior due to sexual desire, and the rape of disabled women is depicted as inevitable and objectified.
Kim Eun-jung pays particular attention to the sexuality of women with disabilities, stating that because existing discussions have focused on men with disabilities, women with disabilities have been discussed primarily in the context of sexual violence or reproductive control.
Moreover, sexual pleasure itself has been less emphasized and has been defined primarily in terms of intimacy with people or marital relationships.
The author argues that rather than offering a single, immediate solution and hastily institutionalizing it, efforts are needed to consider sexual diversity and change, expanded public support and networks, and legal protections, centering on the voices of women with disabilities, sexual and gender minorities with disabilities, activists with disabilities, and sex workers.
“Constructing the sexuality of men and women with physical or intellectual disabilities as a problem to be solved reflects a complex prejudice based on the assumption that normal sexuality occurs within the context of loving, private relationships within the context of marriage.
Disabled men are more likely to evoke empathy for those whose sexual accessibility is institutionally denied in society than other sexually marginalized groups, such as migrant workers or the elderly, or even soldiers or prisoners.
Thus, the logic of sexual desire is selectively applied to morally justify exceptionally designed supports, which solidifies normative sexuality as inaccessible to people with disabilities.
“In this solution, not only is heterosexual desire presented as the normal norm, but the universal claim that all people are sexual beings is emphasized as a counternarrative to the stereotype that disabled people are asexual.” (pp. 320, 321)
“The gendered terrain presented by discourses on disability and sexuality calls for a closer examination of the social dynamics and the workings of power across diverse marginalized groups, including disabled and non-disabled transgender workers in the sex industry.
Furthermore, the dichotomy that emphasizes “male sexuality” and “female vulnerability” based on gender does not adequately explain the diverse sexual lives of people with disabilities, nor does it address issues that do not adequately reflect such diversity.
“In this way, the sexuality of disabled people becomes a problem that can be solved—and at the same time becomes more difficult—through the prescription of prostitution, which has been instrumentalized socially, culturally, and historically, without deep consideration of the experiences of disabled men and women and the structural violence.” (p. 329)
A book that connects by asking ten thousand questions
The significance and utility of this book
By detailing the boundaries and overlapping spaces that exist between disability, healing, and normalcy, this book analyzes how gender, sexuality, family, and nation intervene in healing, using markers such as reproduction, family, class, race, nation, marriage, and heterosexuality.
The greatest significance of this book, which analyzes the existing discourse of feminist disability studies and verbalizes the Korean context into a transnational discourse, is that it covers stories that resonate with the practices of the disability women's movement.
When we unfold "folded time" so that bodies with disabilities and illnesses can exist in their own right, and create a more political and ethical logic of "healing" from the perspective of women with disabilities, new possibilities for transnational feminist disability studies open up.
I hope that readers will now continue to explore the questions this book raises, which, because they are based on intersectionality, can be connected in many ways.
"How does Korean society narrate the time of disability? With this book, which asks these questions, let's embark on a journey through time that transcends able-centered thinking" (Cho Hye-young).
“I recommend this book to everyone who wants to face the roots of discrimination and hatred prevalent in Korean society and contribute to social change, to overcome the history of discrimination and to open up the time that has been reserved for the future” (Na Young-jeong).
“Solidarity is being built between various human rights movements and the disabled women’s movement.
New solidarities are also being attempted, based on movements to depathologize non-normative families, asexuals, chronically ill people, transgender people, sexual minorities, and people living with HIV/AIDS.
The need for solidarity with sexual minorities, workers, and refugees has grown, and connections have been made with organizations for women in the sex industry.
The issues and discussions raised within these progressive anti-violence movements, the movement against ableism, and the temporary gatherings that emerged around these issues helped inform the analysis of the text and historical context contained in this book.
One of the purposes of this book is to explain how various norms of normalcy, including non-disability, gender conformity, family, and sexuality, construct and complicate notions of healing.” (pp. 52, 53)
“I would like to read this book together with colleagues from the disability movement, the LGBTQ+ movement, the migrant movement, the refugee movement, the movement to abolish foreign shelters, the HIV/AIDS human rights movement, the sex worker movement, and the cultural movement, all demanding the right to health, sexual and reproductive rights, the right to form a family, the right not to be detained in institutions, the right to move, and the right to access non-discriminatory public health care.” (Na Young-jeong, Recommendation)
GOODS SPECIFICS
- Publication date: May 23, 2022
- Page count, weight, size: 424 pages | 574g | 140*225*30mm
- ISBN13: 9788964374092
- ISBN10: 8964374096
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