Frankenstein ŭi ilsang: Saengmyoung gonghak sidae ŭi geongang gwa ŭiryo프랑켄슈타인의 일상-생명공학시대의 건 강과 의료 [Frankensteinian Everyday: Feminist Engagement with Health and Medicine in the Age of Biotechnology] ed. by Young-Gyung Paik and Yun-Gu Park (review)

Despite having been published back in 2008, Frankensteinian Everyday: Feminist Engagement with Health and Medicine in the Age of Biotechnology is absolutely worth discussing because of its relevance to the “Hwang affair,” bioethics, and feminist STS in Korea. First of all, this book was published at a very germane time, when public awareness of the ethics of biomedical research and biotechnology was at its peak, after one of the most infamous of scientific scandals, both in Korea and worldwide. A couple of years earlier, Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk had fallen from grace as a national hero and scientist on account of his unethical acquisition of human eggs, fabrication of data, and embezzlement of public funds for his human embryonic stem-cell research. In fact, four of the book’s chapters were originally presented at the International Forum for Securing Women’s Human Rights in the Age of Biotechnology, organized by Korean Womenlink in 2006. The so-called Hwang affair brought bioethical issues to the surface in Korean society: not only ethicists but also humanities and social science scholars came to realize that we needed to learn how to live with new biotechnologies, and social movement organizations and activists started to include science and technology in their agendas.

Meanwhile, the Hwang affair became deeply associated with Korean women’s ambivalent relationship with biotechnology. The term Frankenstein, as used by the editors in the book title, refers to bodies enhanced with biotechnologies. There was a stark contrast between the invisibility of women in public discourse and the high visibility of women in everyday biotechnology practices. For instance, various contraception technologies were widely applied to Korean women’s bodies through government-led family-planning policy during the 1970s and 1980s, and plastic surgery continues to be a popular commodity among young Korean women to this day (Leem and Park 2008). In this context, this volume rightly creates a bridge between the public absence and the private presence of women’s engagement with biotechnologies. In attempts to discover the potential of the new (public) bioethics within a highly concrete and mundane (private) world, feminism and anthropology are suitable tools.

This book, however, covers a broad range of topics and explores cases in and beyond Korea, including surrogate mothers and growth hormone therapy, as well as ova trafficking for stem-cell research in Korea, transnational commercialization of assisted reproductive technology in India, a dwarfism patient organization in the United States, cervical cancer screening and mammography in Canada, and conceptual discussions of terms such as bodies, biotechnology, and bioeconomy.

This book sets as its objective “to re-read biotechnology as questions about our everyday lives and freedom” (18) or, in other words, to rethink the problems themselves that certain biotechnologies are expected to solve and discuss how these problems have been defined and debated. This objective is accomplished well through the individual chapters of this book. In most cases, the authors do not say whether they believe certain biotechnologies are good or bad solutions to problems such as infertility, disability, abnormality, or illness. Instead, they reveal discrepancies between what is considered good and what is considered bad—the middle space full of conflicts, ambivalence, and ambiguity. For instance, in “Surrogate Mothers: Who Is Problematizing Them, and Why? Beyond Sensationalism in the Surrogate Mother Controversy,” Young-Gyung Paik shows not only that in-vitro fertilization technology has legitimated surrogate mothers as modern, technological subjects but also that this has regressively justified (and even led to) a traditional way of practicing surrogate pregnancy. In another chapter, “Beyond Bioethics: The Realities of Ova Trafficking and Feminist Interventions,” Paik also astutely points out the hidden role of conventions and mundane practices in bioethics, highlighting the point that ova trafficking cannot be...