Transnational Feminist and Queer Disability Politics: A Blueprint from Modern Korea

Building on feminist, queer, and disability scholarship, Eunjung Kim's Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea examines the violence that takes place "when cure is what actually frames the presence of disability as a problem and ends up destroying the subject in the curative process" in modern Korea (14). The book focuses on how this form of violence replaces the possibility for people with disability and chronic illness to live in communities and have the livelihood of their choice with institutionalization, rehabilitation, and exorbitantly risky cure. While Kim does not dismiss medical cure, the aim here is to uncover how cure narratives elide the social and political responsibility of society at large to guarantee access to necessary resources and services.

Curative Violence effectively interweaves concerns in disability, gender, sexuality, and Korean studies. It especially offers thematic and methodological contributions to disability studies by addressing the entanglements of disability and colonial geopolitics outside Europe and North America. Kim's deep engagements with local epistemologies and literatures challenge disability studies' assumption that the history and politics of disability in the West are internationally shared, and more important, Kim demonstrates that a geopolitically situated methodology is ethically and epistemologically necessary for disability studies. Curative Violence bridges premodern and modern concepts of disability and health in Korea while remaining critical of both the modern-colonial practice of institutionalizing disabled populations and South Korea's nationalist construction of a premodern past more accepting of disability and chronic illness. As a result, Kim proposes a model of global disability politics that attends to the complexity of modern Korea's colonial and Cold War geopolitical history. Alongside disabled women activists of South Korea imagining a different future for the land formerly occupied by the US military, Kim envisions a transnational feminist disability scholarship that takes antimilitarization and environmental consciousness as its points of departure (233–34).

Curative Violence consists of five chapters, each presenting different cases of curative violence in modern Korea. Chapter 1 tracks the colonial history of eugenics and its afterlife under Cold War developmentalism in South Korea to analyze how abortion, disability, and chronic illnesses were legally co-constituted to curtail disabled women's access to reproductive rights. Chapter 2, on sacrificial and gendered "proxyhood," describes how nondisabled family members are called on to attain cure for the disabled family member. Chapter 3 analyzes how sexual violence is presented as curing disability through heteronormative rehabilitation and, metaphorically, as curing national trauma. In discussing how the ministry of health's category of populations with disability and illness was expanded in 1961 to include those with "social handicaps," such as the multiracial children of women in the camp town sex industry, this chapter offers concrete examples of how one might think the proximity that is forged among different categories of "vulnerable" populations under US military occupation, such as sex workers, disabled veterans, "leprosy" patients, biracial children, and people with infectious diseases. Chapter 4 is on the history of Hansen's disease (pejoratively known as "leprosy") and the construction of able-bodied domestic space through the institutionalized removal of disabled bodies. Kim shows how the West and Japan competed in colonial Korea through claims to superior humanitarianism toward people with Hansen's disease wherein practices of institutionalizing and sterilizing Korean subjects signified the benevolence and civility of the colonial power. Curative Violence's transnational disability politics criticizes these two colonial and imperial powers' construction and institutionalization of vulnerable populations. This chapter suggests that the human rights framework has often historically fueled imperialist interventionist competition rather than served the vulnerable populations of the global South it purports to save. Finally, chapter 5 analyzes how the discourses of sex drive and sexual humanitarianism regarding the perceived a/sexuality of disabled subjects erase the systematic oppression affecting disabled women, who often occupy the margins of the sex industry.

Yet two questions raised by the book remain unanswered. First, Kim invokes convergences between disability and LGBTQIA activism...