Contesting cultural rehabilitation: Disability, nation, and gender in Korea

This dissertation analyzes intersections between disability and gender that have often been separately addressed within a single identity framework. The work introduces the representation of Korean disabled women as the central concern of its textual methodology. The study investigates selected literary, journalistic, legal, and filmic texts as well as other visual images from the twentieth century. The analysis provides specific examples of the ways in which culturally stigmatized positions such as disability are often rehabilitated through normative gender roles in Korean culture. I refer to this process throughout as "cultural rehabilitation."; Disability has been often interpreted as a trope of the nation's trauma imposed on the male body of colonization, wars, and other violent conflicts under various military regimes. The metaphorical connection among traumatized masculinity, the nation, and the disabled bodies tends to obliterate disabled women's subjectivity. Centering on heterosexuality, reproduction, and marriage from which disabled women are presumed to be dislocated, the analysis discloses their centrality and resistance to the normalizing dictates of such institutions. For instance, the sexualization of disabled women in the selected texts "remedies" their presumed asexuality and tends to subject them to violent objectification rather than depicting them as agents. The stigmatization of asexuality, unmarried status, or infertility situates disabled women at the contradicting intersections of disability and female gender. At one extreme, disabled women are prohibited from reproducing; yet, paradoxically, due to their socially isolated status, disabled women are also reduced to reproductive roles as surrogates. At the other extreme, women's infertility constitutes a form of disability that endangers their domestic status at large.; Finally, this dissertation concludes with a case study about leprosy that shows how the logic of cultural rehabilitation expands beyond regulating discourses of the state. Colonial leprosy management contributed to the "inferiority" of Korean culture and resulted in the ostracization of affected people. Contemporary representations of leprosy utilize marriage between men with a history of leprosy and nondisabled women as a symbolic bridge that redresses historical stigmatization. Such efforts reinforce the normative power of heterosexual marriage and leave disabled women unaddressed in their representational obscurity.