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9781503647619 Academic Inspection Copy

Remedying the Body

Plastic Surgery and the Politics of Embodiment in Korea
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Plastic surgery has exploded in popularity around the world in the recent decades, with South Korea emerging as a leader of the global beauty economy. This book presents a cultural discourse of plastic surgery in Korea through the feminist politics of care, bringing together intersecting narratives of marginalization to reimagine coalitional ways of surviving a world governed by oppressive bodily norms. Pulling together a diverse array of archival and cultural materials from the 1950s to the 2020s, including newspapers, television, film, visual art, digital media, and feminist street protests, So-Rim Lee takes Korea as a paradigmatic example to show how the cultural construction of plastic surgery is entwined with the norms governing desire, upward mobility, and social belonging. Loosely translated from the Korean term koch'ida ("to fix or mend"), Lee uses the term "remedy" to name a broad spectrum of medical interventions that are performed with the aim of changing the bodily appearance to arrive at a bodily norm. A remedy promises to alleviate, heal, or cure a broad range of conditions including disease, disability, and psychological pain. It is, however, much more than medical treatment alone. This book contends that remedy is also a critical cultural ethos, a social performance of subjectivity, and a material practice of embodiment where state biopolitics and individual desire for belonging are inextricably entangled.
So-Rim Lee is the Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.
"Remedying the Body is a superbly interdisciplinary exploration of the notion of remedy and its promise of aesthetic improvement. Moving away from a coercive, pathologizing gaze on feminine and non-normative bodies, So-Rim Lee carefully attends to virtual and action-based networks of care and makes a sophisticated argument that the violence of remedial teleology does not preclude the possibility of subversion or resistance." -Eunjung Kim, Syracuse University
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