GWIKS Lecture Series
“Curative Violence:
How to Inhabit the Time Machine with Disability”
Photograph by Park Young Sook,
The Madwomen Project: A Flower Shakes Her (2005)
Description of image:
A woman wearing a blue shirt and navy pants is lying on a bed of pink wildflower in bloom,
with her eyes closed and a slight smile on her face.
Speaker
Eunjung Kim
Associate Professor, Syracuse University
Date & Time
Thursday, September 19, 2019
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Location
Room 505
Elliott School of International Affairs, the George Washington University
1957 E Street, NW, Washington, DC 20052
Event Description
Presenting from her book, Curative Violence (2017), Kim will examine a direct link between cure and violence that appears in the representations of disability and Cold War imperialism in South Korea. She explores the notion of “folded time” in which the present disappears through the imperative of cure in the case of Hansen’s disease care. By thinking about the imperative of cure as a time machine that seeks to take us to the past and to the future by universalizing disability experiences and denying coevalness, Kim explores the possibility of inhabiting in the present with disability and illness. While calling attention to the transnational construction of disability under militarism and imperialism, Kim argues that the possibility of life with disability that is free from violence depends on the creation of a space and time where cure is understood as a negotiation rather than a necessity. In addition, Kim will introduce her work in progress on “necro-activism,” emerging in the form of persistent involvements of dead bodies and presences-other-than-human as important agents for making claims for justice.
Speaker
Eunjung Kim, Associate Professor, Syracuse University
Eunjung Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and Disability Studies Program at Syracuse University. Her book, Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disabiity, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea (Duke University Press, 2017) received Alison Piepmeier Award from the National Women’s Studies Association and the James B. Palais Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Her work also appeared in several journals and anthologies, such as GLQ, Disability & Society, Sexualities, Catalyst, Intersectionality and Beyond, Against Health, and Asexualities.
Moderator
Moderator: Jisoo M. Kim, GW Institute for Korean Studies
Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures and Director of the Institute for Korean Studies at GW. She received her Ph.D. in Korean History from Columbia University. She is a specialist in gender and legal history of early modern Korea. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on two book projects titled Suspicious Deaths: Forensic Medicine, Dead Bodies, and Criminal Justice in Chosŏn Korea and Sexual Desire and Gendered Subjects: Decriminalization of Adultery Law in Korean History.
