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The Korean Studies Research Network (KoRN), an International Programs affinity group, will present a virtual lecture by guest speaker Dr. So-Rim Lee.

Lee will discuss remedy (koch'ida), a term she uses to refer to changing one’s appearance through medical interventions—including plastic surgery, cosmetic injections, among others—to make life better. Remedy is much broader than medical discourse alone; Lee’s current book project contends that remedy is a critical cultural ethos, a teleological narrative, a social performance of subjectivity, and a material praxis of embodiment where state biopolitics and individual desire for belonging are inextricably entangled. From the postwar 1950s to the 1970s, remedying the body primarily signified rehabilitating disabled bodies; its grammar was integral to the narrative of nation-building under developmental dictatorship by way of remaking a healthy, re/productive national body marked by continued economic development. However, with the emergence of middle-class consumer culture and rapidly changing mass mediascape in the 1980s-1990s, remedying the body through plastic surgery became normalized in various print media as a gendered, individualized, and hyper-visible consumption practice undertaken by women for upward mobility. Perusing teen pictorials, feminist magazines, newspapers, and films, this work-in-progress talk explores how the consumerist discourse of remedy in post-authoritarian South Korea was keenly entwined with the discursive marginalization of different yet intersecting strata of women—specifically, housewives and working-class young women/teens.

So-Rim Lee is a Korea Foundation assistant professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. So-Rim’s research explores the politics of embodiment (living in and with a body) in Korea and the Korean diaspora from the intersection of performance studies, visual and media studies, queer/disability politics, and feminist activisms. Her interdisciplinary work has been published in: positions: asia critique; TDR: The Drama Review; Television & New Media; and the Cambridge Companion to K-pop; among others. She is currently completing a book manuscript examining the cultural discourse of plastic surgery in South Korea.

This event is made possible through generous support from the Korea Foundation.

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