Viral and Visceral: Feminist Media, Art, and Neocolonial South Korea

Abstract

This dissertation, “Viral and Visceral: Feminist Media, Art, and Neocolonial South Korea,” examines how South Korean feminist art and activism have actively embraced and utilized the body in their resistance to Korean patriarchal nationalism and U.S. neocolonialism since the late twentieth century. The project traces the gendered violence embedded in the public health measures that the U.S. and South Korean governments have enforced bilaterally upon Korean subaltern bodies since the founding of the South Korean nation-state (1948). It also examines the aesthetic and affective dimensions of this historical legacy marked by contemporary feminist online activism and art. Foundational to my research is the real-time archiving of online feminist activism, interviews with artists, visual analysis of art and media culture, and extensive research on biomedical history of neocolonial South Korea. The tropes of virality and viscerality provide useful lenses for both material and metaphorical analyses of the transnational aesthetics of contemporary South Korean feminism and its entanglement with neocolonial body politics. My project asserts that from the beginning South Korean nationalism has systematically capitalized on Korean women’s bodies—notably through a decades-long-government-run prostitution system around U.S. camp towns—while typecasting them as dangerous “contaminants” of Korean public health (through the spread of venereal diseases) and morals (sexual promiscuity). This has in turn reinforced cultural stereotypes about Korean women internationally. In their artistic critiques of neocolonial and nationalist views of the feminine body, the feminist artists and activists that I study question the notion that Korean women are a permanent threat to the nation’s attempts at modernization, better hygiene, and a strong state made of dutiful members, kungmin (people of the state). I examine how their visual culture and artworks instigate debates over public health issues, and how their politics overlap with anti-colonial, anti-nationalist, and subaltern political movements.