Eunjung Kim

Curative Violence: Habilitating Disability, Gender, and Nation in Korea

Concentrating on the formative and disruptive roles cure plays in Korean literary and filmic texts, the project explores the idea that the various attempts to re/habilitate disabled and ill bodies involve corporeal and ideological violence. The project examines cultural representations from the 1930s to the present to investigate how medical and non-medical cures of illness and disability shape normative family and sovereign nation in particular ways through colonial and post-colonial eugenics, medicine, institutionalization, and interpersonal violence.

Eunjung Kim is a resident fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities and an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kim’s research interests include historical and cultural factors that shape disabled women’s experiences in South Korea; the politics and ethics of cultural representations of disability, gender, and a/sexuality; and transnational disability studies theories. Kim is a recipient of the AAUW International Dissertation Fellowship, the Future of Minority Studies postdoctoral fellowship at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and the Vulnerability Studies postdoctoral fellowship at Emory University. Kim is a member of UW Disability Studies Initiative and affiliated with Centers for Visual Cultures and East Asian Studies.