Remedying the Body

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.