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Plastic surgery has exploded in popularity in the recent decades, with South Korea emerging as a leader of the global beauty economy. In Remedying the Body, So-Rim Lee explores a cultural discourse of plastic surgery in South Korea through the feminist politics of care. Pulling together archival and cultural materials from the 1950s to the 2020s, Lee takes Korea as a paradigmatic example to reimagine coalitional ways of surviving a world governed by oppressive bodily norms.
Drawing from the Korean term koch'ida ("to cure or mend"), Lee uses "remedy" to name a broad spectrum of medical interventions performed to change the bodily appearance to arrive at a bodily norm. Remedy, however, is 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.
"Remedying the Body demonstrates that plastic surgery in South Korea is a biopolitical instrument of nation-building, one which emerged from imperial racial projects. Expertly deploying and critiquing the concept of surgical "remedy" for non-normative bodies, Lee also shares fascinating accounts of how South Korean activists have pushed back against the sexism, ableism, fatphobia and transphobia of appearance-based oppression."—Carmen Alvaro Jarrín, author of The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil