Remedying the Body : Plastic Surgery and the Politics of Embodiment in Korea
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Overview
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.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781503648234
- ISBN-10: 1503648230
- Publisher: Stanford University Press
- Publish Date: October 2026
- Page Count: 304
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