In South Korea (hereafter, Korea), the popular imagination of “ideal bodies” has long been associated with the reconstruction of the nation after the disastrous experience of Japanese colonialism (1910-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953) followed by the state-guided capitalist economic development from the 1960s to the 1980s during which “healthy,” “normal,” and “productive” bodies were desired for national progress. The oppressive force of global neoliberalism since the late 1990s further solidified the normativity of the “ideal bodies” to the extent in which people’s decision to go through surgical procedures to “correct” their undesirable bodily features began to be perceived as natural or necessary to make themselves competitive in the job market and various social organizations they belong to. Such intense focalization of body normativity not only stigmatizes people with disabilities but also reinforces the existing gender and racial norms.

It is noteworthy, however, that body normativity is seriously questioned in recent cultural production, reflecting the growing societal concern over its enduring negative effects on people’s social lives and mental health. In responding to the wave of the representation of body normativity, this panel gathers scholars of visual media and literature who aim to disrupt the hegemonic process of enforcing and managing “ideal bodies” in contemporary Korea — a process that violently silences the socially vulnerable. The normalization of nondisabled, young, and beautiful bodies — bodies that can produce and reproduce — often manifests across gender, age, and class as a form of epistemic violence. To decolonize bodies trapped in this hegemonic culture of normalcy, this panel rethinks “resemblance” not as an internal structure of similarity but as a dynamic network of relations — visual, social, and otherwise. Engaging with contemporary Korean films, TV dramas, reaction videos, and speculative fiction, the panel examines how “other” forms of resemblance emerge between radically heterogeneous bodies, challenging the very definition and categorization of “ideal bodies.”

Panelists have been selected based on panel’s aim to highlight recent scholarship on the selected theme and address the diversity of cultural texts while considering regional distribution of the scholars and the diversity of ranks. Sung Yeon Kim examines the emergence of heterogeneous beings in Korean science fiction, which, Kim argues, signals a fundamental paradigm change in the principles of societal division and coexistence. By analyzing two short stories penned by Kim Cho-yeop, “If We Can’t Move at the Speed of Light,” and “The World We Just Left Behind,” Kim shows how humans, non-humans, and alien entities with multiple bodily forms in these works subvert the body normativity by complicating the epistemological condition of human sensory faculties. So-Rim Lee traces a cultural discourse of appearance-based oppression of women by examining the ubiquitous use of the social rhetoric of the yongmo tanjŏng(“proper look”) of women and shows how its continued presence has provoked various feminist responses and resistance over the years by discussing three key moments that disrupt such rhetoric: the first recorded lawsuit in South Korea on gender discrimination based on the conditions of physical appearance (1994), a short film directed by the feminist filmmaker Im Sullye (Kŭnyŏŭi Muge, 2003), and a photographic collage by the Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist Mirae kh RHEE (2016). Hwajin Lee delves into the representation of hearing impaired people in a TV drama, Tell Me that You Love Me (2023). The drama presents a thoughtful reflection on disability and love while employing various communication methods such as sign language, the absence of sound, non-diegetic subtitles, and text messaging. By focusing on sign language, Lee demonstrates how the multimodality of audiovisual media offers connections to Deaf culture while simultaneously being undermined by ableist frameworks that privilege speech over other modes ofcommunication. Michelle Cho examines global fans’ reaction videos to the overwhelmingly popular TV drama, Squid Game, to interrogate how the spectacle of ideal bodily comportment is enlisted as what she terms “global affects.” Especially, her discussion of reaction videos includes “TEARS!,” a video-edit to the most melodramatic episode “gganbu” in Squid Game. Analyzing its standardized, liberal affective responses to the show’s storylines, Cho criticizes the way this cultural form of reaction embodies racialized and classed norms of western liberal affectivity through the K-Culture consumption.