Layer Matters: Medical Authority, Body Conformity, and Intersex Livelihood in Cold War South Korea

Science and Technology Seminar Series

Todd Henry, UCSD

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/p46njsrv

Supported by the Asia Center and convened by Professor, Victor Seow, Department of the History of Science.

This talk offers a critically-layered analysis of “sex change” (in reality, intersex-related procedures) in Cold War South Korea. In forging a dialogue among Korean Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and LGBTI Studies, I seek to produce knowledge beneficial to individuals and groups who continue to struggle against the historical forces addressed in my work. To this end, I trace how corporeal ideologies of sex dimorphism and heteropatriarchy came to function as the sanctioned but contested building blocks of scientific modernity and state supremacy in the two decades after the Korean War. Based on a binary model of sex requiring consistent reaffirmation in schools, the military, and other institutional sites, these naturalized ideologies were primarily invoked to promote the reproductive and defensive agendas of capitalist development. Focusing on the mediating role of news reporters in justifying medical inspections and police surveillance of non-conforming subjects, I show how the sexed and gendered dictates of ableism gave rise to cultural anxiety, popular scrutiny, and surgical procedures aimed at ensuring dimorphic rules of body coherence. I also emphasize the violent effects of this selectively normalizing regime, exposing how medical doctors and other social actors insisted on surface-level body conformity, while neglecting the deeper and everyday layers of embodiment that animate intersexuality and other corporeal diversities.

Todd Henry is Associate Professor of History at UCSD, where he specializes in modern Korea, with a focus on the period of Japanese rule and its postcolonial afterlives.

The Science and Technology in Asia Seminar Series is sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center and convened by Victor Seow, Assistant Professor of History of Science.