Purifying Blood

Abstract This article examines the medicoscientific construction of “mixed blood” as a legible racial category in Cold War South Korea to understand how scientists and doctors worked to create a normative “pure-blood” national subject, on the one hand, while marginalizing racially and sexually “impure bloods” on the other. Born from the postwar US military occupation of South Korea, Amerasian “mixed-blood” (honhyǒl) children threatened a postcolonial commitment to ethnic homogeneity that was championed by scientists intent on isolating “Korean blood” by biologically defining, medically pathologizing, and legally disowning “mixed bloods.” This article explores the interconnected racial projects of making “Koreans” and “mixed Koreans” during the Cold War decades in which American military personnel and their progeny transformed from a temporary exigency to a permanent fixture on the peninsula. By concentrating on medicoscientific experiments and surveys conducted on Amerasian children at orphanages, segregated “mixed-blood” schools, and criminal detention centers, the author demonstrates how serological, physiognomic, and pathological studies worked in concert with legal rubrics of citizenship and national belonging to define and exclude these proximate racial others from the putatively homogeneous national body. In so doing, the article integrates and expands on scholarship in Korean studies and science, technology, medicine, and society (STMS) studies that have respectively illuminated the rise of ethnonationalism in modern Korean identity and the role of race science in postcolonial nation-building. A mixed-race–centered narrative of South Korea's Cold War pursuit of scientific modernity reveals how pathologizing “mixed bloods” proliferated newly biologized understandings of South Korea as a “pure-blood” nation that continue to resonate in state policies and personal relations today.