Hypervisible Pain and Invisible Bodies: The Rhetoric of Neoliberal Subjectivity and Women's Suffering in Contemporary South Korea

Abstract: This article analyzes the discourses on young women's suicide and suffering in South Korea and their performative effect. The current discoursal and political landscape creates a spectacle of the suffering object that is the young Korean women while ironically neglecting the subjective experiences and the process of self-meaning-making of their psychological and bodily injuries. Two major spheres this article investigates are, namely, the state policies and public health discourses and the feminist critique, both of which use suicide and mental illnesses as symbolic rhetorics that represent a "crisis" either that of the Korean state or feminist politics. The sense of crisis created within suicide prevention policies serves as an extension of the Korean state's biopolitical management of women's life and reproduction. I contend that such an approach renders women's suicide and mental affliction inevitable and partially anticipates their deaths. The feminist critique, on the other side, has viewed the narratives of women's suicide and suffering predominantly as products of the neoliberal subjectivity of the young women. This line of inquiry that emphasizes the individualistic, sanitized, and apolitical mode of the young women's narratives, I argue, has neglected their embodied experience as an important site of knowledge production. This article calls for an ethnographic intervention as the future direction for research regarding women's suicide and suffering. By mapping the topography of public and scholarly discourses, this article switches the mode of feminist critique from delineating the causes of the deaths to analyzing the broader politics of knowledge production surrounding women's affliction in Korea.