Trauma and Westernization: Embodied Exclusion in Korean/Korean American Women’s Literature(NeMLA Panel)
Shirley Geok-lin Lim claimed, “My Westernization took place in my body.” This panel seeks to theorize the female Korean American body as a racialized and excluded site--a biopolitical site for trauma and haunting. More specifically, we seek to investigate representations of Korean women’s bodies in Korean/Korean American women’s writing and how these representations come to embody fidelity, disloyalty, and/or negotiate multiple affiliations and the movement between allegiances.
As such, this panel asks:
How is the Korean female figure situated between Westernization/Americanization and Asian alliances?