The Chains of Substitution
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Published:January 2025
Chapter 5 examines, as a site of prosthetic memories, the connection between the massive use of female animals for their reproductive organs and the scandalous mobilization of women for egg donation in Dr. Woo Suk Hwang’s reproductive and regenerative research in South Korea. It critically explores the erasure of these women and female animals in a delirious biotechnological regime that promises to revamp the national economy and to cure intractable diseases in South Korea and normalizes the bioethics that supplements the extraction of surplus from human and nonhuman lives on a planetary scale in the (both imperialist and nationalist) neoliberal bioeconomy. Against such erasure, this chapter traces how these women and animal bodies are chained through the rubric of substitutability at the heart of Western-centric modern bioethics, intersecting gender, disability, species, and nation—inviting an inhuman vision for an alliance between women and animals to renew postcolonial feminist mnemonics.
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