Violence as a Way of Loving

The chapter addresses the direct link between violence and the discourse of cure—a link based on the condemnation of disabled women for failing to fulfill gender and sexual expectations in the making of the normality-centered, modern capitalist nation-state. The movement to address the criminal justice system’s failure to recognize the severity of violence against disabled women is placed alongside the curative and violent processes through which certain individuals with disabilities are reincorporated into society. In the analyses of literary texts and films, four themes emerge: sexual violence justified to enable “traditional” femininity to return to the past, violence authorized as a naturalized response to traditional femininity and its vulnerability, violence as the price for the transnational purchase of cure, and violence as a way to heal the historical trauma of others, such as that caused by the Kwangju massacre, and as a punishment for the incurability of mental illness.