Curative Violence focuses on disability as confined to a particular temporal imagination through the violent imperatives to “cure” in the context of modern Korean history, which was fraught with colonial and postcolonial / Cold War legacies and produced in conjunction with norms and normativity regarding gender, sexuality, and nondisabled bodies. It is a remarkable book that combines critical thinking with transnational and postcolonial feminist views and in-depth archival and narrative analysis. Not only does it provide numerous entry points to contemplate the issue of disability within a historical and categorical nexus, but it also brilliantly rearticulates what might have been plainly regarded or already established by deploying imaginative thinking tools and visual images.
An example of the book’s elucidation of already established frameworks with imaginative thinking is the way in which Eunjung Kim unravels a notion of “folded time” as expressed in the narratives of curing, healing, and rehabilitation. The...
