Continuing Presence of Discarded Bodies: Occupational Harm, Necro-Activism, and Living Justice

Abstract

This essay explores the coexistence of struggles against the foreclosure of disabled people's lives and against occupational illness, debilitation, and deaths caused by the manufacturing process of electronics in South Korea. Starting from the two activist campsites set up in Seoul and the historical backgrounds of occupational health movement, I draw on two documentary films, The Empire of Shame (2014) and Factory Complex (2015), that depict workers who became ill and those who died due to toxic exposure at semiconductor manufacturing plants.Beyond commemoration, necro-activism emerges in the form of persistent involvements of dead bodies, mourning, and objects representing death as important agents for making claims for justice. Taking into account political and historical differences of locations in which disabled people are positioned differently in the global order redirects us from the language of worth toward sociality, collective reframing of suffering and disability, and justice as an ongoing practice of everyday life and afterlife. Kim Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 2 Two protest camps were set up at two busy subway stations in Seoul: the first, in 2012, in Gwanghwamun subway station near the City Hall north of the Han River; and the other, in 2015, in Gangnam subway station near the Samsung building south of the river. In these camps, activists and allies took turns staying in the tents, shared food, slept overnight, and gave speeches to educate the public about their causes. Sustained for years by the alliance of over two hundred disability and civic organizations, the first camp demanded the elimination of the disability rating system, a bureaucratic apparatus designed to reduce disability benefits, which led to the deaths of disabled people who were left without care. The second camp was set up by an organization called the Supporters for the Health and Rights of People in the Semiconductor Industry, which demanded worker's safety and accountability for illnesses and deaths in the semiconductor industry, including at Samsung Electronics.Despite their different agendas, these two camps have supported each other in solidarity. In his conversation with an activist in the Gangnam camp, disability activist Park Kyung-seok (Pak Kyŏng-sŏk), from the other camp, explains that disabled people and the workers who became disabled and ill share the status of "wastes" (p'yegimul), as they are deemed worthless and locked away in institutions and disposed of by the government and corporations (Ha, 2015). "Disposable populations" and "wastes" are used to describe individuals whose experiences of suffering and injustice do not provoke social, political, and legal recognition and remedies and are subject to further violations as their presences are seen as transgressing. As Max Liboiron (2012) suggests, the "logics of transgression attendant to waste and dirt" constitute the "ideal society" and "out of placeness" (p. 8) based on the value system that determines worth as a condition of emplacement. 1

Progress by death: Labor precaritization and the financialization of social reproduction in South Korea

“…I have attempted to articulate the features that comprise the place in its totality (Katz 2001) to reveal its transnational dimension, instead of highlighting its national character. Articulating ‘necro-activism’ as the dominant mode of social justice movement mediated by dead bodies in South Korea, En Jung Kim urges that the ‘transnational circuits of harms’ that uphold the necropolitical labor regimes in Asia need to be traced and the justice for the debilitated and deceased must be imagined beyond the normative healthy laboring bodies (Kim 2019: 17). Indeed, ‘unbinding’ the bodies from necropolitical power beyond the calculus of justice and redress requires a radical social reproduction praxis that can activate other modes of production, consumption, and reproduction.…”

Sites of conscience redressing disability institutional violence

“…Last, there are numerous sites of conscience in relation to prisons, including Holloway Prison in England (Holloway Prison Stories, undated), the Long Kesh/Maze prison in Northern Ireland (McAtackney, 2014: 225–279) and Prison for Women in Kingston Canada (Guenther, 2022; Naphtali, Sharma and the P4 W Memorial Collective, 2021).…”

Parramatta Female Factory Precinct as a Site of Conscience: Using Institutional Pasts to Shape Just Legal Futures

“…Justice is described as 'not done yet' or 'done', as if justice were something to be completed at a certain time by a set of actions upon which affected people and society in general agree. 71 A further limit of relying on legal modes of justice is the problem that much of the injustice of institutions of confinement has been enlivened and legitimated through law and through the actions and decisions of legal actors (eg the legal purposing of specific buildings for institutional use and the detention, pursuant to court or tribunal orders, of individuals within these buildings), 72 as well as the legal system's role in broader settler colonial dispossession and the denial of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty in which institutionalisation is situated (and its failure to acknowledge and remedy colonialism per se). 73 Running alongside this is a parallel dimension of the role of women and children in the colonial program of occupation and dispossession.…”