Remedying the Body: Plastic Surgery and the Politics of Embodiment in Korea

Wolf Humanities Center • University of Pennsylvania

So-Rim Lee

Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Gender and Performance in Modern and Contemporary Korea, University of Pennsylvania

Laurie Lee

Assistant Professor of Music, Penn

Soosun You

James Joo-Jin Kim Korean Studies Assistant Professor of Political Science, Penn

Emily Ng

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Penn

Presented in collaboration with James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies

In the forthcoming book Remedying the Body (Stanford University Press, October 2026), So-Rim Lee explores a cultural discourse of plastic surgery in South Korea through the feminist politics of care. Pulling together archival and cultural materials from the 1950s to the 2020s, Lee takes Korea as a paradigmatic example to reimagine coalitional ways of surviving a world governed by oppressive bodily norms.

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So-Rim Lee is a Korea Foundation Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in how people marginalized on the basis of difference (in identity, health, appearance, and lived experience) resist the material and discursive oppression by caring for one another in radically compassionate ways. Her research addresses the politics of embodiment (living in and with a body) in Korea and the Korean diaspora from the intersection of performance studies, visual and media studies, queer politics, disability justice, and feminist activisms.

is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and a researcher of the relationship between music, labor, and capital. Her current project examines the waged musical entertainment labor of women known as kisaeng in colonial Korea, focusing on how their proletarianization under colonial rule prompted powerful ideological campaigns to eradicate their work. Across this project and others, she is interested in the ways radical demands for payment and utopian desires for decommodification coincide and appeal to one another in histories of cultural labor.

is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work centers on madness and subjectivity, religion and cosmopolitics, and how historical worlds and wounds reverberate across geographies and generations. She is particularly interested in how psychic life can offer a site for rethinking politics, and how the symptom can be approached across scales. She is the author of A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao.

is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Soosun's research lies at the intersections of gender and migration, comparative politics, and political behavior, with a regional focus in South Korea. Soosun’s current book project explores how demographic shifts and changes in the marriage market have shaped the trajectory of women’s rights in South Korea. Drawing on a wide range of methods including archival work, survey experiments, and in-depth interviews, the book examines the rise of anti-natalist and pro-natalist government policies and their consequences for women’s economic and political rights.

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