장애인 시설화의 두 양상 - 「맹아원에서」(1953)와 「육체추」(1960)를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper explores the meaning of institutionalization by focusing on Hwang Soon-won’s “In the Institution for Blind Children”(1953) and Son Chang-seop’s “Ugly Flesh”(1960), which depict institutions for the disabled and their inmates during the Korean War. These two works invite analysis as rare examples of Korean literature’s attention to the politics of the gaze and affective dynamics surrounding the damaged body. While the facility in “In the Institution for Blind Children”(1953) provides care for children with disabilities, with the aim of providing safety and protection for the socially disadvantaged, the institutionalized care in this space is aimed at reinforcing the hierarchy between disabled and able-bodied bodies and repositioning the disabled body within a patriarchal order. In this sense, the work reveals that the facility perpetuates the discourse of disability. The institution in “Ugly Flesh” was a space that was intertwined with the power structures of the Cold War system. Aid-based institutions produced images of disability by depriving inmates of their freedom and conforming them to the power structure that determined aid. This work reveals that disabled bodies are fragmented, depersonalized, and domesticated in this process, revealing institutions as spaces that dehumanize prisoners. This paper actively interprets the possibilities that can be explored here as much as it analyzes the mechanisms of institutionalization. Figures who are constantly peripheralized within the mechanisms of institutionalization, and who are not given language and discourse even in representation, may even exceed the mechanisms of institutionalization.