1990년대 전환기의 불임 디스토피아: ‘영광 핵발전소 무뇌아 사건’(1989)과 반핵/찬핵 서사들의 분기

Abstract

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, numerous anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear narratives emerged. One of the most frequently recurring elements in these narratives is the affect of fear, conveyed through the image of the child. This fear appears to have originated from the 1989 “Younggwang Nuclear Power Plant Anencephaly Incident.” The incident evoked apocalyptic visions of the future for family communities, contributing to the creation of a worldview that could be termed an “sterility dystopia,” which featured themes such as impotence, sterility, abortion, deformity, and rare diseases in narratives surrounding nuclear power. The recognition of vulnerability led to strong demands for protection, and this, in turn, became a catalyst for the resurgence of both familialism and exclusive nationalism on a domestic and international scale. The Younggwang Nuclear Power Plant Anencephaly Incident marks a key moment in the popularization of the anti-nuclear movement, as it expanded beyond traditional fears of the atomic bomb. It also represents a “turning point” for ecological movements and a “political juncture” during the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s, where the political subject of “the people” was either dismantled or reconstituted. This paper aims to examine the conflicts and transformative processes reflected in various anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear narratives that emerged around the time of this incident. To this end, it first analyzes “The Food Chain,” a late-1980s theatrical play, and the popular comic “The Nuclear Bug Has Appeared.” Despite the satirical nature of these genres, they convey the way the nuclear threat infiltrated individual bodies in new and different ways, allowing the nuclear hazard to be sensed as a form of pollution. Then, the paper turns to the 1990s pro-nuclear short story collection And Yet the River Flows to explore the government’s response to the widespread affective fear within the public, highlighting the points the state sought to emphasize in opposition to this sentiment. This collection reveals a hegemonic project centered on the family, demonstrating how the government, recognizing the need to strengthen its governance, re-sanctified the nuclear family by combining science and moralism. Baek Hye-gang’s novel Black Sunset represents a path taken by progressive literature when the government’s pro-nuclear logic began to evolve into survivalism centered on the nuclear family. In this novel, the people and rural communities are rediscovered through the sound and dance of a female shaman, who is both a Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor and a spiritual medium. The novel’s emphasis on traditional Korean percussion sounds can be interpreted as an imaginative effort to symbolically compensate for the disintegration of “the people” in the early 1990s through a form of “primitive passion.” However, the affect that emerges at the novel’s conclusion goes beyond the political-economic logic of pollution within the state, envisioning the issue from a global perspective and offering a glimpse into the formation of a new political force—the “ecological class.” This study explores the evolving context of nuclear-related narratives during the transitional period of the 1990s, investigating the tension between survivalist family communities and the reconstituted people envisioned by the anti-nuclear democratic revolution. In doing so, it seeks to assess the potential for a green democratic revolution.