Disabled Bodies in Korean Fictions in the 1970s: The Dwarf and “Young-ja’s Heyday”

The modernization’s intervention with human bodies  around  the  1970s in Korea is epitomized in Cho Se-hui’s The Dwarf and Cho Sunjak’s “Young-ja’s Heyday.” In The Dwarf, the protagonist as Other represents the powerless low classes, especially manual labourers. Utilized like mechanical tools, his grotesque body is reified. Having lost one arm while working as a labourer,  Young-ja  becomes a prostitute, a sexual commodity. Both marginalized characters, who dreamed of escaping from the reality, die when they lose the exchange values of their bodies. Both best-sellers implicitly criticize the dominant capitalistic system that exploits low-class bodies to the extent of dehumanization.

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