Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appears in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
Over the years the two Koreas have been repeatedly personified and anthropomorphized (in movies, journalism, and even nonfiction books) but never in a consistent manner. Are South Korea and North Korea twin siblings separated at birth? Are they fellow patients in a psychiatric ward? Are they doomed heterosexual lovers, each unaware that the other is a spy? Are they clones? Are they organ donor (South) and recipient (North)? If not separate human beings, then are the Koreas parts of what used to be a single body that was severed? Are they nation (limb) and phantomnation (phantom limb, as experienced by an amputee), as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha suggests in her 1982 work Dictee? The inconsistency of these and other characterizations ends up revealing the tragically illogical nature of the division that made such characterizations possible in the first place. The fact that the personification of the Koreas resists coherent formulation at once reflects and explains the inability of the “two Koreas” to relate to each other in a way that makes sense.
