Abstract
The material turn in the environmental humanities drastically changes our perception of who we are and challenges our attitude toward nature. In this article, the author argues that there is a critical connection between the works of Sunwoo Kim, one of the most prominent ecofeminist poets of Korea, and the trans-corporeal poetics of new materialist feminism. By resuscitating “dead” nature and recognizing the agency of things in the world, Sunwoo Kim deconstructs humanity’s prestigious position of all-powerful subjects and repositions them as equal actors with other nonhuman beings. Trans-corporeal poetics allows her to combine the two most conspicuous trends of her poetry: her feminist poetics and her ecological poetics. Owing to her new recognition of our essential corporeality, Kim rescues the female body from the patriarchal society’s debasement and brings it back to its original status. The meaning of her trans-corporeal body is most apparent in her poems on eating, since eating shares matter across corporeal boundaries. Because foodways are a major contributor toward climate change, Kim’s articulation of the trans-corporeal nature of food and her insistence on the mindful eating deserves our full attention, if we are to halt our mad rush into ecological disaster.
Recommended Citation
Kim, Won-Chung
(2022)
"The Nomad of the Naked Body: The Trans-corporeal Ecopoetics of Sunwoo Kim,"
Kritika Kultura:
No.
38, Article 19.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152x.1922
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss38/19
