Continuing Presence of Discarded Bodies: Occupational Harm, Necro-Activism, and Living Justice

Abstract

This essay explores the coexistence of struggles against the foreclosure of disabled people’s lives and against occupational illness, debilitation, and deaths caused by the manufacturing process of electronics in South Korea. Starting from the two activist campsites set up in Seoul and the historical backgrounds of occupational health movement, I draw on two documentary films, The Empire of Shame (2014) and Factory Complex (2015), that depict workers who became ill and those who died due to toxic exposure at semiconductor manufacturing plants. Beyond commemoration, necro-activism emerges in the form of persistent involvements of dead bodies, mourning, and objects representing death as important agents for making claims for justice. Taking into account political and historical differences of locations in which disabled people are positioned differently in the global order redirects us from the language of worth toward sociality, collective reframing of suffering and disability, and justice as an ongoing practice of everyday life and afterlife.