Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl: Biopolitics, Necropolitics and a State of Exception

Abstract

This essay aims to discuss the effects of the Korean government’s hygiene policies on the lives of prostitutes and their families in a U. S. military base village, or kijichon in Nora Okja Kelle’s Fox Girl from the viewpoints of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics and Michel Foucault’s biopolitics. When it comes to prostitution, it can be said that kijichons were in a state of exception, from Georgio Agamben’s perspective. Using sexually transmitted diseases testing (STD testing) as an example, Fox Gil shows how the hygiene policy pushes ex-Japanese comfort woman and kijichon prostitute Duk Hee into a worse life condition, as a prostitute in a show window, “a fish tank,” while also leading her daughter Sookie into prostitution. Because the policy was unconcerned with the test subjects and their families as a biopolitical attempt to ensure the health of the U. S. soldiers, all of the damage goes to them. The biggest problem is that the completely biased policy was implemented, even though state-regulated prostitution in Korea was abolished in 1948, and the Anti-Prostitution Law was enacted in 1961. The terrible result of the government’s policies was that such policies turned kijichons places where women cannot normally live, as we can see when Hyun Jin Kong, another victim of Korean blood- related culture, runs away to America with Sookie’s daughter Myu Myu. (Chosum University)