Han and Disability in Korean American Women’s Memoir

Abstract

My thesis addresses a need for research at the intersection of Asian American studies and critical disability studies that specifically examines Asian American lives outside of psychiatric biomedical frameworks in order to identify lives that are not typically legible as disabled. I posit the Korean cultural concept of han as a useful critical disability studies method that necessarily recognizes the systemic violence that underpins what I term “mental unwellness,” or mental and emotional suffering that neoliberal societies ignore. Analysis of contemporary memoirs by Korean American women authors Nicole Chung and Jane Jeong Trenka reveal the resistant possibilities of han in alleviating mental unwellness within individuals and wider communities through the exposure of subjugated knowledge and political practices of interdependence.