Family, Disability and Lived Experience in Lee Chang-dong’s OASIS
Speaker
Kathleen McHugh (Professor, UCLA)
with Kyung Hyun Kim (Professor, UCI)
Wednesday, November 19, 2 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
UCI McCormick Screening Room
Attendees are invited to watch OASIS (directed by Lee Chang-dong, 2002) and read Prof. Kathleen McHugh's new essay on the film prior to the discussion.
This talk considers Lee Chang-dong’s 2002 film Oasis from a feminist disability media studies perspective. Beginning from Lee’s recent revelation that his sister’s lived experience inspired its narrative, I consider how that inspiration, inflected by regional (South Korean and Asian) cultural priorities that emphasize family, shape Oasis’s distinctive but underrecognized intervention in global disability media studies. The film anticipates and creatively implements the critical principles of nonableist representation formulated more than a decade later, while also engaging deeply fraught questions concerning gender, sexuality, disability, and sexual violence.
Constructed around two differently gendered, disabled protagonists, the film’s nonableist narrative and looking relations affectively situate audiences and critics within a three-pronged inquiry: how are fantasy, capacity, and consent privileges of the abled? The film’s coupling unfolds answers by foregrounding the gendered illegibility of disabled desire, capacity, and consent in abled personal (domestic/family), social (restaurants, transit), and legal (police station/prison) contexts in Seoul South Korea.