Abstract

With the decline of research on minjung history, the argument for a new minjung history that would critically inherit it was proposed. This new minjung history, it was emphasized, should break free from the representation of minjung that centered class or nation and focus on the multivocality of the minjung. This article examines research trends in disability history and explores the relationship between disability history, minjung history, and new minjung history. The discourse on minjung during the 1970s grasped the disabled as part of the marginalized minjung, but this was more as a way of recruiting their bodies at a symbolic level to represent the oppressed and marginalized minjung than any serious contemplation of the structures of discrimination against disabled persons. In the narratives of the minjung movement, which picked up steam in the 1980s, the emphasis on the productivity and subjectivity of the proletariat made it difficult for the disabled, whose bodies were unsuitable for production and struggle, to become visible. Despite this, disabled persons were inspired by the minjung movement and appropriated or parted with the concept of minjung in their own ways in the disability movement from the mid-1980s. This study traces this process, examines how disability history resonates with new minjung history, and proposes that new minjung history approach the minjung as affect instead of a substantial actuality in its encounter with minority history.