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Since the late 2010s, when the Black Protests were sparked in Korea (September 2016) and the Constitutional Court of Korea ruled that criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional (April 2019), contemporarily and internationally produced films, series and documentaries focusing on abortion have been actively introduced to the Korean public alongside with the popularisation of global OTT services. Most of them explicitly or implicitly support women's choice and the right to abort, but they often perpetuate the suffering, shame, and victimization of women who undergo abortions. For exemple, they make maternal grief inseparable from the pregnant body, embody the excruciating physical suffering of the protagonist’s abortion to the point of making the audience shudder, or keep the protagonist (slut-)shamed, without cause, throughout the story of abortion experience. Erica Millar puts ‘emotion’ at the center of abortion politics, criticizing the politics of ‘choice’, whether anti-abortion or pro-choice, for naturalizing, depoliticizing, and normalizing desperation, grief, and shame as the experience of abortion. This article extends her ideas into the dimension of ‘affect’ and, building on Brian Massumi's discussion of politics of affect, explores affect via film, how anti-abortion power operates and the cinematic practices that resist it.
Hyejin Kim (Tue,) studied this question.