Presented at Modern Language Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 5-8, 2017.

Abstract:

Kin Kakuei’s Kogoeru kuchi (Frozen Mouth, 1970) is one of the central texts of “zainichi literature,” writing by the Korean minority in Japan. The novel, narrated by a person who stutters, allows readers a glimpse at the intersectional struggles of speech-disabled members of the minority community. In this respect, Kim’s novel is part of a substantial body of works by Korean writers that portray characters with physical and cognitive disabilities throughout the twentieth century, both within and outside the peninsula. However, typical readings of Kogoeru kuchi tend to subordinate disability to ethnicity, interpreting the stutter as a metaphor for colonial or minority oppression without attending to the specificity of disabled identity itself.

In this paper, I explore the intersections of Korean ethnicity and disability by unpacking the literal and metaphorical implications of “speech” in Kim’s text. In particular, I consider the politics of speaking as they act on the narrator by delineating not only how his speech disability restricts him from articulating his ethnic identity, but also, conversely, how his ethnic identity precludes him from articulating a disabled identity. Viewing disability as a potentially productive rather than inevitably restrictive condition, I argue that Kim’s stuttering narrator allows for new possibilities in the enunciation and representation of identity, ethnic and otherwise. By disrupting the smooth flow of “sound” from the medium of vernacular text to the reader’s sonic imagination, Kim is able to create a hybrid, ambiguous space in which to create alternative modes of identification.