GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

Unbecoming HUman
an ethics of objects

Eunjung Kim

The machine is not an it to be animated, worshiped, and

dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of
our embodiment.
— Donna Haraway

Beyond simply being deployed as a condemnatory last word, can “objectifica-

tion” as a mode of “dehumanization” offer a new way to challenge the exclusionary
configurations of humanity that create otherness? At the core of the two concepts
are questions of what characteristics define humans — in distinction to those of
objects, plants, animals, and otherness itself — and how the determination of their
absence elicits the judgment of degradation.
This essay questions the perspective that distinguishes humans from
objects on the grounds of ability (e.g., humans are not objects, because “objects
do not see or know”) and considers the departure from recognizable markers of
humanity.1 Thinking through the performances by Marina Abramović’s Rhythm
series (1973 – 74) and The Artist Is Present (2010) and through I’m a Cyborg, but
That’s OK (Saibogŭ chiman Koench’ana), a 2006 South Korean film directed by
Park Chan-wook (Pak Ch’an-uk), I explore the moments when one becomes a
“quasi-object” (being a laboring machine or being in an unconscious or immobile
state), so that one embodies the characteristics of objects, perceives one’s body
or body parts as objects, or suspends what are conventionally viewed as uniquely
human capacities and values. The tantalizing affect produced around the decla-
ration that humans are objects and objects are humans casts light on the seem-

GLQ 21:2 – 3
DOI 10.1215/10642684-2843359
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ingly sacrosanct but fragile distinction between humans and objects. Object beings
and human beings overlap within, and beyond, various contexts of personifying
and objectifying interactions. I suggest that unbecoming human — by embodying
objecthood, surrendering agency, and practicing powerlessness — may open up an
anti-ableism, antiviolence queer ethics of proximity that reveals the workings of
the boundary of the human. Dipesh Chakrabarty defines proximity as a “mode . . .
of relating to difference in which (historical and contingent) difference is neither
reified nor erased but negotiated.”2 This ethical positioning of proximity to human-
ness through unbecoming human disengages from any kind of ability-based deter-
mination of a being’s legitimacy and aims to cease assessing the value or quality
of differences.
Disability studies scholars and disability activists (including myself) have
claimed that people with various ranges of functions, capacities, and shapes
deserve respect and dignity, and that our lives need to be equally valued. The
humanness of a being is a condition that has been made grounds for exclusion
(“A being that has lost dignity is not human”) rather than a positive entitlement
that ensures rights (“All human beings have dignity”). The disability activist Ed
Roberts, who started Independent Living Movement in the United States, recol-
lects the doctor telling his mother: “You should hope he dies, because if he lives,
he’ll be no more than a vegetable for the rest of his life. How would you like to
live in an iron lung 24 hours a day?” Rather than asserting his humanness, he
declares, “the vegetables of the world are uniting, and we’re not going away!”3
The notions of value and dignity may rely too much on images of the nor-
mative conditions of life for disability studies to successfully challenge the hierar-
chy of disabled and enabled lives, which intersects with the racialized, gendered,
classed, and sexuality-based constructions of the “less-than-human.” To chal-
lenge ableism by instating dignity and by claiming the value of disability through
capacity is strongly tied to the production of “nonnormativity not only through the
sexual and racial pathologization of certain ‘unproductive bodies’ but more expan-
sively through the ability and inability of all bodies to register through affective
capacity.” Jasbir Puar argues, “Attachments to the difference of disabled bod-
ies may reify an exceptionalism that only certain privileged disabled bodies can
occupy.”4 Claiming values or quality of differences often depends on the unearned
and earned privileges as the key to acceptability and survival. The question then
is how to proximate a mode of existence and survival without producing the power
to exclude.
Normative values are often constructed through the legal determination
of humanity and its absence. Samera Esmeir points out that the modern law in

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colonial Egypt operated to determine the absence of the human, which “indicated
a state of dehumanization or indeed inhumanity, that is, a state of cruelty, instru-
mentalization, and depravity.”5 Esmeir further argues that international human
rights regimes rely on “the law’s power of constituting humanity,” noting that
humanist critics of violence also “accept the notion that humanity can be taken
away.”6 How does object-becoming as an embodied practice refuse the idea that
“humanity is a matter of endowment, declaration, or recognition”?7 The claim that
“we are humans, not objects” also operates within this frame, failing to question
the moral separation between humans and objects, as if the treatment of one had
no effect on the other.
Contrary to the way violence is cast as “inhumane,” Chakrabarty empha-
sizes the humanness of violence involved in mass killing during the Partition of
India: “It is obvious that, for all the rendering of the human into a mere thing
that collective violence may appear to perform, the recognition by one human of
another as human is its fundamental precondition. It is humans who torture, rape,
oppress, exploit, other humans. We cannot do these things to objects. . . . In this
unintentional practice of mutual human recognition lies the ground for the concep-
tion of proximity. The denial of the victim’s humanity, thus, proceeds necessarily
from this initial recognition of it.”8 The blasphemy of thingification, it seems, is not
the misrecognition of one entity (humans) for another (things); rather, it involves
the active removal of certain characteristics after humanity is initially recognized.9
It hinges on a particular way to treat an object, as objects are loved and revered
as much as they are used and discarded. Viewing perpetrators of violence as non-
human animals and victims as objects is an attempt to render them outside the
human, thereby preventing a closer look at the human contexts in which violence
and nonviolence occur. It also naturalizes the violence of and against nonhuman
animals and objects. Positioning violence inside the human — which Chakrabarty
calls “in-human” rather than inhuman — compels a movement out of humanness
to practice nonviolence, in this way refusing to exercise violence and embracing
the vulnerability involved in becoming objects.10
Connecting a person who is unconscious or immobile to a quasi-object
sounds immoral, derogatory, and “dehumanizing.” So does comparing a person
to an animal, a plant, an inanimate object, or a nonhuman being (e.g., saying that
someone is a “puzzle,” an “alien,” or in “a vegetative state”), an offense quite com-
mon in racist and ableist society.11 Just as attempts to remove differences by enforc-
ing normality are detrimental, attempts to erase humanness by casting off certain
bodies have violent effects. Nevertheless, Sunaura Taylor ponders the connection
between disabled people and animals in sideshow culture and medical discourses

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and asks, “Is there any way to consider these metaphors beyond the blatant rac-
ism, classism, and ableism these comparisons espouse? I find myself wondering
why animals exist as such negative points of reference for us, animals who them-
selves are victims of unthinkable oppressions and stereotypes.”12 Like Mel Chen,
I take Taylor’s question “as a basis for a revised ethics” and ask similar questions
about being objectlike, recognizing numerous ways in which objects exist and are
treated.13 The moments of object-becoming yield an opportunity — one that is per-
haps counterintuitive yet potentially generative — to fashion an ethics of nonpurpo-
sive existence. Seeing humans as objects may invite critical readings of cultural
texts that disrupt the political efficacy of “objectification” as a label to condemn
morally challenging phenomena.14 This condemnation often refuses to examine
more closely the lived realities involved in objectification. Remedying objectifica-
tion and dehumanization may end up simply prescribing subjectivity and agency
in order to rehumanize othered bodies without questioning why the recognition of
humanity relies on certain signs of subjectivity and agency.
In what spaces and arrangements does this object-becoming appear gener-
ative rather than annihilative? In what ways can object-becoming contribute to an
anti-ableist project of shifting certain observable characteristics from being central
to humanness to being inessential or even irrelevant, thereby leaving humanness
without qualification? What are the ethical implications of such a project in pro-
moting conditions for a livable and sustainable life and for abolishing violence
by invoking universal human rights without relying on humans as possessing, or
needing to possess, certain capacities and faculties?

Performances of objects

The automatic link between objectification and violence assumes a sustained dual-
istic separation between the objectifier and the objectified. This is the basis of
Martha Nussbaum’s theorization of objectification: to make objectification positive
or benign, consent and equality are necessary to remedy the hierarchy existing
between two individuals.15 The Rhythm series by Marina Abramović, a renowned
performance artist and a controversial figure, challenges this division by show-
ing an overlap between objecthood and human bodies as the objectifier and the
objectified.
The series started with her first performance piece, Rhythm 10, which
involved the intense and rhythmic motions of jabbing a knife in between her fingers
as she positioned them on a white sheet of paper on the floor. Abramović was liter-
ally the objectifier, on the one hand, and the objectified, on the other. Whenever

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she cut her hand, she changed the knife, going through twenty different knives.
Meanwhile, she recorded the sound and rhythm that her body, her motion, and the
objects generated together. After she had used all the knives, she listened to the
recording of the performance and repeated the same performance, ultimately cut-
ting her hand again. The distinction between the surface and the extended fingers
disappears as the vulnerability of flesh fills in the space. Setting aside the registers
of Abramović’s able-bodiedness — her hand-eye coordination, double-handedness
with multiple digits, maintaining control of movements, concentration, and mul-
tisensory abilities — the repetition of the acts and replaying of recorded sounds
take the audience beyond the suspense about the risk of self-wounding and fill the
space with the mechanical motions of muscles, enabling the performer to experi-
ence her body parts as objects.
In Rhythm 5, Abramović lost consciousness while lying in the middle of
a burning structure shaped in a pentagram; it was not until her pants caught on
fire that the audience realized that she was unconscious and intervened to pull
her out.16 She had fed the flame with her hair and nails, thereby making her own
body-objects contribute to her loss of consciousness, which was caused by fumes.
Seeing the ending as an interruption of a performance that relies on the artist’s
intentionality, she devised a way to continue to perform without interruption as
she went in and out of consciousness. In Rhythm 2 she took a pill used to treat
catatonia. She wrote that her medicated body started moving involuntarily even
while she was conscious and aware of the situation. After the medication wore
off, she took another pill that is used for sedation. She explains, “Physically I was
there but mentally I was not. I don’t remember anything.”17 Abramović also suc-
cessfully let her unconscious body continue the performance in Rhythm 4. When
she hovered over a strong blower and tried to inhale air driven from it, she lost con-
sciousness, but the jet of air kept her head moving. The audience could see only
her floating head through a monitor, as she was in a different room; they did not
notice her unconscious state.18 These public displays of self-experimentation on
the body, generating a state of mind-body disconnect and a movement in and out of
consciousness without interrupting the performance, shift focus from the body to
the mind and back again to the body as an agent of performance.
The dualisms of subject and object and of mind and body, dismantled inso-
far as she is the one objectifying herself, were reinstated and accentuated in the
last performance in the series, Rhythm 0. Abramović stood motionless for six hours
in Studio Morra in Naples in 1974. With a sign that said “I am the object,” she
invited the audience to take the role of objectifier.19 Instructions in print read,
“There are seventy-two objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. I’m

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taking the whole responsibility for six hours. There are objects for pain, objects
for pleasure.”20 Among the objects were weapons, such as a gun, a bullet, a metal
spear; tools that could be used as weapons, such as razor blades, an ax, nails, a
saw; grooming tools, such as a comb, a mirror, perfume, kitchen utensils; food,
such as bread, apple, grapes, honey; and a feather and a rose. Their arrangement
heightened the sense of vulnerability and suspended agency. Although the art-
ist’s status as an object contradicted her claim of responsibility, it did not stop the
audience from acting “as desired.” The objects, including her female body, carried
stories and purposes in various arrangements, placed ritualistically on a table;
as Klaus Biesenbach argues, they could have constituted the Last Supper or an
operating room, among many possibilities. 21 Pictures taken at the performance
in Naples show her body carried by two audience members, laid down on a table,
and covered with a coat. She is also shown standing up with her top removed,
tears in her eyes. Her body and face are written on and her body bears a bleed-
ing wound. One audience member placed a gun in her hand, pointing at herself;
later, another audience member removed the gun. Her stillness, like that of a liv-
ing statue, made the transition out of such stasis highly dramatic. After six hours,
Abramović started walking toward the audience, and people ran away from her “to
escape an actual confrontation.”22 That the transition from an object to a moving
subject was so shocking reveals that the audience invested in and interacted with
her as if she were a real object. “The veneer of civilization is very thin,” Chris-
sie Iles observes, making the easy link between violence and nonhuman animals:
“What is absolutely terrifying is how quickly a group of people will become bestial
if you give them permission to do so.”23 Jack Halberstam notes the display of “the
murderous impulses of audiences against women, against artists, against self.”24
However, becoming “bestial” or acting on “murderous impulses” — as Iles and
Halberstam explain the audience’s behavior, drawing on their particular under-
standing of humans and nonhuman animals — cannot be assumed to have single
meanings and cannot account for the fact that Abramović’s audience acted within
the boundaries that she had predetermined. The proximity and context were care-
fully shaped by the performer, and then combined with the cultural and historical
scripts carried by each object, including the performer’s female body. Audience
members were turned into actors, activated and authorized by Abramović’s and
the objects’ commands, while the performer remained an object. Like the partici-
pants in the Stanford prison experiment, a classic study in which individuals were
randomly assigned the role of prisoner or guard, audience members improvised
actions in a given context, both cooperating with and working against one another,
and thereby enlivening the cultural repertoire of actions involving completely

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passive flesh, the power given them by the circumstances, and objects. In other
words, when given the privilege to act with impunity the audience failed to imagine
Abramović’s position as an invitation to practice powerlessness together. When the
art critic Thomas McEvilley asked Abramović about the traditional idea that she
showed female energy in making herself submissive and passive, she identified her
courage to do the piece more with male energy.25 Elsewhere, she has also pointed
to the audience’s gendered response, in which women took little direct action but
told men what to do to her body.26 Activity and passivity are seen as characteristic
of and practiced by males and females, respectively, yet the decision to be com-
pletely passive becomes associated with power and is gendered masculine. This
gendering of the practice of objecthood illustrates the difficulty of unbecoming
human and of achieving disengaged and unqualified proximity without hierarchy.
In the end Abramović’s status as object has to be removed (thus she must be
deobjectified), even through a pharmaceutical intervention to make her body move
out of stillness, restoring the normatively gendered balance (Rhythm 2). Object-
becoming in the Rhythm series does not necessarily challenge the understanding
of agency and subjectivity associated with the masculine, but it does reveal the
performative power of bodies’ objecthood to destabilize the gendered interpretation
of passivity and activity. The clear overlap between objects and humans enables
the reading of objectification as a practice of powerlessness — what Halberstam
calls “radical passivity.”27 Simone de Beauvoir noticed the power of women who
play at being objects, which she called “the comedy of being passive”: “Man wants
woman to be object, she makes herself object; at the very moment when she does
that, she is exercising a free activity. Therein is her original treason; the most
docile, the most passive, is still a conscious being; and sometimes the fact that in
giving herself to him she looks at him and judges him is enough to make him feel
duped; she is supposed to be only something offered, no more than prey.”28
Exploring the moments of unbecoming human as a form of power and the
reorganization of power relations is not to obscure but to facilitate a deeper under-
standing of how, in certain contexts, objectifying oneself and others as disposable,
replaceable, unworthy of care, and violatable is exploitative and destructive. Never-
theless, recognizing objecthood in humans and keeping in mind the many whose
human status has been questioned and denied on the basis of their resemblance
to objects, I think of object-becoming as providing entry into the relationship
between disabled, unproductive, queer, and nonwhite bodies and the ableist soci-
ety that tempts them with the legitimizing value of normality. (This does not mean
that all disabled people are unproductive or passive.) The instances of objecthood
imagined and enacted by oneself or by others as objects and machines expose the

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lack of a clear distinction between vitality and death and between nonhuman and
human. In these blurred spaces, the linkages between objects, matters, and beings
are reoriented to form an anti-ableist position — an ethics of queer inhumanism,
based not solely on identity and sociality but also on proximity and copresence.
In The Artist Is Present (2010), a famous piece performed at the Museum of
Modern Art, Abramović’s motionlessness created a context of object-becoming dif-
ferent from that of Rhythm 0 in a way that heightened affective and vibrant prox-
imity between presence and existence. In an empty space surrounded by galleries
and heavily guarded by security personnel, Abramović sat on a chair during the
operating hours of the museum every day for three months. Visitors were invited to
sit across from her and to gaze at her for as long as they wanted. A sitter who did
anything other than looking would be escorted out by the guards. In this heavily
controlled arrangement, sitters were obliged to perform the stillness of an object-
body, interacting only through their gaze and energy field. The significant elements
are the presence of the artist and the duration of the encounter, rather than who
is being objectified by whom. The work created a “new conceptual space” that is
marked by “multiplicity and a profound resistance to closure,” demanded the audi-
ence’s participation, and foregrounded the artist’s rules in ways that defined her
presence. 29 Objectification and quasi-human status do not automatically lead to
violence unless the conceptual space invokes certain repertoires of violent inter-
actions. The fact that the surveillance of the guards controlled the space, so that
the audience could only sit still, mimicked the visible and invisible enforcement
of the ableist principle of functional, behavioral, intellectual, emotional, and aes-
thetic norms on which noncapable bodies are often removed from public spaces.
In “The Artist Is Object,” Halberstam describes Abramović’s perfor-
mances as demonstrating a “shadow feminism,” one that lacks a discernible “femi-
nist subject.” There are only “un-subjects who cannot speak, who refuse to speak;
subjects who unravel, who refuse to cohere; subjects who refuse ‘being’ where
being has already been defined in terms of a self-activating, self-knowing, liberal
subject.” Halberstam concludes that by becoming an object, Abramović “stands
in potent opposition to all of the clichéd forms of rationality that collect around
embodied subjectivity.”30 In the search for feminist subjectivity, embodiment has
often been narrowly imagined as able-bodied — characterized by willed desire,
speech, seeing, refusal, mobility, purposiveness, intelligence, desire, and con-
nection rather than by unintentionality, speechlessness, unseeing, acquiescence,
immobility, inertness, incompetence, asexuality, and disconnection. Halberstam’s
“un-subject,” then, is what Amber Jamilla Musser calls “a mode of desubjectifica-
tion” and “a mode of becoming-object.”31

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In what way can an embodiment of immobility and speechlessness chal-

lenge ableism, which is firmly grounded on the criterion of the capability to con-
trol one’s body to determine whether one qualifies as human? Abramović’s still-
ness and its duration had an impact on her audience, not because she simulated
the incapacity to move but because she displayed a kind of superhuman abil-
ity to appear inanimate and to control her body while maintaining eye contact.
As all bodies (live, dead, or taxidermied) are constantly marked by what Chen
calls “animacies,” even in the moment of stillness and “nonlife” in the form of
objecthood, appearing inanimate is a performance of a supra-ability as much as a
simulation of disability.32 This uncanny merging of the disability of her material
body and the supra-ability of her mind and gaze became evident in her refusal of
an accommodation of her animate body’s stillness: a bedpan was briefly placed
underneath her chair but soon removed. Instead, following a regimen of regulat-
ing water intake, she said that she did not urinate during her daily performance;
Abramović insisted, “I really have mind control.”33 While regulating water intake
is a common experience for people navigating public space with so few safe and
accessible public restrooms (in the midst of physically inaccessible, chemically
laden, dichotomously gendered, and customers-only restrooms), her emphasis on
discipline, control, and overcoming the limits of the body problematically invokes
the dualist superiority of mind over body and what Susan Wendell calls “the myth
that the body can be controlled.”34 This dualism has long influenced the view of
constantly tremoring, fidgeting, or nonmoving disabled bodies as exhibiting a fail-
ure of control. Moreover, eye contact as a sign of humanity often works against
neurodiverse individuals who are forced to learn how to make eye contact. Yet even
with this insistence on ableist tradition, her unmoving, speechless presence pro-
vides a moment of proximity, coexisting and negotiating with nonnormative exis-
tence, without intimate sociality. Ironically, she labors to overcome her able-bodied
temporality and provides an invitation to recognize the materiality of “bodymind”
as she becomes object.35
In an essay focusing on mental disability, Margaret Price uses the term
bodymind to remedy the long-standing separation between mind and body,
“because mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give
rise to each other — that is, because they tend to act as one, even though they are
conventionally understood as two.”36 That they “act as one” does not imply that
they are always felt as one. As we think about the objecthood of humans, the sense
that mind and body are disconnected emerges as an experience of disability. In
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, for instance, Oliver Sacks writes of one
woman, Christina, who lost proprioception, the awareness of the body and “the

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complex mechanisms and controls by which our bodies are properly aligned and
balanced in space.”37 Christina initially felt “disembodied” and her body as “blind
and deaf to itself,” and continued to feel, with the continuing loss of propriocep-
tion, that her body was “dead,” “not-real,” “not-hers.”38 In this illustration of the
limits of the assumed mind-body integration, Christina’s disabled body is in prox-
imity to her as an object of her own gaze in order to be operated and as, what Sacks
calls, the “nothingness” and inexpressible “non-realm” without words to describe
her experience.39
The disability of proprioceptive “disembodiment” reveals the overlap
between corporeal existence and objecthood. Christina’s reliance on the metaphor
of blindness and deafness expresses this proprioceptive disability as a difference
in sensory processing, aligned with sensory disabilities. Similarly, Larry David-
son writes that one of his research participants with schizophrenia described “the
times when he no longer was aware of himself as a person. In these moments, what
awareness he retained seemed to him to be that of an object.”40 Davidson quotes
another person who was having a similar experience: “I am starting to feel pretty
numb about everything because I am becoming an object and objects don’t have
feelings.”41 Although these quotations do not provide larger contexts of the indi-
vidual’s experiences, being open to the disconnect between body and mind may
generate deeper understandings of how multiple dimensions of mental, physical,
and sensory disabilities do not fit into a single alternative ontology, such as inte-
grated bodymind, stillness, or advantages of differences. Instead, the ontologies of
unbecoming human gesture toward the copresence and simultaneity of the mind
and the body whether or not they feel together, relational, and whole, or discon-
nected, fragmented, and proximal.
At this juncture, the queer inhumanism of unbecoming human as a theo-
retical and ethical intervention expresses an anti-ableist commitment, recognizing
that it is difficult to think of human subjectivity, disabled or not, without resorting
to abilities, values, legitimacy, and social acceptance. In the absence of conven-
tional markers of humanity and with the desire to “endow” humanity and person-
hood entirely set aside, the imperative of progress toward an enhanced future that
makes “human life” valuable loses its force. This position is in a way an alternative
to what Douglas Biklen calls the “presumption of competence” for individuals who
do not communicate verbally or use sign language. Biklen draws the notion from
the work of Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay and Sue Rubin, who are autistic: “Give
the person the benefit of the doubt, presume competence, then work hard at look-
ing for the evidence, and also support the person in finding new ways of expres-
sion.”42 Given how the label intellectual disability often creates otherness and

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low expectation, the “presumption of competence” is an important practical step

toward ensuring equal participation. However, this presumption does not challenge
the belief that “competence” is a threshold requirement for equality and sociabil-
ity. Making competence irrelevant in recognizing the ontology of a being is another
way to challenge the qualifications that operate as exclusive criteria of humanity.
To think through disability from a critical inhumanist position is not to
recalibrate our understanding of the human in a more accurate and inclusive way
but to open up diverse ontologies that make any declaration of value and classifi-
cation irrelevant, as well as to abandon the able-bodied schema as a normalizing
goal of cure, re/habilitation, and assimilation. This focus on the conditions of the
inhuman unexpectedly meshes with a global commitment to human rights that
is not based on the recognition of humanness in terms of productive citizenship.
Hannah Arendt’s argument for “a right to have rights” reveals the prerequisite
conditions — including “actions,” “opinions,” and “a right to belong to some kind of
organized community” — that warrant rights protections.43 Arendt adds that before
the formulation of modern human rights based on “a completely organized human-
ity,” “what we must call a ‘human right’ today would have been thought of as a
general characteristic of the human condition which no tyrant could take away.”44
Queer inhumanism is an effort to refuse to make the human the central condition
required in building a community, for any inclusive claim of humanity never fully
represents or describes all humans’ characteristics. An objecthood-based critique
recognizes nonconforming and recalcitrant forms of a being rather than privileging
one form of resistance and agency, and a fixed perception of a valuable life, over all
others. To suspend humanness is to abandon the appraisal of difference and move
toward a nonjudgmental ontology of copresence and proximity.

conditions of an oK Life of a machine

How is object-becoming feasible or ethical within global capitalist politics that

supports the exploitation of labor based on oppression and colonial histories? Park
Chan-wook’s I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK (2006) employs surrealism, comedy,
musical elements, and a mentally disabled figure who becomes a machine with no
purpose.45 This experiment is paradoxically centered on the search for the mini-
mal elements that sustain life. A young woman named Young-goon (Im Soo-jung),
who works on the assembly line of a radio factory, identifies as (or is in the pro-
cess of becoming) a cyborg whose purpose is as yet unknown to herself. Her self-
electroshocking on a rainy night at the factory in an effort to charge her body leads
her to a psychiatric hospital in which she refuses to eat and becomes unresponsive.

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The film has two contrasting parts woven together: a lighthearted depic-
tion of a community of eccentric people with mental disabilities, one that disrupts
the boundary of self by presenting hallucinations and delusions as transferable
and shared, almost as machine parts; and a violent visualization of Young-goon’s
vengeance against the medical system, one activated by her machine identity
that mourns the institutionalization and death of her grandmother. The film pre-
sents potentially transgressive yet morally ambivalent travels to and from objects,
humans, antisociality, and proximity. In the end, the film advocates for a need-
based understanding of existence rather than a capacity-based definition of being
human: it ultimately challenges the binarized indignity of objecthood and digni-
fied humanity, affirming life with mental disability as well as proximity to and
connection with objects. The collaboration between Young-goon and another char-
acter in the hospital, Il-soon (Jung Ji-hoon), who is diagnosed as antisocial, sug-
gests that sustenance and social proximity — without identification, a purpose of
existence, or the need for “improvement” — constitute the minimal condition of an
OK life.
In the initial sequence, extreme close-up images of moving cogwheels as
if shown in X-rays vividly portray the internal world of machinery. A mechanical
rhythmic sound opens the shot of a brightly colored space filled with an endless
number of indistinguishable young women sitting in straight lines and repeating
the same motions in unison. A reading of the noncompliant figure of a Korean
female disabled factory worker who thinks of herself as a cyborg inevitably invokes
Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway mentions Korean factory workers
who labor in an assembly line for the manufacture of integrated circuits and that
“ ‘women of color’ might be understood as a cyborg identity, as a potent subjectivity
synthesized from the fusions of outsider identities.”46 After noting that “ ‘women of
color’ are the preferred labor force for the science-based industries,” she observes:
“Young Korean women hired in the sex industry and in electronics assembly are
recruited from high schools, educated for the integrated circuit. Literacy, especially
in English, distinguishes the ‘cheap’ female labor so attractive to the multination-
als. Contrary to orientalist stereotypes of the ‘oral primitive,’ literacy is a special
mark of women of color, acquired by US black women as well as men through a
history of risking death to learn and to teach reading and writing.”47 Here capabil-
ity, gender, age, ethnicity, and geopolitical history constitute an “ideal” condition
of exploitable humanity. This exploitability is put in contrast with the image of “the
oral primitive” as unenlightened and occupying a lower rung of the evolutionary
hierarchy, an image that also justified colonial subjugation to usher these individu-
als into modernity and humanity through education. Literacy and racialized and

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gendered assumptions that they have a natural aptitude for repetitive unskilled and
skilled labor make them desirable in the name of national economic growth.
To be properly human as a woman of color, ironically, is to be equipped with
capacities exploitable in global production. In one scene of the film, Young-goon
stays still with her head tilted up while she listens to a hallucinated commanding
voice, providing a stark visual contrast to the rows of workers laboring in synchro-
nized motion with their heads down. In this mechanized human labor, Young-goon
breaks out of the capitalist machinery by becoming a cyborg and transforming
into unexploitable existence. Haraway connects cyborg existence with the art of
survival: “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original
innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them
as other. The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and dis-
place the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities.”48 The themes of power,
violence, connection with inhuman objects and animals, and survival, which all
address the injustice of othering, appear in I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK with an
added emphasis on mental disability and medical institutionalization as conditions
of politicized nonnormative existence.
Whereas Abramović’s sitting objecthood was a condition of social encoun-
ters that test the connection and disconnection of bodies through the gaze, the
manufacturing process in Young-goon’s radio factory creates an environment in
which mechanized workers do not recognize each other’s state. Obeying the voice
commanding her, Young-goon cuts her wrist with a knife, puts a wire into the cut,
and affixes the wire with tape. The electrical outlet is then shown in a close-up,
implying that in the next step she would put the wire into it. Intercutting Young-
goon’s actions carried out in the factory is a scene in a doctor’s office in which
her mother and the doctor, Choi Seul-gi, are discussing Young-goon’s “suicide
attempt,” making the before and the after of the event occur simultaneously. Choi
asks, “Was there anything different about Young-goon before the incident? For
instance, did she suddenly stop eating?” This question about eating foreshadows
the ethical problem of force-feeding. Mother explains, “The truth is that Young-
goon raised my mother. No. I mean, my mother raised Young-goon.” This linguistic
slippage implies generational role reversal and interdependence between Young-
goon and her grandmother, both living with an alternate identity. Following the
revelation of Grandmother’s mouse identity, Choi asks, “Did Young-goon ever say
she was something else, too?” Critically, Mother’s lie — “Never, doctor. Young-goon
is a human being” — is uttered as viewers see a shot of the unconscious Young-
goon, who has fallen backward in her chair. Her bleeding body on the ground is
a clear mark of an unfit, leaky body, out of order in the middle of the two rows of

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workers, who never look up from their tasks. The next gory scene playfully tran-
sitions to a close-up of her toes lighting in a cascade of colors to signal that her
body is fully charged and her cyborgness enacted. Plugging oneself into an electric
socket, licking batteries, and receiving electroconvulsive therapy are, after all, the
methods of sustaining a cyborg.
In declaring that it is OK to be a cyborg, the film takes a route different
from that followed by the typical psychotherapeutic narrative, which moves toward
conformity and cure.49 Mother asks, “Grandmother’s thing would not be related,
would it, to her suicide attempt? Young-goon will be OK, right?” Mother attempts
to reframe it by contending that affinities to an animal, objects, or other humans
are not uncommon, hinting at her own undisclosed identity and at matrilineal men-
tal disability: “My mother probably felt a little closer to mice that day. I too have
days when I feel extremely close to pig intestines. You feel the same with patients.
Don’t you?” This is not so much an argument for the universalizability of disability,
as experienced on a continuum, as it is Mother’s attempt to erase and conceal the
ways in which they differ from assumed normality. Nevertheless, Mother’s deci-
sion to hide Young-goon’s cyborg identity illustrates that identifications with vis-
ible nonhuman entities (a mouse and pig intestines) are more easily disguised as
affinities and intimacy than is Young-goon’s cyborgness — which cannot be located
as an object of her affinity. Mother’s desire for Young-goon’s life to be OK, while
hiding her cyborgness to avoid pathologization and social stigma, is at war with
Young-goon’s need for her machine embodiment to be acknowledged and shared so
that she can survive.
For Young-goon, being a cyborg means having the power to stop the ambu-
lance in order to give Grandmother her dentures, a technology necessary for
Grandmother to sustain her life as a mouse eating radishes. As revealed in her
flashback, when Grandmother was forcibly taken away from home to a nursing
home, Young-goon fails to catch up to the ambulance and holds on to the den-
tures as a substitute for Grandmother’s presence. Her habit of carrying a com-
puter mouse with the dentures — together with a photo on the wall above her bed,
which shows a person bending over, his two arms engaged with a big machine that
has a valve emitting steam and pipes connected to the wall — marks her physi-
cal and emotional proximity to working machines as fellow beings.50 The differ-
ence between her and all laboring machines is that they each exist with a specific
purpose and utility. She longs to discover her purpose as a laboring object. Part
organism and part machine, the cyborg is a transitional step toward becoming a
full machine with a purpose. Consistent with viewing the instrumentalization of a
person to serve someone else’s interest as a sign of objectification, Young-goon per-

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ceives her potential utility as the essential condition of becoming machine. Rather
than valorize humans for their productivity and contributions to society, as a utili-
tarian might, her desire to be used reveals that relational passivity and proximity
are the keys for object-becoming as she moves away from agency as an exertion of
power for advocating self-interest.
As the voice communicates with Young-goon, she learns about the seven
deadly sins of which she needs to rid herself in order to be capable of exacting
revenge on the Hayan-men (men in white), the medical professionals responsible
for Grandmother’s institutionalization. The sins are Sympathy, Sadness, Excite-
ment, Hesitancy, Imagination, Guilt, and Gratitude — “listed in the order of evil-
ness,” a soft, kind female voice announces.51 Young-goon’s cyborgian ethical vir-
tues, by contrast, gesture toward antisociality. The voice from the transistor radio
urges, “You should not uselessly imagine whether Hayan-men have grandmothers.
You should not hesitate to kill because of your sympathy for those grandmothers.”
Grieving grandmothers, not humanity itself, are offered as a reason to respect life
and thus as a hindrance to Young-goon’s mission. Sympathy is her symptom of
the disorder that needs to be remedied. She asks Il-soon to steal her sympathy, so
that she will become antisocial enough to kill all the medical professionals. In a
scene in which Young-goon is wearing the dentures and mourning Grandmother’s
death outside the hospital by burying the mouse she was carrying, she makes a
ritualistic crying sound and tells Grandmother that she is not allowed to be sad.
Il-soon, who became sympathetic after stealing her sympathy, comes near, holds
her body up, and kisses her. Her face is oriented toward him but her body is turned
in the opposite direction and levitates as flames come out of her feet as if from a
rocket. She collapses when the voice is heard saying, “No excitement.” The kiss
reveals the heteronormativity tied to the notion of the human; Young-goon shifts it
to human – object sexuality as embodied in the machine, endeavoring to suspend
her emotions and heterosexual affect to continue to become a cyborg. With the
kiss, the dentures are transferred to Il-soon, as he now becomes part of her prox-
imity to objects.
In line with this object transference between the bodies, the “patients” at
the hospital present an ensemble in which their unique fantasies that are typi-
cally understood as “symptoms” of mental disabilities are traded and shared.52
One man feels guilty for every event that happens around him, apologizes exces-
sively, and walks backward so as not to rudely turn his back on another person.
His excessive modesty and politeness are stolen by Il-soon and later transferred
back to him. As Sacks remarks, one reason that hallucinations are startling is their
lack of “consensual validation”; here, the transference of “symptoms” suggests the

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importance of observing and understanding the fantasy experiences of a mentally

disabled person.53 In her ethnographic research of Bethel House, a community
in a fishing village in northern Japan, Karen Nakamura learned that people with
schizophrenia usually avoid telling anyone about their hallucinations and delu-
sions, so that they will not be considered out of touch with reality, and “this causes
them to withdraw into their own world and increases the feelings of social isola-
tion.” Instead, in Bethel, “People are encouraged to talk about their hallucinations
and delusions. Thus, hallucinations and delusions become communal property,
something that everyone can talk about and deal with.”54 Similarly in the film,
hallucinations are externalized and can even be stolen and given back, generating
interactions and providing tools for imagining different ontologies.
When Il-soon prepares to steal Young-goon’s sympathy, Il-soon becomes an
anthropologist with an emic perspective, that is, one from which the internal ele-
ments of a language or culture are described without interpretation.55 For Il-soon,
“stealing” other patients’ characteristics or symptoms is a way to understand their
fantasies and become able to practice them; he does so not to ridicule them but to
enter into their modes of perception and also to make “symptoms” into transferra-
ble objects. The transference underscores what Davidson calls “the intersubjective
nature of experience.”56 Audience members are introduced to Young-goon’s char-
acteristics through Il-soon’s eyes and not through a clinical gaze that might identify
behaviors as signs of catatonia accompanying echoralia, echopraxia, and stereo-
typy, a clinical term for a repetitive motor activity.57 He finds out that Young-goon
is not eating any food but is secretly only licking batteries, making her exhausted.
After he successfully steals her sympathy through a ritualistic act of transference
using a mask in a boiler room full of machinery, Young-goon is activated as an auto-
matic machine gun: she starts her first fantasy rampage of shooting nurses and doc-
tors through her fingers, only to collapse and become completely unresponsive —
not eating, not communicating, and not sleeping.
Young-goon’s unresponsive and emaciated body is in a state that, accord-
ing to Giorgio Agamben, “marks the threshold between the human and the inhu-
man.”58 In discussing the Muselmänner — camp slang for those in Auschwitz on
the verge of death who were emaciated, exhausted, listless, and apathetic (also
called the “living corpses”) — Agamben rejects the notion of human dignity by
considering the Muselmann to be “the guard on the threshold of a new ethics, an
ethics of a form of life that begins where dignity ends.” Agamben argues, “The
bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to
anything. It itself is the only norm; it is absolutely immanent. And ‘the ultimate
sentiment of belonging to the species’ cannot in any sense be a kind of dignity.”59

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He contests the possibility of dehumanization: “no ethics can claim to exclude a

part of humanity, no matter how unpleasant or difficult that humanity is to see.”60
The playfulness and fantastical nature of I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK may make
the comparison of Young-goon’s catatonia to the historical condition of a Musel-
mann seem extreme. Nevertheless, Agamben’s insight powerfully underscores the
point that it would be crucial to abandon dignity as the determinant of the begin-
ning and ending of humanity, to avoid creating an “outside” to humanity and to
prevent signs of powerlessness from being considered a cause of (and invitation to)
violence. Even further, to work against privilege and the liberal notion of legiti-
mate personhood, it is generative to leave the boundary of the human altogether
by embodying object beings and by actively undoing human values, abilities, and
subjectivity.
Without knowing that Young-goon is a cyborg, her doctor decides to put her
through electroconvulsive therapy, which solves her problem of charging her body
to its fullest. During the electroshock, Young-goon has a dream of being inside a
giant incubator to which many wires are connected.61 She sees Grandmother out-
side it, who tries to tell her the purpose of existence, but the sentence is never com-
pleted. After being recharged, her body transforms into a high-capacity machine
gun and starts to shoot at all the people working at the hospital, sparing only peo-
ple with disabilities. The ammunition is rolling in her mouth, and her arms and
fingers are extended as muzzles. Set to classical music, the scene runs more than
three minutes, reflecting the significance of this bloody rampage and displaying
the impact of her cold ruthlessness. The killings completely shift the film’s genre
from a lighthearted drama about a community of people with mental disabilities to
a violent story of vengeance against the medical system and identities that divide
“us” and “them” and enable violence. During this vigorous action in her fantasy,
she appears to others as catatonic.
Although the gory sight of bullet-riddled bodies feeds the stereotypical
and dangerous misperception that people with mental illness are violent and mur-
derous (an image more widely held in the United States, where gun violence is
strongly associated with mental illness), her fantasy of a massacre also expresses
rage against a system of institutionalization and against ableist society in general,
which does not allow various modes of existence. Does this violent scene of mass
killing by a cyborg justify the use of violence as a mode of resistance and as what
Frantz Fanon calls “a cleansing force” at an individual level?62 Or is it an expres-
sion of “queer negativity,” launching a vigorous political critique of the system in
the form of violent fantasy combined with embodied objecthood?63 The director’s
previous films on the theme of revenge might provide useful contexts to understand

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it. In Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Park Chan-wook features a deaf charac-
ter who, much like Young-goon, works at a factory. His sister’s failing kidney and
his own victimization by organ traffickers attract the involvement of his girlfriend
and her socialist organization. Both films criticize the use of human bodies as
exploitable commodities in medical capitalism and portray disabled people’s non-
conformist struggles through enacting or hallucinating violent revenge.
In I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK, when Young-goon is subjected to force-
feeding, the patients collectively launch a hunger strike as they demand her release
from the isolation room. New social links are formed in the hospital ward around
Young-goon’s prospect of survival and against force-feeding. The acceptance of
psychic difference and the intersubjective mixing of fantasies occur in parallel.
Il-soon tries to persuade her to eat by explaining that rice will be transformed
into an electron if he installs equipment inside her body. In an emotional scene
inside the boiler room, Il-soon performs a symbolic surgery on Young-goon’s back
that gives him access to the machine of her body. At this crucial moment, he also
lets go of his own trauma about his mother (who abandoned him) by pretending to
install a small locket containing his mother’s photo inside Young-goon’s body. In a
dramatically choreographed group scene, in which everyone cheers as Young-goon
swallows rice, Young-goon’s body becomes transparent and the locket is revealed
inside, as the histories of Il-soon and Young-goon merge as objects.
After the rampage, Young-goon is still haunted by the image of Grand-
mother trying to tell her what the purpose of her existence is. By decoding Grand-
mother’s message as she remembers it from the movement of Grandmother’s lips,
she comes to believe that she is now a nuclear bomb and is supposed to deto-
nate to end the world. Needing a billion volts of electricity to do so, Young-goon
and Il-soon sit outside, on the top of a hill, holding an antenna to attract light-
ning on a stormy night. As morning breaks, the camera shows from a distance
two naked bodies collapsed on top of each other as a rainbow shines in the sky.
This somewhat comical closing recalls the typical ending of musicals: a triumph of
heterosexual love, ironically blessed by a rainbow, a symbol of queer diversity. Yet
despite suggesting that each will have a companion in journeying through life with
mental disability, the ending registers no cure, no disappearance of their psychic
differences or resolution of their haunting memories, but only temporary and tenta-
tive proximity.
The remark of Young-goon’s mother that it is “OK” if she is a cyborg as
long as she hides it and eats food is an unwitting challenge to what are assumed
to be distinct boundaries between personhood and objectness. An assessment
of “OKness” hints at the potential of queer disability to blur the boundaries of

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humans and objects. More explicitly, I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK challenges
notions of agency that are bound to signs of capacity. As a seemingly passive
object, Young-goon unintentionally creates a community of support in the insti-
tutional space where life with disability and with cognitive and psychic difference
ultimately disengages from the conditions of personhood. In its hallucinatory and
delusional incoherence and in its insistence on the OKness of mental disability,
I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK challenges viewers to dwell on unlikely pairings that
undercut the idealization of the heterosexual nuclear family as the bearer of care
and love. Embracing antisociality to lose the quality of being human, Young-goon
and Il-soon crucially form a human-object dyad at the end, signaling that they will
continue their survival in an existence made intelligible and unintelligible at the
same time.
This proximity between two disabled individuals outside the normative
family is thus a new form of sociality based on remedying violence and disen-
gaging from the utilitarian framework of human existence. Objecthood is a kind
of antisocial mode, a refusal to become what our society demands us to be, as
Halberstam declares, “the anti-social dictates an unbecoming, a cleaving to that
which seems to shame or annihilate; and a radical passivity allows for the inhabit-
ing of femininity with a difference.”64 What Halberstam names as an act of unbe-
coming is realized in the form of becoming an object and taking on object-defining
characteristics. Becoming an object is not automatically benign, however, as shown
by Young-goon’s revenge — she creates an identity that imposes an absolute divi-
sion between the community of disability and the medical professionals to deter-
mine who lives and who dies.
After revealing to her doctor that she is a cyborg, Young-goon recalls the
traumatic day when Grandmother was taken away. In her recollection, her aunt
and uncle, together with her mother, come into the house, interrupting the peace and
intimacy that Young-goon and Grandmother share while assembling a radio and
eating a radish, respectively. The three adults walk in and domineeringly look
down on the two subjects sitting on the floor. First Mother takes Grandmother’s
radish away. Noticing the strong odor in the house, her aunt screams, “How could
you bear living like this? You should have taken her to a nursing home way before
now.” Young-goon tries to erase her violent words by turning up the radio’s volume.
Reacting to the loud sound, Mother attempts to take the radio away from her. As
they struggle over it, the radio is thrown on the floor and breaks. The smashing of
the radio parallels the violence of shattering the intelligibility of Young-goon and
Grandmother’s world and the violence of Grandmother’s removal from her home.
This link between the machine and the disabled woman is acutely expressed by

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Young-goon’s cyborg identity. For Young-goon, violent responses are not anti-
human: they are her attempt to illustrate the in-humanness of violence, the in-
humanness she needs to fully escape to become an object.
The merging of disabled characters and the symbolic transfer of their
objects, fantasies, and symptoms present another way to imagine the experience
of mental disabilities. The intense intergenerational female connection between
Young-goon and Grandmother is also important, as it counters the ableist famil-
ial complicity displayed by her mother and aunt and uncle, who are culpable for
taking Grandmother away in the name of remedying the degraded and inhuman
conditions of her life. This “remedy” justifies institutionalizing her as a solution.

Proximity and becoming an object

What does it mean to unbecome human by becoming an object? Or what does

it mean to reveal the already existing overlap between object beings and human
beings that conditions our daily experiences? The neoliberal self-containment
of families is reserved only for self-regulating and self-sustaining individuals; in
contrast, disabled people, queer youth, older people, and laborers are driven out-
side their homes. In 2011 Kim Jin-sook (Kim Chin-suk), the leader of the Korea
Confederation of Trade Unionists, took herself to the top of a 115-foot-high crane,
no. 85, above a shipyard of Hanjin Heavy Industries Construction, which had laid
her off. The structural adjustment program was not a direct response to economic
troubles within the company but connected to neoliberal principles implemented
since the economic crisis that led to the intervention of the International Mon-
etary Fund in 1997: low wages, austerity measures, massive layoffs, and offshore
production. Kim demanded that Hanjin cancel its layoff plan and rehire the fired
workers, pledging to stay on top of the crane until her demands were met. When
she finally came down — more than ten months later, after the union and Hanjin
reached an agreement — she said, “I haven’t seen any other human this close for
the last 309 days.” By calling herself an “invisible human” and making her life a
kind of “bare life” and by relying on others to send food up and to empty the waste
bucket that she sent down, Kim seized the tools, the machinery, “to mark the world
that marked [her] as other.”65
Kim Jin-sook inhabited the machinery that would also be discarded and
sold as the jobs went away; in addition, her protest was intended to memorialize
another worker, Kim Chu-ik, who ended his life in the crane after 129 days of
labor rights protest in 2003. Her bare life mobilized the Bus of Hope movement
in which people visited the crane and formed a broad coalition that included pro-

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ponents of labor rights, activists in the disability rights movement, teachers, and
contingent workers. Living a marginalized existence under global neoliberal capi-
talism with machines and as machines, treated as obsolete objects, impels us to
embrace object-becoming without purpose as an inevitable protest and as a mode
of being that is unintelligible and vulnerable.
In the end, feminist theories of objectification serve as a tool to make
explicit the problems of how othered bodies are seen and treated and denied moral,
perceptual, and material equality. However, relying on the notion of a degraded
objecthood that does not reflect how humans are embodied, attach themselves to
objects, live in proximity to objects, and become dis/embodied as objects cannot
account for the infinite number of ways in which objects create meanings. Esmeir
writes, “Can we rid ourselves of the notion of dehumanization, so that we do not
reproduce colonial and neocolonial practices that insist dehumanization can occur
and that humanity can be given back?”66 It is dangerous to reinstate humanity
by tying it to notions of the dignity, value, validity, and legitimacy of existence.
Instead, I suggest challenging its status as a locus of dignity and respect based
solely on limited notions of agency and abilities.
Performing the objecthood of human bodies — as Abramović’s oeuvre and
I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK illustrate — surrenders the power to inflict pain and
to relate to each other through violence while undoing the sociality that is built
on neoliberal self-regulation, productivity, utility, quality of life, and presumed
able-bodiedness, all employed to separate the deserving from the undeserving. A
queer feminist disability studies might benefit not from a mere refusal of objecti-
fication — “we are humans, not objects” — but from a refusal of the subject-object
binary that denies the “object” and the objectlike state attention and presence.
The new anti-ableist queer ethics of inhumanism, which negotiates with differ-
ences through copresence, proximity without identification, and simultaneous
inhabitation, recognizes the labor of living with disability that is not exploitable.
Perceiving someone or feeling oneself to be an object in a given conceptual space
does not itself constitute ethical harm; indeed, becoming an object provides a point
of departure to unravel ableism, normative humanity, and violence.

notes

I thank Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano, who encouraged me to think further on this
topic. The anonymous reviewers provided me with thoughtful and insightful feedback
that guided me in reconsidering and clarifying various points. Nicole Markotić’s and
Michael Gill’s help were integral to completing this essay. I also thank Margaret Price

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for her invaluable feedback and for making me think more about the body-mind dis-
connect. Eli Clare helped me realize the importance of disengagement for which I
am deeply grateful. I would also like to thank Alice Falk, Sarah Groeneveld, Stacey
Lutkosky, and Elizabeth Freeman for their helpful editorial suggestions. The epigraph
is from Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist
Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 80 (March–April), 99.

1. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: G. P. Putnam’s

Sons, 1981), 108.
2. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Stud-
ies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 140.
3. “Highlights from Speeches by Ed Roberts,” collected by Jon Oda, World Institute on
Disability, wid.org/about-wid/highlights-from-speeches-by-ed-roberts (accessed June
17, 2014).
4. Jasbir K. Puar, “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, and Switch-
points,” GLQ 18, no. 1 (2012): 153, 154.
5. Samera Esmeir, Judicial Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2012), 3.
6. Samera Esmeir, “On Making Dehumanization Possible,” PMLA 121, no. 5 (2006):
1547, 1549.
7. Esmeir, “On Making Dehumanization Possible,” 1549.
8. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, 142.
9. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 43. Chen explains, “One form of what is under-
stood as dehumanization involves the removal of qualities especially cherished as
human; at other times, dehumanization involves the more active making of an object.”
These two modes come together when becoming-objects remove the markers of the
human.
10. Chakrabarty, Habitation of Modernity, 142.
11. A video produced by Cure Autism Now used the rhetoric that children with autism
have lost their personhood: “Imagine that aliens were stealing one in every two hun-
dred children. . . . That is what is happening in America today. It is called autism”
(Ian Hacking, “Humans, Aliens, and Autism,” Daedalus 138 [Summer 2009]: 44).
Another video in the series treats the body as a vestige, lacking mind and personality:
“It’s like somebody sneaks into your house in the middle of the night and takes your
precious baby’s mind and personality and leaves the bewildered body behind. If one
in every two hundred and fifty children in America were actually being kidnapped,
we would have a national emergency. And we do. It’s called autism.” See www.youtube
.com/watch?v=j_cJp714jXQ, September 4, 2006.
12. Sunaura Taylor, “Beasts of Burden: Disability Studies and Animal Rights,” Qui Parle
19, no. 2 (2011): 194.

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13. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 235.
14. Linda LeMoncheck limits the term’s scope: “It is only when women are regarded
as inanimate objects, bodies, or animals, where their status as the moral equals of
persons has been demeaned or degraded, that the expression ‘sex objectification’ is
correctly used” (Dehumanizing Women: Treating Persons as Sex Objects [Totowa,
NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985], 11). Lina Papadaki asserts that it is desirable to
reserve “objectification” as a negative designation for the morally objectionable situ-
ations in which “a person’s humanity is denied when ignored/not properly acknowl-
edged and/or when it is in some way harmed” (“What Is Objectification?,” Journal of
Moral Philosophy 7, no. 1 [2010]: 32; italics removed). Martha C. Nussbaum and Ann
Cahill bring new approaches to objectification. Nussbaum points out that objectifica-
tion is “not only a slippery, but also a multiple, concept,” and it may involve benign or
positive aspects of sexual experiences when consent and equality are present in adult
relationships. What makes objectification objectionable, she argues, depends on its
specifications and on the contexts in which it occurs (“Objectification,” Philosophy
and Public Affairs 24, no. 4 [1995]: 251, 256). According to Cahill, the source of
degradation in objectification comes from seeing the material body as a reduced state.
Objectification as currently conceptualized, Cahill insightfully argues, is overly bur-
dened by the Kantian ideal of rationality and autonomy as the grounds of humanness,
which does not serve feminist goals. For this ideal fortifies a notion of personhood
defined as having distinctive capacities that are “intellectually and/or cognitively
derived,” ignoring embodiedness and the intersubjectivity of human existence (Over-
coming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics [New York: Routledge, 2011], 8).
15. Nussbaum, “Objectification.”
16. Marina Abramović and Velimir Abramović, Artist Body Performances, 1969 – 1998
(Milan: Charta, 1998), 68.
17. Marina Abramović, “Body Art,” in Marina Abramović, ed. Anna Daneri, Giacinto Di
Pietrantonio et al. (Milan: Charta, 2002), 30.
18. Abramović, “Body Art,” 30.
19. Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 2010), 74.
20. Abramović, “Body Art,” 30.
21. Klaus Biesenbach, “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present. The Artist Was Pres-
ent. The Artist Will Be Present,” in Biesenbach, Marina Abramović, 17.
22. Abramović, “Body Art,” 30.
23. Chrissie Iles, quoted in The Artist Is Present, directed by Matthew Akers (2012; Chi-
cago: Music Box Films, 2012), DVD.
24. Judith Halberstam, “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies,” Graduate Journal of
Social Science 5, no. 2 (2008): 150.

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25. Thomas McEvilley, “Stages of Energy: Performance Art Ground Zero?,” in Abramović
and Abramović, Artist Body, 16.
26. Abramović, “Body Art,” 30.
27. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011), 139.
28. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vin-
tage Books, 1974), 684.
29. Lucy Sargisson, Utopian Bodies and the Politics of Transgression (London: Routledge,
2000), 3.
30. Jack Halberstam, “The Artist Is Object: Marina Abramović at MOMA,” April 5,
2010, bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/the-artist-is-object-.
31. Amber Jamilla Musser, “Objects of Desire: Toward an Ethics of Sameness,” Theory
and Event 15, no. 2 (2013): n.p. Musser explores the “becoming-object” involved
in “objectum sexuality, an orientation in which people sexually orient themselves
towards objects” and “questions of relationality and ethics in queer theory.”
32. Chen, Animacies.
33. Rachel Dodes, “Artist Marina Abramović Sits for an Interview,” Speakeasy: The Wall
Street Journal, June 1, 2010, blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/06/01/artist-marina
-abramovic-sits-for-an-interview/.
34. Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections of Disability
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 85.
35. Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” in “New Con-
versations in Feminist Disability Studies,” ed. Kim Q. Hall, a special issue of Hypatia
30, no. 1 (2015): 268–84.
36. Price, “Bodymind Problem,” 269.
37. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Simon and Schus-
ter, 1998), 72. There are limitations to getting glimpses of experiences through the
reports of the writers who met individuals in their capacity as clinicians, as Rose-
marie Garland Thomson points out in discussing the “freak show” genealogy in
Sacks’s “wonderment” of clinical tales (Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring
Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature [New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1997], 56). Nonetheless, Sacks’s writing, from a phenomenological per-
spective, reveals what Wendell observes: “the appreciation of difference” rather than
treating the individuals as “curiosities” (Rejected Body, 67).
38. Sacks, Man Who Mistook His Wife, 51.
39. For more examples of mind-body disconnection or different proprioceptive perceptions
experienced by autistic individuals, see Douglas Biklen, Autism and the Myth of the
Person Alone (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 264 – 69.
40. Larry Davidson, Living outside Mental Illness: Qualitative Studies of Recovery in
Schizophrenia (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 148.

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41. Andrew McGhie and James Chapman, quoted in Davidson, Living outside Mental Ill-
ness, 148.
42. Biklen, Autism, 258.
43. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., San Diego: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 296 – 97.
44. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 297. Ironically, Arendt lists speech as one such
example along with human relationship as the minimal human condition.
45. I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK, directed by Park Chan-wook (Seoul: CJ Entertainment,
2006), DVD.
46. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 174.
47. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 174 – 75; emphasis added.
48. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 175.
49. In such a coherent narrative, the flight of Young-goon’s father shortly after her birth, the
absence of her mother (who is running a restaurant), her grandmother’s schizophrenia,
and her premature birth followed by a period inside an incubator might be employed as
the psychoanalytic origin of her mental state and an explanation for her machine iden-
tity. But the film provides this information only via a glimpse of the doctor’s monitor.
50. The photo appears on the cover of Ed van der Elsken’s photo album Sweet Life (New
York: H. N. Abrams, 1966).
51. These seven evils echo “the seven evils of wives,” which in Confucius tradition justify
a woman’s expulsion from her husband’s family.
52. Park Jin, “Chŏngsin Punsŏk Naerŏt’ibŭ ŭi Saeroun Yŏngyŏk” (“New Realm of Psy-
choanalytic Narrative”), Kukje Ŏmun (International Literature) 42 (2008): 482. More
examples of such transference of “symptoms” among the people in the hospital are as
follows: One woman practices yodeling, and Il-soon later repeats the yodel. Il-soon is
afraid of vanishing into a dot, a fear born from his experiences of invisibility when his
parents ignored his presence. Young-goon is shown shrinking so small that she is car-
ried out of the isolation room by a ladybug. One man thinks that his body is connected
to a greater force by a rubber band that will take him to the right place at the end of
his life. Grandmother, who after her death visits the mourning Young-goon in a field,
is taken away into the sky by a rubber band, vanishing to a dot.
53. Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (New York: Knopf, 2012), x.
54. Karen Nakamura, A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and
Mental Illness in Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 82 – 83. Nakamura
explains, “Every year, Bethel holds an annual festival where the highlight of the fes-
tival is the Hallucinations and Delusions Grand Prix. Here, the best hallucination or
delusion is celebrated. The twist is that ‘best’ means the hallucination or delusion that
brings together the most people or has the most community involvement” (82).

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55. Kenneth Lee Pike, Talk, Thought, and Thing: The Emic Road toward Conscious
Knowledge (Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1993).
56. Davidson, Living outside Mental Illness, 25.
57. “Section II: Diagnostic Criteria and Codes,” in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders: DSM-5, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing,
2013), DSM Library, dsm.psychiatryonline.org/content.aspx?bookid=556&sectionid
=41101755#103435410 (accessed August 31, 2013).
58. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York:
Zone Books, 1999), 55.
59. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 69.
60. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 64.
61. Mentally disabled people in institutions are often subject to involuntary unmodified
electroconvulsive therapy without anesthesia, or with anesthesia but without con-
sent, treatment that constitutes a form of violence. In 2013 the UN Human Rights
Council received Juan E. Méndez’s “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Torture and
Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,” February 1, 2013
(A/HRC/22/53). The report states, “The environment of patient powerlessness and
abusive treatment of persons with disabilities in which restraint and seclusion is used
can lead to other non-consensual treatment, such as forced medication and electro-
shock procedures” (15).
62. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove,
2008), 51.
63. Halberstam, “Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies,” 154.
64. Halberstam, “Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies,” 151.
65. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 175. The phrase “bare life” is from Giorgio Agamben,
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
66. Esmeir, “On Making Dehumanization Possible,” 1550.

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