1.0 Introduction

Currently in South Korea, massage therapy licences are restricted to individuals with a recognised visual impairment under Article 82 of the Medical Services Act (Medical Services Act (KR) art. 82). A remnant of Japanese occupation policy in 1912, the legislation, in recent times, has been framed as a progressive policy aimed at protecting the blind community’s right to work, ensuring that they could work independently and provide for themselves economically (“South Korea court says”, 2008). This legal arrangement, however, invites scrutiny, as advocacy efforts by their sighted peers continue to push for expanded legal recognition and wider access to licensing for sighted masseuses. Four petitions have been filed and subsequently rejected to date by the South Korean Constitutional Courts, with each petition being met by the Constitutional Court’s ruling in 2008 (“South Korea’s Constitutional Court defends”, 2018). They state: “The regulation is meant to provide visually impaired people with an opportunity to have a personally rewarding occupation, and assure that they have a means to earn a living...the legislation is well justified” (“South Korea court says”, 2008). The Korean Association of Masseurs reaffirmed the court’s ruling, framing the legislation as a fundamental human right, the “right to live”, for the visually impaired (“South Korea court says”, 2008). While the discourse on the ‘right to work’ gives special privileges for economic participation of the blind and visually impaired, the framing of such dialogue obfuscates perhaps the broader implications this legal discourse.

This essay uses the case study of South Korea’s legislation of restricting massage licences to visually impaired people to examine how protective disability policies can function as instruments of biopolitical control. Using Foucault’s theory of biopolitics and Puar’s concepts of debility and the biopolitics of disability, this essay argues that such legislation - in reality - reinforces ableist and neoliberal bio-governances that marginalise blind and visually impaired bodies. This essay ultimately argues that such protective legislation not only conceals but also abets the reproduction of their precarity, downplaying the state’s own role in reproducing their marginalised social realities – and atomised debility.

2.1 Biopower and Debility as Governance

Disability, such as what it means to be visually impaired or blind, must be understood not solely as a biological, anatomical impairment, but as a socio-political category produced and managed through a complex matrix of socio-political processes and able-bodied norms. Foucault’s concept of biopower is one critical framework that can show how disability and its bio-governance is socio-politically constructed.

Foucault conceptualises biopower as a ‘technology of power’, which emerged as a result of how modern societies became increasingly complex and de-centralised in their administration (Foucault, 1978/1976:139). For Foucault, biopower is a specific form of power that focuses on the management of life itself. This power operates across two interrelated axes. The first is the ‘anatomo-political’, which ultimately sees the body as a “machine” (Foucault, 1978/1976:139). The anatomo-political disciplines, regulates, and ‘optimises’ the body to create ‘obedient’, efficient and socially ‘useful’ bodies (Foucault, 1978/1976:139). The second is the biopolitical, which concerns the governance of populations. The biopolitical describes how the behaviours of systems of power, like the ‘state’, regulate discourses and norms that make ‘life’ governable (Foucault, 1978/1976:139). In The History of Sexuality, Foucault shows how during the classical period, as states began modernising, large-scale issues such as ‘birth rate’, ‘public health’, and ‘housing’, for instance, became an institutional preoccupation for the fields of politics and economics (Foucault, 1978/1976:140). This proliferated a number of fields of knowledge and political thought that would attempt to manage populations or life, such as ‘demography’ and resource distribution (Foucault, 1978/1976:140). Together, these forms of power, the anatomo-political and the biopolitical mutually reinforce one another, co-constituting biopower. For Foucault, not only does he highlight how institutional control and the fields of knowledge generate how life becomes both knowable and governable, but also how the productive capacity of the anatomo-political internalises and inscribes norms onto bodies (Foucault, 1978/1976:139). The body internalises the biopolitical, and the social norms become their reality, actively co-constituting what they perceive is true and valuable about their bodies. For Foucault, biopower co-opts life as a knowable thing to one that also produces and reproduces socio-political realities. As a framework for understanding how systemic injustices and inequities become reproduced, biopower offers rich lexicon for explaining how systems of power not only idealises certain bodies and their functionality, but also how it differentiates, invalidates and subsequently neglects them. Just as the sovereign power can ‘take life or let live’ (Foucault, 1978/1976:136), Foucault’s biopower marked a shift in population bio- governance, preferring ‘to make live and to let die’ (Foucault, 1978/1976:138).

Puar problematises Foucault’s theorising of biopolitics by introducing a third vector in his life-death paradigm; ‘debility’, as an important register of biopolitical governance. For Foucault, the biopolitical is framed as a force primarily concerned with managing and ‘optimising’ life (Foucault, 1978/1976:139). Although Foucault’s conceptual framing does allow for understanding systemic injustices and neglect, he frames biopolitics as fundamentally tied to a life-death axis, to make live or die, and to let live or let die (Foucault, 1978/1976:136). Puar disrupts this with her recognition of debility as a needed “intervention” into biopolitical discourse (Puar, 2017: xviii). For Puar, the dual poles of life and death does not fully capture the spectrum of slow, non-lethal forms of harm across particular marginalised populations (Puar, 2017:139). The biopolitical strategically administers the “slow wearing down” of bodies (Puar, 2017:xiv), preferring to see “disposable” populations as a ‘source of value extraction’ (Puar, 2017: 79), while also never fully rendering their bodies to be fully alive or dead (Puar, 2017: xviii). For Puar, biopolitical governance does not only foster life or neglect bodies, it can also actively administer or permit their injury without killing them, suspending them in a sort of “slow death” (Puar, 2017: xviii). The ends of the biopolitical are not just to “make live” or “let die”, but also to sustain injury and states of incapacity - or “to maim” (Puar, 2017: xviii).

2.2 Protection as Discipline

Public discourse surrounding South Korea’s current massage therapy licensing legislation frequently centres on the visually-impaired’s ‘right to work’ and live, framed almost exclusively on access to work and fairer economic participation conditions, which might otherwise favour their sighted counterparts. The Constitutional Court’s ruling in 2018 reaffirmed this rationale, stating that the law “guarantee[s]” their “right to survival”, and is “virtually the only occupation [the visually impaired] can normally enjoy” (“South Korea’s Constitutional Court defends”, 2018). While framed as a form of corrective socio-economic justice, Foucauldian biopolitical analysis shows how this protective ‘rationality’ does not simply include the visually impaired into an ableist labour market. Arguably, the legislation itself can be viewed as a tool of disciplinary control by the state, reinforcing existing socio-political realities of their reduced capacity to access and secure employment. For Foucault, disciplinary technologies of the anatomo-political increase bodily utility (Foucault, 1978/1976:139), while at the same time diminishes their “political” capacity (Foucault, 1976/1975:138). By giving bodies their subjectivity, Foucault argues how mechanisms of disciplinary control over bodies “reverses the course” of their potential for political resistance, instead replacing it with obedience and “docility” (Foucault, 1976/1975:138). The law, by virtue of its discursive understanding of disabled-ness and the visually-impaired’s economic utility, arguably normalises these conditions, reinforcing and defining their autonomy and value through their capacity to perform economically productive labour in state-recognised domains. The visually impaired thus is rendered by the legal discourse, useful and governable under particular conditions which necessarily values them against ableist norms: productivity of the able-bodied, the capacity and incapacity to be economically valuable and profitable.

While much of the biopolitical discourse is rendered invisible, the implication of the ruling itself constructs and deeply reinforces particular “regimes of truth” that centres their impairment as inherently limiting (Foucault, 1986/1977:131), in need of correction and guidance through state-endorsed protection. In the Foucauldian sense, this rationale disciplines the visually impaired into a biopolitical rationality that normalises their relegated economic and social value to their body-difference, reinforcing their perceived deviation and conditions of being visually impaired from the idealised, ‘optimal’ body of the productive, the sighted, and the non-disabled. Here, inclusion into broader society operates through restriction and privileged spaces, where the able-bodied exclude or permit the exclusion of disabled bodies. The underlying logic of management of non-sighted bodies in the legislation suggests how non-sighted peers must necessarily be protected by way of their distance from or proximity to their more capable sighted peers. Liberation for the non-sighted, (the right to live, the right to work, the right to be independent) under this discursive regime, must then also operate through their containment (state-defined spaces of work exclusive to non-sighted bodies). By defining the non-sighted as only economically legible within the trade of massage therapy against the exclusion of their sighted peers, the legislation inadvertently reproduces and naturalises the facticity of their de-facto exclusion. It obscures wider socially-ingrained structural ableism of the economy and society, which reproduce their economic and social realities. By doing so, the legislation inculcates a subjectivity for the non-sighted body that is tied to their perceived limitations to perform and thrive within a neoliberal labour market, one that is fundamentally hostile and largely unaccommodating for bodied differences.

2.3 Biopolitics of Debility, Disability and the Disavowal of State Responsibility

Perhaps, one of the most insidious aspects of the juridico-legal discourse surrounding the massage licensing law is how it permits the state to perform symbolic inclusion, while disavowing responsibility for the deeper inequities, which the visually- impaired face because of their non-sightedness or bodied-difference. Puar’s concept of debility is particularly illuminating here and has critical utility. Puar’s biopolitics of disability shows how the state is complicit in reproducing debility and its invisibility.

For Puar, how a disabled body is made legible by the state is fundamentally tied to its relation to the neoliberal prerogative to ‘maim’ and manage those injuries (Puar, 2017:139). Disability is a discursive regime which sustains the biopolitical management of who is recognised for their debility and who is not (Puar, 2017:xv-xvi). In Puar’s analysis, she is deeply concerned of how neoliberal economies and states make invisible forms of debility (Puar, 2017:xvi), which result from the under-recognition of certain disabled bodies or certain conditions of their disabled-ness. A critical reading of this legislation would support this, particularly in the way that it both addresses and does not address the few or lack of employment options available for the visually impaired. The law simultaneously admits to their lack of employment alternatives, while also giving them only one trade in the form of accommodationist, special privilege in the competitive labour market, guaranteeing their monopoly for one profession. This seems almost counter-intuitive, since policies which address systemic issues must surely enlarge and address systemic harm. Using a Puarian perspective, the rationale and its protectionist approach seems to suggest a deliberate obfuscating of state responsibility over their economic value in the form of benevolent inclusion into the economic life of the able-bodied. In a similar policy design, the 1995 Korea Special Education Promotion Act aimed to give special considerations for students with disabilities, requiring higher education institutions to adopt special admissions processes for individuals with disabilities, including accommodationist admissions criteria and eliminating the need for students with disabilities to pass college entrance tests (Kim, 2015:968). The focus here is to increase enrolment of disabled students in higher education, a crucial determinant for access to employment opportunities and future economic security and independence. Higher education admissions rate for students with disabilities rapidly rose, yet retention rates and academic failure seemed to also follow these students (Kim, 2015:968). Studies found systemic issues relating to their unpreparedness, such as lack of educational support and guidance, and curriculum designs at special schools, having not been adequate for their future preparation for college (Kim, 2015:968-969). In much the same way that the massage licensing law operates, these policies both position the state as a benefactor, while also completely ignoring how these policies aimed at economic inclusion do not address how the valuation of their lives in economic-neoliberal terms and the regimes of able-body-ness is fundamentally incompatible with their different-bodied realities. Just as it claims a “futurity” for disabled bodies in able-bodied norms (Puar, 2017:15), it also masks how their marked body-difference continue to reproduce outcomes in other ways, which only reinforce their marginalisation, while also creating conditions that attribute their marginalisation as a matter of state benevolence.

Perhaps most insidiously are the ways in which the policies by design are destined to fail. The outcomes they generate produce more conditions that need more bureaucratic policy and more state-intervention. In Korea, the visually-impaired are more likely to have poorer mental health, be unemployed, and have poorer health outcomes (Cho et al., 2015; Korea Employment Agency for Persons with Disabilities, 2022; Kim, Koo, & Han, 2021). The disabled subject in Foucauldian terms is successfully brought under biopolitical management, their subjectivity increasingly incorporated into state apparatuses (Foucault, 1978/1976:193): their disabled-ness becomes subjects of inquiry for fields of the medical, legal, judicial, economic and even education pedagogy. Yet, Puar’s reading of this suggests that these forms of biopolitical control and discipline are not necessarily to ‘optimise’ their bodies to adjust to norms, but fundamentally exploitative, keeping them in a state of invisible, unrecognised debility as the biopolitics of disability continue to obscure systemic harms. The systems of power which co-constitute these realities becomes “shrouded” (Puar, 2017:xvi). In the case of higher education or the pursuit thereof, even the discourse surrounding disability research focus on addressing issues like retention, career counselling, psychological distress. They individualise the disabled subjects and proffer solutions which only embed the invisibility of their debility by the broader regimes of neoliberal, meritocratic norms and institutional austerity. For example, in a Korean study which showed how mental health and stress was largely over- represented by blind or visually impaired students offered recommendations such as psychological counselling and college mentoring programs (Kim, Kang, & Kim, 2007:471). Just as their debility is unearthed, the paper then proceeds to discuss career counselling that is specific to the severity of the disability to alleviate their anxieties about the future (Kim, Kang, & Kim, 2007:471).1 These regimes of truth presented in research itself normalise demands for the disabled subject to conform to able-bodied paradigms, and in some sense, sustain their debility in forms that are individualised to biopolitical metrics such as economic productivity, self-sufficiency, and psycho-social resilience.

The rationalisation of these kinds of policies reinforces the neoliberal tendency to detach the individual and their economic, material realities from any collective social responsibility. This echoes Puar’s argument which demonstrates how certain marginalised groups are expected to be exemplars in order to assume a ‘privileged’ position within their non-normative biopolitical category. The productive, exceptional, and ‘empowered’ subject (Puar, 2017:xvii). She writes, “[discourses of] plurality absorb “difference” into regimes of visibility that then reorganise sites of marginalisation into subjects of privilege, indeed privileged disabled subjects” (Puar, 2017:xv). In addition to this, despite the fact that it is essentially illegal for sighted people to practice, there is an estimate of least 100,000 unlicensed masseurs currently practicing, more than 10 times the number of licensed blind masseurs (Lewis, 2021). A New York Times article even reports how the government had assigned “hundreds of sighted masseurs to cater to the visiting delegates” during both the Seoul Olympics and the 2002 World Cup soccer tournaments when it was held in South Korea (Choe, 2008). This starkly conflicts with the rationale of the decision and shows the hypocrisy of the state, which positions itself as a benefactor for the vulnerable. As Puar suggests, accommodationist solutions rarely evoke “disability imaginaries” beyond the systems of power which make invisible their debility (Puar, 2017:xvi). The biopolitical lens, therefore, shows how not only does the law’s well-concealed rationality reveal undercurrents of institutional and state inflicted harm, but also how the evasion of responsibility itself becomes an inevitable consequence. The effacement of debility as a biopolitical condition then produces conditions where responsibility for their marginalisation comes to be found at the site of their bodies. Debility then becomes a private, invisible matter for the disabled, a problem to be assisted and cared for by the state.

3.0 Conclusion

When the South Korean Constitutional Court abrogated Article 82 of the Medical Services Act, it dealt a massive psychological toll on the visually impaired community, particularly those who were already earning their living in this profession. Three blind protesters took their own lives and the South Korean judiciary quickly called for a reinstatement of the law, which they have kept to this day (“South Korea court says”, 2008). Perhaps, most curious about the tragic events that followed is the way in which discourse, particularly from the Masseuse Association and the Constitutional Court, emphasised their right to work and live as a fundamental rationale for their decision. This paper shows how protectionist accommodationist disability laws can function as both a disciplinary technique and a biopolitical strategy for deflection by the state. Using Puar’s biopolitics of debility and disability, this essay has argued how protectionist legislation does not just fail to liberate the subjects it purports to care for, rather that it is one of such instruments of biopower, which actively contribute to the continued reproduction of their marginalisation. Its rationality reflects how neoliberal governance can mobilise, diffusely, regimes of truth that actively maintain existing social realities, while managing and sustaining debility not as by-products of neoliberal governance, but as ‘ends unto themselves’ (Puar, 2017: 81).

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