The rhetoric of the bingeeating body: An ethics of mourning in post-Sewol South Korea

Abstract

In this short essay, I critically examine the ‘eat-ins’ protest by South Korean right-wing populists who derided the hunger strikes of the bereaved family after the Sewol ferry incident in April 2014, in which 300 high school teenagers, teachers and crew drowned. This binge-eating spree in public caused an intense controversy about the ethics of mourning for tragedies that critics believe should be empathized among the community members. Engaging in the epideictic function of the protest, an ethics of mourning and liberal tolerance, I argue, drawing from Kenneth Burke’s idea of human motives, that human’s pain cannot be reduced simply to the sheer realm of animality.