ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Eugenics, though historically discredited as a pseudoscience, continues to shape contemporary society through subtle institutional and cultural mechanisms. In South Korea, eugenic ideas were reconfigured through colonialism, industrialization, and nationbuilding, positioning women as moral and reproductive agents of the nation. Despite legal advances, reproductive autonomy remains constrained by eugenic ideals linking value to health, productivity, and conformity, and technologies such as prenatal screening often reflect social pressures to produce “normal” children. This study argues that eugenics today operates through cultural biopolitics that encourages women to internalize responsibility for life itself, as media, education, and medical discourse moralize individual choices and obscure structural inequalities. By examining how power works through care, embodiment, and emotion, the paper reveals how gendered and class-based control persists under neoliberalism and calls for a feminist reimagining of bioethics that centers relational responsibility and the political significance of care.

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