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Class and ethnicity in the global market for organs: the case of Korean cinema.

Garden R, Yoo Murphree HJ

Center for Bioethics and Humanities, SUNY Upstate Medical Center, 725 Irving Ave. #406, Syracuse, NY 13210, USA. gardenr@upstate.edu

While organ transplantation has been established in the medical imagination since the 1960s, this technology is currently undergoing a popular re-imagination in the era of global capitalism. As transplantation procedures have become routine in medical centers in non-Western and developing nations and as organ sales and transplant tourism become increasingly common, organs that function as a material resource increasingly derive from subaltern bodies. This essay explores this development as represented in Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook's 2002 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, focusing on the ethnic and class characteristics of the global market in organs and possible modes of counter-logic to transplant technologies and related ethical discourses.

Published 26 October 2007 in J Med Humanit, 28(4): 213-29.
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