Yoon Won Chang

This project investigates the experiences of grief by Korean suicide loss survivors whose loss is rendered both socially “ungrievable” and hypervisible in the public health crisis. The Korean state has increasingly targeted survivors as the “population at the most risk” of suicide, pathologizing their grief through suicide prevention policies. Despite the survivors’ centrality in prevention efforts, suicide largely remained “ungrievable.” On one hand, the neoliberal biopolitical regime in Korea produces the suicide of the minoritized peoples and assumes the “contagion” of suicidality among them. On the other hand, the disenfranchised nature of suicide grief is made doubly so for members of the LGBTQ community, whose kinship with those who have died by suicide is neither socially nor politically sanctioned. This ethnographic project attends to these paradoxes as conditions that survivors negotiate and refract to grieve for the loss of their loved ones. During the 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul, I will engage with survivors across suicide prevention programs, psychiatric treatments, and grief groups. This project will illuminate how ungrievable deaths are actively produced in Korean society and the meaning of mourning the ungrievable, as a site of potential collective, political resistance and creative restorative action.