‘The body for family’: Biopolitics of Living donor liver transplantation in South Korea

Abstract

Liver transplantations from living donors (Living Donor Liver Transplantations or LDLT) are more prevalent in South Korea than any other country in the world. The high proportion of living liver donors in this area has been usually attributed to low rate of cadaveric donations resulting from religious beliefs, and endemic diseases. Drawing on field work on LDLT in South Korea, however, I attempt to show that the high rate of living donors cannot be explained away by local religion and specific medical conditions. I argue that liver transplantation as a socio-technological practice has been shaped by a biopolitical enterprise, which naturalizes both recipients’ demand for transplantable organs and donors’ willingness to give their organs to their loved family member. I elucidate that the biopolitics around ‘the body for family’ has been underpinned by knowledge politics such as production of ignorance (Proctor, 2008), local institutional context and intrafamilial politics, which both contributed to making donors’ suffering socially invisible. Revealing LDLT’s biopolitical implications in South Korea, I propose that we need to pay attention to ethical challenges raised by the transplantation technologies and their practices.