"Since the turn of the millennium South Korea has continued to grapplewith transgressions that shook the nation to its core. Following the serial killings of Korea's raincoat killer, the events that led to the dissolution of the United Progressive Party, the criminal negligence of the owner and also the crew members of the sunken Sewol Ferry, as well as the political scandals of 2016, there has been much public debate about morality, transparency, and the law in South Korea. Yet, despite its prevalence in public discourse, transgression in Korea has not received proper scholarly attention. Transgression in Korea challenges the popular conceptions of transgression as resistance to authority, the collapse of morality, and an attempt at self- empowerment. Examples of transgression from premodern, modern, and contemporary Korea are examined side by side to underscore the possibility of reading transgression in more ways than one. These examples are taken from a devotional screen from medieval Korea, trickster tales from the late Choson period, reports about flesheating humans, newspaper articles about same- sex relationships from colonial Korea, and films about extramarital affairs, wayward youths, and a vengeful vigilante. Bringing together specialists from various disciplines such as history, art history, anthropology, premodern literature, religion, and film studies, the context- sensitive readings of transgression provided in this book suggest that transgression and authority can be seen as forming something other than an antagonistic relationship"--"As the nine chapters that comprise the present volume will try to show, transgression has been feared, disavowed, regulated, interrogated, and enjoyed to fashion and often exploit various sorts of subjectivities in Korea. The boundaries and thresholds that were either erased or respected to make these subjectivities possible, however, were not incommensurate with the instrumental aims of the established socio-political system as assumed by Han.

Cannibalism is a good example. As demonstrated in one of the chapters of this book, during the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) cannibalism posed a serious conundrum for a state that sought to find stability and order in the Confucian vision of a well-structured, deferential, and hierarchical society. The state knew that it could encourage the populace to cultivate the Confucian virtue of filial piety by taking advantage of the numerous stories of exemplary men and women sacrificing parts of their bodies to feed their ill parents, but it also knew that malicious rumors of humans eating other humans (as medicine and sustenance) had the potential to threaten the stability of the established social order. In the eyes of the state the human body could be consumed if it was sacrifice but not if it was flesh.The state accordingly made serious effort to ensure that the body consumed remained sacrifice"--.