The Compromised First-Person(s) in Emily Jungmin Yoon’s A Cruelty Special to Our Species (2018)

Emily Jungmin Yoon’s 2018 poetry collection A Cruelty Special to Our Species meditates on the limitations and potentials of the first-person “I” in redressing the sexual, racial, and species-level violences entrenched in 20th-century Korean/American history. This paper argues that Yoon’s disarticulation of the “I” from a unitary, coherent subjective position arises from her questioning of the assumptions of humanism. While she proposes, “A theory: special to our species, this grape-bell has to do with speech. / Which separates us from animals,” she also explores how such a theory of the human readily excludes the experiences of Korean women, who achieve historical recognition not through their active voices but rather through their violated bodies. Weaving together the testimonies of former “comfort women” and her own experience as an Asian immigrant woman in America, Yoon compares the women’s bodies to “the limbs of trees,” “gravel,” and “a fresh new spice to taste”—objects marked by their malleability for use or disposability. If these women’s exclusion from humanity is valued on their (in)capacities to objectify, make use of, and speak for, how should one understand Yoon’s use of the “I” throughout this collection? This paper analyzes how the “I” personifies a spectrum of characters historically rejected from the perimeters of humanity, encompassing the surviving “comfort women” as well as azalea flowers and whales. Conceiving them as compromised first-person(s) that never attain full capacities of the human, Yoon negotiates what disability studies scholar Eunjung Kim terms “unbecoming human,” in which “embodying objecthood, surrendering agency, and practicing powerlessness may open up an anti-ableism, antiviolence queer ethics of proximity.” Ultimately, This paper argues that these compromised first-person(s) reformulate the Korean/American women’s struggle for historical redress, carving out new possibilities for human and non-human entities to relate to each other and cultivate modes of care that override the constant imperative to exploit inherent in a theory of the human.