ABSTRACT

In November 2017, a 24-year-old North Korean soldier fled across the demilitarizedzone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. Chased and shot five times by North Korean soldiers, he received critical gunshot wounds. His defection attracted particular media attention on a global scale due to its spectacular components that fed the media frenzy. His suspenseful defection process through the heavily armed inter-Korean border, recorded by surveillance cameras, was later televised to general audiences through national and international news outlets (Berlinger 2017). In addition to broadcasting the defection process, the news media exhibited the soldier as another form of spectacle during his surgery and recovery. During the press briefing after the major surgery that saved the soldier’s life, a South Korean surgeon publicly announced that there had been many parasitic worms inside the soldier’s body, also stating that this was “shocking” and had made the laborious surgery even more difficult. He offered these details alongside a magnified image of the worms that had been projected onto the screen behind the podium where he stood. While the relatively poor hygiene and nutrition of North Koreans caused by the decades-long national famine had already been known, the images of the parasites inside the soldier’s abdomen shocked global audiences, especially South Koreans, who were intensively exposed to the images and the term “parasites” over the next few days.