Kinship Killings, Taesal and Biologized State Violence During the Korean Civil War

ABSTRACT This article explores the underdeveloped linkages between the South Korean government’s mass killings of “leftist” opponents during the civil war era (1948–1953) and kinship killings. Specifically, I examine the significance of “taesal” – the proxy killing of suspected leftist rebels’ family members. I argue that rather than being merely indiscriminate acts of state terror, these killings conformed to highly ritualistic patterns in which the family unit – in both symbol and reality – was targeted for destruction as an extension of rightist political consolidation. An investigation of this phenomenon, I argue, provides us with a window into seeing the ways in which the political ideology was biologized in the form of gendered and exterminatory violence directed at kindship relations.