Language, Matter, Movement: Global Health Equity and the Anti-capitalist Poetics of Cathy Park Hong

Contemporary capitalism intra-acts with health on multiple levels and is a key predictor of global health outcomes, including numerous negative health impacts. Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution (2007) illustrates the link between imperialist capitalism and global health inequities, ultimately demonstrating that inequity, politics, and place are relationally intertwined, generated over time, and always simultaneously material and semiotic. Hong uses an invented language to communicate material-semiotic entanglements, telling the story of the Guide, a former South Korean dissident who now works in the Desert, a global resort city. Hong’s Desert is the epitome of a globalized world in which cultures, ethnic groups, and languages are constantly arriving and departing. By telling the Guide’s life story in this new language, Hong artfully communicates how material locations (including bodies) are shaped by language, and conversely, how language is shaped by material locations. Hong critiques the inequities reinforced by global imperialist capitalism while also providing a model of community building grounded in a posthuman affirmative ethics.