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Genres: Feminist Body Horror in Translation
In an imagined near-future where ageism has turned into unbridled gerontophobia, shopping for youth among elderly rich Koreans has become tomorrow’s contactless, next-day-delivery recreational sport.
One of three anti-ageing procedures available, it involves returning to one’s desired age via hormone transplants from a donor within the target age group. It’s a not-so free market of hormone ‘buyers’ and ‘sellers’ where everyone has something to lose. Money and power decide who matters in society, and at what cost. Other possible side effects include infection and death.
But these are kept in the proverbial fine print, from the sellers especially, because who doesn’t love a good pay day? And besides, what’s the point of living if you can’t be rich AND young forever?
From one grandmother whose return to her twenties sees her disowned by her disapproving daughter, to sellers renouncing their youth to provide for their struggling families; and from pro-ageing resistance groups to abhorrent policy-makers willing to lower the selling age of consent in the name of profit, HORMONE SWAP exposes and augurs the societal rifts driving and sown by the cults of beauty and youth.
HORMONE SWAP is a provocative novel with a hopeful ending reminding us to focus less on rights and wrongs and more on who gets left behind.
Genres: Feminist Body Horror in Translation
In an imagined near-future where ageism has turned into unbridled gerontophobia, shopping for youth among elderly rich Koreans has become tomorrow’s contactless, next-day-delivery recreational sport.
One of three anti-ageing procedures available, it involves returning to one’s desired age via hormone transplants from a donor within the target age group. It’s a not-so free market of hormone ‘buyers’ and ‘sellers’ where everyone has something to lose. Money and power decide who matters in society, and at what cost. Other possible side effects include infection and death.
But these are kept in the proverbial fine print, from the sellers especially, because who doesn’t love a good pay day? And besides, what’s the point of living if you can’t be rich AND young forever?
From one grandmother whose return to her twenties sees her disowned by her disapproving daughter, to sellers renouncing their youth to provide for their struggling families; and from pro-ageing resistance groups to abhorrent policy-makers willing to lower the selling age of consent in the name of profit, HORMONE SWAP exposes and augurs the societal rifts driving and sown by the cults of beauty and youth.
HORMONE SWAP is a provocative novel with a hopeful ending reminding us to focus less on rights and wrongs and more on who gets left behind.