The (Geo)Politics of Beauty: Race, Transnationalism, and Neoliberalism in South Korean Beauty Culture.

Abstract

Departing from the current literature on cosmetic surgery, which largely asks why Korean women undergo procedures at the highest rates per capita globally and pathologizes them for doing so, The (Geo)Politics of Beauty: Race, Transnationalism and Neoliberalism in South Korean Beauty Culture maps the discursive formation of plastic surgery by asking how it has become normalized as economically necessary. This dissertation articulates plastic surgery as a form of “body work” shaped by consumer and popular culture, on the one hand, and neoliberal policies and rationalities, on the other. Situated in the epistemological gap between Korean studies and Asian American studies, The (Geo)Politics of Beauty places these literatures in dialectical tension while locating the Korean beauty aesthetics within a genealogy of imperial racial formation. Through an examination of the politics of the everyday that make cosmetic surgery a viable form of self-management along with the concomitant industries productive of, and profiting from, these beauty practices, The (Geo)Politics of Beauty theorizes the concealed relations between seemingly unrelated spheres—popular and consumer culture, medicine, tourism, the military and other governmental institutions. The (Geo)Politics of Beauty juxtaposes close reads of popular cultural forms with lived experiences in the form of consumer practices as well as feminist resistance campaigns against heteropatriarchal beauty standards in general and cosmetic surgery and dieting in particular. Accordingly, this dissertation analyzes a variety of popular cultural forms including Korean serial dramas and films, independent documentaries, on-line video clips and advertisements and mainstream television shows related to plastic surgery. In addition, The (Geo)Politics of Beauty utilizes a wide range of discursive materials such as public advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles and brochures as well as archival materials and in-depth interviews. This range of texts and interdisciplinary methodologies—archival research, discursive analysis and ethnographic interviews—form an interdisciplinary project that offers a transnational feminist perspective on Asian/American and more specifically, Korean/American women’s identities and experiences of embodiment.