THE (GEO)POLITICS OF BEAUTY: RACE, TRANSNATIONALISM,
AND NEOLIBERALISM IN SOUTH KOREAN BEAUTY CULTURE
by
Sharon Heijin Lee

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillmentof the requirements for the degree ofDoctor of Philosophy(American Culture)in The University of Michigan
2012

Doctoral Committee:
Associate Professor Nadine C. Naber, Co-Chair
Associate Professor Maria S. See, Co-Chair
Associate Professor Vicente M. Diaz
Associate Professor Henry H. Em, New York University
Associate Professor Mimi Thi Nguyen, University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign

© Sharon Heijin Lee 2012

To Oma and Ahpa who prayed every night.
To Dean who worked by my side each of those nights.
And to Banyan who kept me company all day long.

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been buoyed by the profound love and support of many along thisjourney. First and foremost, I must thank Nadine Naber who has guided me fromday one of graduate school. Thank you for seeing me through my quals, prospectus,
and fieldwork in addition to reading countless drafts of the dissertation as well as
personal statements and applications. More importantly, though, thank you formodeling for me the kind of generous scholar activist I someday hope to be. Thankyou, Sarita See, for being my other rock during this process. Your ability to know, attimes, my project better than I knew it myself never ceased to amaze me. Thank you
for patiently reading through draft after draft of the dissertation. You’ve taught methat academic writing is a craft, one that can be enhanced with artistic and creative
ways of seeing and thinking.
Thank you to my dissertation committee: Mimi Nguyen, your “gettingness”
of my project so early in my graduate school career gave me the courage to believe inwhat I wanted to do. And I never would have found Transnational Feminist Cultural
studies without you. Henry Em, thank you for making this Asian American studies
scholar into a Korean studies scholar. Your attention and patience have led me
where I am today. Vince Diaz, you have been such an important force in mine andiii

Dean’s lives. More than a committee member, we consider you and your family ourfamily.
In addition to my committee, I have been blessed with so many otherintellectual mentors. Thank you Miriam Ticktin for providing me with such aninvaluable theoretical foundation. Thank you Jun Yoo, Nancy Abelmann, andSeungsook Moon for mentoring me during the Korean Studies Dissertation
Workshop—my dissertation is better for those three days. I have also been blessed
to receive mentorship and friendship from Jodi Kim, Dylan Rodriguez, Setsu
Shigematsu, Mariam Lam, and Andy Smith while writing the dissertation in Southern
California—thank you for the constant encouragement, all the yummy dinners, andthe much needed drinks.
Through the generosity of the Korea Foundation and the Fulbright-Hays
Program, I was able to spend a year doing fieldwork in Seoul, South Korea. Duringthat time, I depended on the generosity of Korean scholars in ways that I will never
be able to repay: Thank you Keunsik Jung for your guidance while I was in residence
at Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies. Thank you Eun Shil Kim for taking me
on as one of your unofficial students, and Jae Kyung Lee, thank you for allowing me
to be a part of the Korean Women’s Institute (KWI) at Ewha. Thank you (again) Jun
Yoo, for introducing me to your family at KWI and asking them to make me a partof it. In particular, thank you to Hye Gyong Park for taking me under your wing andshowing me (and continuing to show me) the kind of intellectual, political andpersonal generosity that should define feminism as a daily practice. Lastly, thank youivSeungyun Lee for the hours upon hours you spent helping me improve my Korean
language skills and more importantly, for treating me like a younger sister. Seoul wasa much warmer place because you were there.
Of course, one needs not only mentors but also friends and the ones I madeduring my time at University of Michigan continue to sustain me even now when I
am far from the Midwest. Many thanks and much Panini to the Groovetheory
cohort. Brian Chung and Matt Stiffler in particular, thanks for being my homeboys
and for all the BAG love. First there was ERC, then the Dudu Crew and then
BLWG—there will never be another. Isa Quintana, I am so glad our friendship had
the chance to grow in LA; I never would have made it through these last months
without you writing by my side. Afia Ofori-Mensa and Urmila Venkatesh, you ladies
make my life brighter and the best thing is that I know this is only the beginning of
our friendships. Lloyd Grieger, my CT, thank you for all the 3 encouragement, belly
laughs, FOOD, and spontaneous outbreaks into song. Special thanks goes out to
Monica Kim for walking a year ahead of me and taking special care to share with mewhat you’ve learned. And a most heartfelt thank you to Eunil Cho for being themost conscientious research assistant a graduate student could ask for.
And for my friends who knew and loved me pre-dissertation, my deepest
gratitude for our undying friendships. Nicole Gardiner, I couldn’t have made it
through without your patient ear. Julie Remala, you have been and always will be mylife sponsor. Haeyon Song, I am blessed to have had you along with me for the rideof life since birth. To my church family: Jane Kim, Alice Kim, Ted Kim, Janet Kim,v

John Kim and Abe Martinez, when we’re together it’s a ready made party where
everyone there is a family member you want to spend a Saturday night with. Thankyou for all the love… and for watching Banyan. To all of you, thank you forsupporting me since before getting a PhD was even in my realm of possibilities andfor especially loving me when I thought I just couldn’t do it.
Words do not do justice for the gratitude I wish to express to my loved ones.
I am so blessed to have not one but two amazingly loving families. Mom Saranillio,
there are so many things I wish to thank you for but most importantly, thank you formaking Dean the man he is today. Candace Fujikane, Shelley Takasato, Ai Saranillio,
and Drew Saranillio, I went from being an only child to having three sisters and abrother! Dad Saranillio, thank you for always reminding Dean and I just how blessed
we are and for being a constant source of love. John Ohpa Lee, people aren’t usually
lucky enough to have their big brother be their best friend, too—there is nothing we
can’t do together.
Last but not least, my parents. Oma and Ahpa, you have always believed inme. From making food when we were too stressed to cook to helping me translate
Korean documents, I know that I can always depend on your love. People can’t picktheir parents and I am blessed that God chose you for me. Thank you.
And Dean, my partner in life, love and work. None of this would be possible
without you. You have spent nights working with me, days talking over ideas withme, and still other nights watching t.v. with me when I just couldn’t write any more,viall the while reading and caring for this dissertation as if it were your own. Thankyou for it all, from the bottom of my heart.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

iii

ABSTRACTx

INTRODUCTION

1

I. Towards a Transnational Asian/American Studies Project

12

II. Literature Review and Theoretical Frameworks

16

III. Methodology

34

IV. Chapter Summaries

38

CHAPTER ONE. Lessons from “Around the World with Oprah”:
Neoliberalism, Race, and the Geopolitics of Beauty

46

I. Neoliberalism and the Rise of Oprah

50

II. Neoliberal Feminism and “Around the World with Oprah”

57

III. Conclusion

74

CHAPTER TWO. Consuming Commodities:
Body Work, Gender, and Modernity in South Korean Film

76

I. Hallyu and the Rise of Korean Film

87

II. Unraveling Han in Kim Ki-duk’s Address Unknown and Time93

III. The Horrified Body (Genre) in Bong Man-dae’s Cinderella

113

viii

IV. Conclusion

125

CHAPTER THREE. Entertaining Beauty:
Hallyu, Cosmetic Surgery and South Korea’s Burgeoning
Medical Tourism Industry

127

I. The Rise of the Korean Drama

133

II. Globalizing the K-Drama

137

III. K-Dramas as Technologies of Subjectivity

145

IV. Medical Tourism in South Korea

160

V. Hallyu and the (Nostalgic) Korean Dream

178

VI. Conclusion

187

CHAPTER FOUR. “Love Your Body”:
Lookism, Feminist Organizing, andDangerous Corporations

189

I.

195

Korean Womenlink and Feminism in South Korea

II. “Knifestyle, not Lifestyle.”

203

III. “Today, your looks are your resume.”

212

IV. “Just a little more, a little bit more.”

222

V. “Like an intimate friend, whispering in your ear…”

229

VI. “In modern society, knifestyle is lifestyle.”

234

VII. Conclusion

240

EPILOGUE

243

BIBLIOGRAPHY

248

ix

ABSTRACTTHE (GEO)POLITICS OF BEAUTY: RACE, TRANSNATIONALISM,
AND NEOLIBERALISM IN SOUTH KOREAN BEAUTY CULTURE
by
Sharon Heijin Lee

Chairs: Nadine C. Naber and Maria S. See

Departing from the current literature on cosmetic surgery, which largely asks
why Korean women undergo procedures at the highest rates per capita globally andpathologizes them for doing so, The (Geo)Politics of Beauty: Race, Transnationalism andNeoliberalism in South Korean Beauty Culture maps the discursive formation of plastic
surgery by asking how it has become normalized as economically necessary. Thisdissertation 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 theother. Situated in the epistemological gap between Korean studies and Asian
American studies, The (Geo)Politics of Beauty places these literatures in dialecticaltension while locating the Korean beauty aesthetics within a genealogy of imperial
racial formation. Through an examination of the politics of the everyday that makex

cosmetic surgery a viable form of self-management along with the concomitantindustries productive of, and profiting from, these beauty practices, The (Geo)Politics ofBeauty theorizes the concealed relations between seemingly unrelated spheres—
popular and consumer culture, medicine, tourism, the military and othergovernmental institutions.
The (Geo)Politics of Beauty juxtaposes close reads of popular cultural forms withlived experiences in the form of consumer practices as well as feminist resistancecampaigns 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 toplastic surgery. In addition, The (Geo)Politics of Beauty utilizes a wide range of discursivematerials such as public advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles andbrochures as well as archival materials and in-depth interviews. This range of texts
and interdisciplinary methodologies—archival research, discursive analysis andethnographic 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.

xi

INTRODUCTION
In 2006, the South Korean film 200 Pounds Beauty (미녀는괴로워 2006) garnered over 6.23 million admissions, making it a sleeper hit andSouth Korea’s most successful comedy to date.1 Criticized in some circles, on the
one hand, as pro-plastic surgery and hailed by others as a satirical indictment of South
Korea’s “booming surgery culture,” 200 Pounds Beauty chronicles Hanna’s journeyfrom obese back-up singer to sleek and sexy headliner.2 Saving up money from gigs
as South Korea’s most famous pop star’s “ghost singer” and as a sex hotline operator,
Hanna undergoes major surgery and reemerges with an ideal face and body according
to dominant 21st Century South Korean beauty standards. As a result, her outward
appearance is finally considered as beautiful as her voice. Her popularity eventuallysurpasses even the woman whose voice she had secretly supplied, yet the attempt tokeep her former identity (and looks) a secret proves too much a burden for the purehearted Hanna who eventually confesses her secret at a major concert to tens of
thousands of fans. Albeit shocked at first, masses of fans accept Hanna for

1 Nigel D’Sa, “200 Pounds Beauty Weighs in at Box Office,” HanCinema: The Korean Movie and Drama
Database, February 2, 2007, accessed December 1, 2010, http://www.hancinema.net/200-poundsbeauty-weighs-in-at-the-box-office-8630.html.
2
Kim Yong-hwa, No Hye-yeong and Suzuki Yumiko. 200 Pounds Beauty, 미녀는 기로워. DVD(Kim Yong-hwa, 2006: 120 min).

1

her honesty, thus catapulting her even further into stardom and providing a tidy
ending to the film.3
While 200 Pounds Beauty fits neatly into the romantic comedy genre repletewith a heroine who must overcome obstacles in order to find not only herself but
true love, it is also exemplary of the myriad popular cultural productions that bothspeak to the pervasiveness and normalization of cosmetic surgery in contemporary
South Korean society.4 These narratives, while not uniform, render visible theneoliberal logics driving cosmetic surgery consumption as well as mounting social
anxieties about its unprecedented and unregulated consumption. For example,
although Hanna is far more talented and hardworking than the pop star for whom
she sings, she is unable to fully realize her potential until she has undergone her
physical transformation to meet heterosexual gendered norms. After investing in her
self vis-à-vis surgery, however, her previous industriousness and dedication coupledwith her new appearance allow her to finally be recognized for the gifts she possessed
all along. Yet, 200 Pounds Beauty also teaches us a moral lesson about cosmetic
surgery consumption. That is, it is not until Hanna is honest with her fans (and3

All Korean words and names have been romanized throughout this dissertation using the McCuneReischauer system with the exception of words directly quoted from previously published texts or
widely known proper names. I also retain the spelling of Korean names as they appear in English
language publications. I follow the Korean naming practice of surname then given name when the
person referenced is Korean and the Western convention of given name followed by surname whenreferencing Korean Americans.
4
Throughout this dissertation I use the terms “cosmetic surgery” and “plastic surgery”
interchangeably. I lean more on the term “cosmetic surgery” when I am discussing the particular
context of South Korea (in chapter four for example), because in my estimation, it is a more accuratetranslation of the Korean terms, miyong sŏnghyŏng (미용 성형), which connotes reconstructive surgery
for beauty purposes.

2friends) about her past that she finds true success and happiness—one’s characterand integrity must also match one’s appearance.
Around the same time that cosmetic surgery began to take prominence within
South Korean popular culture, attesting to its ubiquity, U.S. media outlets also began
reporting on South Korean cosmetic surgery consumption. In November of 1993,
for instance, The Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled, “Cosmetic Surgery Goes
Hand in Glove With the New Korea.”5 The subheading read: “What Would
Confucius Say About the Westernization of Eye, Nose and Breast?” The article
opens in Myŏngdong, one of the Seoul’s bustling shopping and tourism districts,
describing it as a hub for finding “Western-style accessories” including Calvin Klein
clothing, Gucci and Chanel handbags and Western-styled “eyes, noses and breasts.”
With the same fervor with which they seek out the aforementioned fashion
accessories, the article asserts, “Korea’s young and affluent women (and some men)”seek “to ‘go Anglo’ with Caucasoid features.” The article’s shocking revelation
presumes that South Korean affluence through a so-called “New Korea” is signaled
by a bizarre South Korean consumption of all things “west” to such an extent that
not only is Korean culture replaceable via Western-styled fashion, but Korean
phenotypes are also necessarily replaced through a new kind of commodity thatmarks Korea’s entry into modernity.

5

Steve Glain, “Cosmetic Surgery Goes Hand in Glove With the New Korea,” The Wall Street Journal,
November 23, 1993.

3

In the 1990s to the 2000s, U.S. media coverage regarding South Korean plastic
surgery consumption such as the above The Wall Street Journal article was innumerable.
From The Oprah Winfrey Show (the subject of chapter one) to MTV, a particular
discursive formation concerned themselves with South Korean women’s desire to“go Anglo” through plastic surgery and attain “Caucasoid features.” While The WallStreet Journal article is unique in its blatant use of outdated ethnological terminology,
most of these representations presuppose a biologically essentialized appearance forboth Koreans and whites and assert that Koreans are trying to achieve, throughcosmetic surgery, white “looks.” Moreover, as the article above illustrates by likening
cosmetic surgery procedures to the purchase of handbags or brand name clothing,these discourses typically point to South Korean women’s cosmetic surgery
consumption as an example of their excessive, if not bizarre, consumer practices.
And, just as the article harkens to Confucius, asking “What Would Confucius Say
About the Westernization of Eye, Nose and Breast?,” these essentialized notions
posit a traditional Korea that is at odds with the trends, practices and spending habitsof “New Korea.” U.S. obsessions with Korean cosmetic surgery, as the only avenue
through which to contend with South Korea’s newfound affluence (and influence),
comes at a time when U.S. economic global dominance appears most threatened,
which perhaps says more about an anxious western gaze that desires to see itself inplaces where its hegemony is on the wane.
The seeds of this dissertation were planted by, what has been to my Korean
American sensibilities, a glaring contradiction. As a transnational Korean American
4

growing up in Southern California near Los Angeles, home to the largest populationof Koreans outside of Seoul, cosmetic surgery was not only normalized but also
unproblematic for both first and second generation Koreans within my Korean
American community and my extended family in South Korea. Often a marker ofhigh school or college graduation and usually in preparation for sahoe saenghwal (사회생활) or professional life, including finding suitable marriage prospects, cosmetic
surgery and the “double eyelid” surgery (as it is colloquially referred) in particular,
often signified the beginning of a woman’s life outside the familial home. Like
Hanna whose singing career depends on her outer appearance, friends and familyaround me would justify such bodily alterations as necessary for their professional
success if not personal happiness. The discourse of race, so prevalent in U.S.
depictions of South Korean women’s choices, was altogether absent in the personal
narratives I was privy to in these contexts.
Departing from the current literature on cosmetic surgery, which largely asks
why Korean women undergo procedures at the highest rates per capita globally andpathologizes them for doing so, my dissertation 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 economicallynecessary. In other words, I examine the competing discourses that shape a regimeof truth that posits cosmetic surgery as a viable mode of economic investment.
South Korean women largely explain their cosmetic surgery consumption ineconomic and aspirational terms, just as Hanna does throughout 200 Pounds Beauty.
5

As such, I articulate plastic surgery as a form of “body work” shaped by consumer
and popular culture, on the one hand, and neoliberal policies and rationalities, on theother. 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, I theorize the concealed
relations between seemingly unrelated and often uninterrogated spheres—popularand consumer culture, medicine, tourism, the military and other governmental
institutions. While dominant U.S. discourses focus on the racialization of theindividual, my dissertation asserts that the desire to undergo plastic surgery can belocated at the intersection of these global industries and state institutions.
In so doing, I argue that ideas about beauty, and women’s subsequent choices
in regards to it, are inherently geopolitical. I understand geopolitics as, pertransnational feminist cultural studies scholar Inderpal Grewal’s summation, not only“a matter of state politics and claims of territories but also as a mode of regulation inwhich discourses of territoriality, space, and nationalism produce forms ofsubjectivity.”6 That is to say, more than mere consumption, everyday practices ofbeauty are embedded within deep histories of (neo)colonialism and produced bytransnational and local trajectories of global capital and competing discourses therein.
I argue that mapping U.S. notions of race onto the South Korean context elides thegeopolitical specificities that shape women’s quotidian and corporeal choices bycentering the U.S. nation state and further reinforcing the First World/Third World
6

Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005) 17.

6hierarchies that inform U.S. empire. As such, my work contributes to a larger
political and intellectual feminist project that seeks to build transnational alliances that
do not privilege U.S. feminisms or posit a “global feminism” but rather, excavate
linkages between women in various locations by paying careful attention to local
differences structured in complex unity with transnational capital.
Accordingly, chapter one examines global media vis-à-vis The Oprah Winfrey
Show and parses out how Oprah’s geopolitical positioning as a U.S. woman of color
necessarily affects her interpretation of Korean women’s choices—as evidenced by
the labored criticism this show received from South Korean viewers, presumably
leading her to cut the segment from subsequent airings of the episode. This chapter
illuminates the ways in which such popular culture representations enact discursive
violence through a centering of U.S. (white) women that constructs them as rational
agents in opposition to irrational South Korean women. By juxtaposing my analysisof her global media empire, and this segment in particular, with independent
documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Lee’s good for her, this chapter offers not only asense of how these differing media forms operate but argues that ultimately, theycollude with the aims of neoliberal feminism, which shares the same neoliberal ethics
that undergird the cosmetic surgery industry.
While Asian American studies scholarship on plastic surgery focuses on thesalience of race in the self-identity fashioning of South Korean women, South
Korean scholarship sees cosmetic surgery as a symbol of the excesses of latecapitalism. Because scholars are often limited to their national language, the7intersections of these interventions are never fully interrogated. Situated in the
epistemological gap between Korean studies and Asian American studies, my second
chapter triangulates these fields with Korean beauty aesthetics while locating themwithin a genealogy of imperial racial formation.7 Indeed, plastic surgery in Korea canbe traced to the 1920s during the Japanese colonial period when Eugenics andEthnology informed elite Japanese and Korean choices to mimic white or more
specifically, Euro-American features.8 Cosmetic surgery was available to the masses
after the Korean War, when American doctors alleviated Koreans of the “sleepy look”
of the “Oriental eye” as a Cold War humanitarian effort. Koreans’ negotiations withcolonialism and occupation by both Japan and the United States has influenced
Korean people’s conceptions of beauty exemplifying what Nadia Kim calls “imperial
racial formation” or “the link between the state and dominant representations” that“has forged the superiority and normativity of White America and, in relation theinferiority and Otherness of Korea and its people.”9 Using imperial racial formation
as a theoretical framework, then, chapter two complicates the ideology of imperialism
in the contemporary Korean aesthetic without reducing South Korean cosmetic
surgery consumption to an analysis of race devoid of U.S. and Japanese (neo)colonial
practices. Using Kim Ki-duk’s films Address Unknown and Time as well as Bong Man7

The “triangulation” of Korean studies, Asian American studies and cultural studies is informed by
the spatial and conceptual framework theorized by Native Pacific cultural studies scholars thatmaintains that these points are always moving and in flux.
Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,” TheContemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 315 – 341.
8

Lee, Young-ah, 한국 근대초기 미용성형수술의 풍경, (paper presented at Seoul National University’s
Women’s Studies Institute, Seoul, South Korea, Spring 2010).
9

Nadia Kim, Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA, (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 2008), 56.

8

dae’s Cinderella, this chapter argues that processes of (neo)colonialism haveconstructed for South Koreans an “American Dream”—aspirational desires for thelife promised by American neocolonialism and capitalism. As such, under the
auspices of militarized capitalism, both cosmetic surgery and sex work have emerged
as methods of “body work” through which Korean women attempt to secure theseaspirations.
Since its (neo)colonial origins, however, cosmetic surgery in South Korea hastaken on new meanings that while possessing its refractory imprint, has growndistinct from its (neo)colonial origins. South Korea’s neoliberal era has ushered in
new standards for feminine self-empowerment that are measured on a scale ofcompetitiveness on the labor and marriage market, displacing traditional emphases onmotherhood as the definitive marker of femininity. Since South Korea’s 1997 IMF
Crisis, rates of cosmetic surgery have risen to the highest per capita globally withrecipients citing fierce competition for jobs as their major reason for undergoingprocedures.
At the same time, also owing the economic downturn caused by the 1997
Crisis, the South Korean government has turned to its popular culture and more
recently, medical tourism industries for export growth. Hallyu or the “Korean Wave”(as South Korean popular culture is known) grossed $71.4 million in 2005, illustrating
its global popularity while South Korea expects 100,000 medical tourists in 2012.10

10

Doobo Shim, “Waxing the Korean Wave,” ARI Working Paper, No. 158, June 2011,www.nus.ari.edu.sg/pub/wps.htm, 27.

9Such developments have solidified the transnational connectivities through which
South Korean ideas about beauty and self-management circulate abroad and mostprevalently, to other parts of Asia. Chapter three illustrates the mutually constitutive
nature of Hallyu and the medical tourism industry, arguing that Hallyu and Korean
dramas more specifically, not only regulate social anxieties about plastic surgery but
also act as “technologies of subjectivity” that proliferate neoliberal mandates thatchampion the consumer market and cosmetic surgery in particular. I contend thatthese cultural productions construct a fantasy space for viewers that, depending on
their position and location within geopolitical formations, enacts either nostalgic or
aspirational “Korean Dreams.” The medical tourism industry plays on such dreams
posing cosmetic surgery, and traveling to South Korea to undergo it, as a rational
economic investment in part because of how it is affectively tied to Hallyu’s narrativeand representational strategies. By showing how both Hallyu and South Korean
medical tourism are formidable players within transnational economies, this project
shifts debates about U.S. economic and cultural hegemony. Although global beauty
standards and consumption practices are largely thought to be at the mercy of U.S.
global hegemony, my project mines the ways in which cultural and economic flows
indeed move multidirectionally.
While this dissertation begins with The Oprah Winfrey Show in order tounderstand how Korean women’s choices are framed internationally through a U.S.
Bae Ji-sook, “[KoreaToday] Cosmetic Surgery Emerges as Export Product,” The Korea Times (Korea
Today, January 27, 2010),
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/01/117_59782.html.

10lens, it is bookended by an examination of a localized South Korean context. As
discussed above, U.S. discourses such as The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Wall Street
Journal not only overdetermine race but subsequently present a myopic picture ofcosmetic surgery that often pathologizes the patient for their choices. Chapter four
examines a South Korean feminist non-profit organization’s, Yŏsŏng Minuhoe (alsoknown as Korean Womenlink), “Love Your Body” campaign as an example of“counter-conduct” that attempts to disrupt the normalizing force of cosmetic surgery
consumption in South Korea.11 By focusing their campaign on the perhaps
particularly South Korean concern of “lookism,” Womenlink centers the specificgeopolitical concerns of contemporary South Korean women. In particular, I argue
that their interrogation of the cosmetic surgery industry’s predatory marketingstrategies and legal action against them (in addition to health-oriented educational
outreach, public forums, and rallies), refocuses debates on cosmetic surgery byshifting the gaze from individual women to the entities that enact and profit fromsuch predatory strategies. In showing how various groups of women are constituted
differently by geopolitically situated sets of discourses, my project illuminates how
geopolitics operates in women’s everyday lives. As such, this chapter examines
feminist organizing in South Korea, highlighting their privileging of the everyday as a
viable site for feminist practices.
Taken together, these four chapters seek to understand how beauty is
mediated through variously structured fields of power specific to the geopolitical
11

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the College de France), (New York: Palgrave
Macmillon, 2007), 333-362.

11

context. Because culture is both engendered by and engenders the economic andpolitical, this dissertation makes the larger argument that culture—in the forms ofcultural production as well as cultural practices—is a critical site for the study of the
body and consumption. Consumption itself can be understood as a cultural practice,
and accordingly, this dissertation locates the ways in which neoliberal
governmentalities operate through and are performed within culture itself.
In the following pages, I first provide an explication of my project’s
theorization of transnational Asian/American studies. Next, I review the existing
literature and theoretical frameworks on the body and neoliberalism, consumption
and modernity while locating my work’s contributions to these fields. I then provide
a description of my methodological approaches and finally, I end with a detailed
outline of each chapter.

TOWARDS A TRANSNATIONAL ASIAN/AMERICAN STUDIES PROJECT
Between 2008 and 2009, I conducted several interviews with second
generation Korean American women in their 20s and 30s in the Los Angeles area.
These women had undergone some form of cosmetic surgery and most typically the
double eyelid procedure. If U.S. discourses assert that Korean/American women
want to “go Anglo” and I hypothesized that this assumption was incorrect or at thevery least inadequate, my fieldwork sought to locate more nuanced reasons for
Korean American cosmetic surgery consumption. More specifically, my questionsattempted to parse how Korean American women understand (if at all) the12relationship between cosmetic surgery, culture, nationalism and transnationalism. My
interviewees’ responses varied. Some women felt pressured by older women in theirfamilies such as their mothers or aunties while others simply wanted to enhance theirability to wear eye make-up. Still others asserted that it was normal for Koreans in
Korea and hence, also normal for Korean Americans gesturing towards surgery as aform of diasporic performance.
Because my project is conceived transnationally as a two-sited project (LosAngeles and Seoul), I spent the following year doing fieldwork in Seoul, South Korea
as a Fulbright-Hays and Korea Foundation fellow. In Seoul, I set out to understandthe networks through which ideas and practices of beauty travel to the Korean
American context and shape the lives of the Korean American women I had
interviewed. While there, my theorization of transnationalism and consequently, myproject changed. Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, for instance, argue formodes of inquiry that do not merely recognize “the multiple meanings of Asianness
in Asian and Asian American studies and the historical conditions that give rise tothem.”12 Instead, they call for a newly emergent field of inquiry “situated around andbetween those disciplinary formations, that takes as its focus precisely the differencesamong those meanings as a way of exposing the ideologies that affiliate particularkinds of value (political, institutional, cultural, historical) to epistemological objects

12

Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, “Introduction: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora,” inOrientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora, ed. Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2001), 5.

13

and practices.”13 Once in Seoul, Chuh and Shimakawa’s formulation resonated withmy findings. Since the U.S. military’s popularization and proliferation of racialized
cosmetic surgery in Korea after the Korean War, the cosmetic surgery industry (andits procedures) has taken on not only new meanings but also new and lucrative
connections to other industries, creating connectivities to other populations inaddition to Korean Americans.
Accordingly, my dissertation attempts to provide an examination of the
Korean context “situated around and between” Asian and Asian American studies.
Rather than viewing South Korea simply as a point of context for Korean American
experiences, my project focuses on South Korea as a salient nexus of global capitaland transnational culture that has been shaped by U.S. imperialism but is notdetermined by it. Whereas my original project sought to uncover the similarities andnetworks connecting Korean and Korean American women, my dissertation instead
illuminates the ways in which gender, capital and culture operate in and throughSouth Korean discourses, global industries, and feminist practices. In so doing, I see
my dissertation as a mode of Asian American studies inquiry that is not intellectuallyand geographically bound to the U.S. but asks instead how Asian American studies
itself might be transformed or informed by engaging with Korean feminist
scholarship and its attendant concerns. Through a transnational framework, then, my
project makes the larger argument that Korea is a crucial intellectual and politicalnode for Asian American studies given that it is a site of U.S. imperialism and

13

Ibid.

14

Japanese colonialism as well as a formidable player within contemporary formationsof global capital and politics.
As such, The (Geo)Politics of Beauty provides an invaluable foundation for mybook manuscript, which will return to the Asian American context in order todevelop a theorization of Korean diasporic beauty culture in conjunction with thespecificities of South Korea laid out here. As Chuh and Shimakawa explain,“transnationalism exposes the apparatuses through which [postcolonial] ideologies
continue to be deployed and reveals how these contemporary deployments areshaped by available technologies.”14 To be sure, my dissertation is a critical first stepin theorizing the transnational apparatuses and technologies that deploy anddisseminate the ideological realities, to which my original interviews alluded, shaping
Asian/American women’s everyday lives.
In addition to the interviews I collected in 2008 and 2009, my bookmanuscript will delve deeper into Transnational and Diasporic studies by analyzing
further interviews with Asian American cosmetic surgery recipients, providing close
readings of cultural texts, and through an analysis of the trajectories of capital linking
South Korea and the U.S. vis-à-vis beauty industries. According to Cold War scholar
Jodi Kim, Asian American cultural productions can be understood as “Cold War
compositions” that “trace, uncover, and interrogate U.S. Cold War imperialism.”15 In
recent years, Asian/American plastic surgery consumption has been the subject of

14

Ibid.
Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War, (Minneapolis, Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 12.
15

15

multiple Asian American documentaries, performance art pieces/shows, magazines,
and blogs. My book project will examine these Cold War compositions in order to
excavate not only the ways in which Korean beauty culture travels to and through the
Korean diaspora but how it is understood by Asian Americans within the imperial
legacy of Japan and the United States. By coupling my existing research on the
Korean context with more in-depth theorization of the Asian American one, mybook will provide a comparative and relational analysis of the lived and imagined
experiences of Asian/American embodiment in different diasporic registers.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS
Drawing from the fields of Transnational Feminist cultural studies, Koreanstudies, Economic Globalization and the Body, and Asian American cultural studies,
my theoretical framework brings together feminist critiques of modernity, approaches
to neoliberalism and the body and research on beauty and consumption to formulate
a transnational feminist practice. In the following section, I map the theoreticalconcepts underlying my argument as well as the literatures I draw upon.

Geopolitical Biopower
Because male subjectivity has taken on a particular representational salience
within South Korean histories, feminist scholars have sought to counter this byshowing the specifically gendered effects of modernity on female subjectivity. Thesescholars emphasize modernity as a lived experience and seek to show how South
16

Korean women have navigated it as such. While these scholars’ own understandingsof modernity are differently inflected, each of these scholars show that modernity
cannot be understood as monolithic but rather as a local and gendered phenomenon.
For instance, Cho Haejoang argues that South Korea’s “aborted and colonial
modernity” created two major shifts in Korean womanhood through which Korean
women went from identifying themselves primarily as mothers to identifying
themselves primarily as wives and now in the current era of consumer culture, sexyindividuals (Cho 2002). On the other hand, Seungsook Moon’s concept of“militarized modernity” shows how these shifts were, in fact, impelled and facilitatedby state discipline, which encouraged the “housewifization” of Korean women(Moon 2005). Lastly, Nancy Abelmann has shown that the melodrama of South
Korean women’s personal narratives—the “melodrama of mobility”—both reflect
and constitute South Korea’s “compressed modernity” or rapid modernization(Abelmann 2003).
Transnational feminist scholars have also made significant contributions tocritiques of modernity by questioning teleological assumptions that modernity isnecessarily progressive or emancipatory (Abu-Lughod 1998, Deeb 2006). Thesescholars build upon the insights of Foucault whose work illuminates how the modern
state, its institutions and the family normalize and discipline through the productionof discourses about the self and sexuality. These scholars not only illuminate theproductive nature of modernity but also complicate binaristic understandings that
posit modernity against tradition and East against West, instead highlighting the17fluidity of national boundaries especially in the colonial context. Rather than being
separate, Eastern and Western cultures have been constituted by each other such that
one would not exist without the other. As such, purely Eastern cultural practices, forexample, cannot be said to exist since cultural practices have developed in the context
of the other. By examining these processes of entanglement, we can examine how
seemingly static cultures are actually entwined through processes of hybridization.
Building upon the literatures above, I understand the entangled concept ofmodernity through the notion of “geopolitical biopower.” According to Michel
Foucault, biopower is essential to the ways in which modern governments govern
their populations (Foucault 1990). In this formulation, power is organized around
two poles, which constitute the regulatory controls or biopolitics of the population:
control of the body and control of the population. In this view, the state isconcerned with the daily lives of individuals because their lives are politically usefuland thus, biopower is essential to the maintenance of capitalism, not only as a formof control but also as a means of optimizing life. Biopower thus justifies
arrangements of power and hierarchies, making natural uneven distributions of power
and resources.
I pair the concept of “biopower” with geopolitics in order to yield a locationspecific understanding of power and how the local interacts seamlessly with theglobal. As transnational feminist scholars have stressed, geopolitics are not simply
international conflicts between nation-states but rather, are technologies of powerthat both produce and manage territorial space, as well as subjects of those territories.
18

According to Inderpal Grewal, geopolitical biopower has specific relationships toneoliberalism because of neoliberalism’s global reach in the last 30 – 40 years (Grewal2005). Accordingly, neoliberalism’s emphasis on market logics has engenderedlocation specific concerns for variously gendered and racialized populations. Indeed,
the body is a crucial site for understanding geopolitical biopower in contemporary
South Korean society since as feminist scholar Kim Eun Shil relates, “Along with theend of the Cold War regime and the active integration of the Korean society into theglobal neoliberal order, bodies of consumer subjects that embodied the individuation
created by the market began to be constructed by demonstrating the value ofdifferences and diversity.”16 In the context of neoliberalism, then, South Korean
consumer culture has taken up the body as a new site for commodification using therhetorics of self-empowerment and personal style. I thus understand beauty culture
as a form of geopolitical biopower that engenders its own gendered codes of conductthat are at once particular to the local context even while they travel throughtransnational connectivities.

Consumption and the Body
Korean studies scholars have addressed consumption not only as aconsequence of capitalist modernity but also as a cultural and nationalistic practice.
Laurel Kendall, for instance, illuminates how South Korea’s modern history isreflected in the changes to the wedding ritual over the past one hundred years and16

Kim Eun Shil, “The Politics of the Body in Contemporary Korea,” Korea Journal 49, no. 3 (Fall2009): 9.

19

how specifically, consumption has come to play a significant role within wedding rites
with the emergence of South Korea’s consumer culture (Kendall 2002). As Laura
Nelson shows, cultural rituals and consumption practices are linked to the state since“consumer nationalism,” or nationalism based on bettering the collective economy,
describes the link between South Korea’s economy and national ethos (Nelson 2000).
South Korean nationalism is based on ideas of the future given Korea’s tumultuous
past and as such, South Korean women have been pushed to either be frugal or tospend (depending on the economy) on behalf of their country. Significantly, thisframework fits nicely with the scholarship on modernity since pushing housewives tobe consuming subjects was part and parcel to the ways in which the Korean state has
disciplined housewives as “modern” wives and mothers.
Still other scholars have intervened to expose the ways in which these efforts
to constitute Korean women as consuming subjects have had significant effects on
Korean women’s bodies. According to So-Hee Lee, Korean housewives were swept
into consumerist postmodernity by the “Missy” phenomenon, which emerged as anadvertising ploy of a major Korean department store (Lee 2002). The “Missy”
embodies the image of a married woman who looks like a young, single woman,
usually works and engages in sexual encounters freely. Young-ja Lee stresses that thisimage is in part accomplished through “body making” or the conflation of selfidentity through gender identity vis-à-vis body management i.e. consumer fashion,dieting and plastic surgery (Lee 2000). As Taeyon Kim shows, however, although
South Korean women’s “body making” may seem like a new phenomenon, South
20

Korean women’s manipulation of their bodies can be seen as new forms of NeoConfucian “body techniques” finding expression in the context of global
consumerism (Kim 2003).
Although this scholarship addresses modernity and consumption, researchthat places these concepts within a transnational context and interrogates how
practices such as “body making” extend beyond national borders is virtually nonexistent. My work examines how two of South Korea’s global industries—Hallyu andmedical tourism—shape (as well as problematize) consumer practices and ideas aboutmodernity for both Koreans domestically as well as Asians residing outside of South
Korea. Moreover, although this scholarship theorizes cosmetic surgery as atechnology of the self and contextualizes it within social structures like NeoConfucianism, my work parses out the ways in which these practices have been
shaped by South Korea’s (neo)colonial encounters with the U.S. and Japan.
While Korean studies scholars address consumption as a consequence ofcapitalist modernity within the South Korean context, Asian American cultural
studies scholars such as Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu are increasingly
understanding consumption practices as “technologies of the self” or a “set ofdynamic practices through which subject positions are inhabited by individuals withinfields of power and knowledge production.”17 Finding synergy with thisunderstanding of consumption, scholars such as Jigna Desai and Nhi T. Lieu have

17

Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, “Introduction,” in Asian American Encounters: Popular
Culture in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 25.

21

shown how diasporic acts of consumption in the South Asian and Vietnamese
communities respectively, constitute diasporic subjectivities (Desai 2005, Lieu 2007).
While scholars such as Desai and Lieu illuminate how consumption
constitutes diasporic identities through the transnational circulation of homeland
popular culture, other scholars have focused on consumption as a means ofconstituting American identities. Lisa Park, for example, contends that second
generation Asian Americans use consumption as a ritualized and performative meansof proving their Americanness (Park 2005). Similarly, Shirley Lim shows how Asian
American women have historically engaged with various cultural forms including
beauty culture through ethnic beauty pageants, fashion and women’s magazines tocultivate a sense of cultural citizenship or belonging both amongst themselves andwithin American culture (Lim 2006).
When it comes to plastic surgery consumption and that of cosmetic eyelid
surgery in particular, however, Asian American scholars (in the humanities andcultural studies, more specifically) have been less concerned with consumption inprocesses of identity formation and more concerned with whether or not such acts ofconsumption are agentive or oppressive. In scholarship that disavows Asian
American women who elect cosmetic surgery, race is assumed to correlate withphysicality and both are assumed to relate to ethnicity. In other words, women who
elect such procedures are assumed to “want to look white” and as such, assumed todisavow their Asianness (Palumbo-Liu 1999, Kaw 1991). While these scholars
overlook individual agency, they pay close attention to the Cold War origins of22

racialized plastic surgery in Asian American communities. On the other hand, other
scholars argue that such critiques do not acknowledge the discursively constructednature of racialized traits and instead, assume them as natural thus reinscribing them
(Yamamoto 1999, Zane 1998). In this view, plastic surgery consumption can be seen
as one way of negotiating the material effects of such discourses on Asian Americanbodies and although these works acknowledge individual agency, they also tend todecontextualize the double eyelid surgery from its Cold War history.
To date, Taeyon Kim has provided the most three-dimensional treatment of
Korean cosmetic eyelid surgery that takes the discussion out of structure/agency
debates. In her dissertation, Kim historicizes cosmetic eyelid surgery and shows how
seemingly race-neutral medical discourses are implicated in the normalization of
racialized plastic surgery (Kim 2005). She also includes a short chapter on Korean
American consumption and argues that Korean American women elect the procedurein order to enhance or solidify their diasporic Korean identities.
Although Asian American studies scholarship has examined consumption
practices and beauty culture as processes of identity formation, this scholarship rarely
links the two. When they have, as in the case of Kim, this scholarship continues tofocus on a singular racialized procedure rather than the cosmetic surgery industry as awhole and neglects to interrogate the transnational industries and neoliberalimperatives undergirding women’s choices. In other words, Asian American
scholarship has not, as of yet, taken seriously beauty culture as a site of consumer
culture through which Asian American identities are shaped vis-à-vis transnational
23

networks in complex relation to U.S. nationalism. Furthermore, while Asian
American studies scholarship has tackled the issue of racialized beauty standards, it
has mostly done so within structure/agency debates that limit conversations to aneither/or framework. While this dissertation does not address Asian American
cosmetic surgery consumption as its primary source material, it brings Asian
American studies literature and insights to bear on the Korean context in order toyield a transnationally informed and diasporically wrought analyses.
In order to do so, I draw upon sociologist Nadia Kim’s concept of “imperial
racial formation.” Kim describes “imperial racial formation” as a process of
racialization that occurs “across borders and through multiple and related lines ofinequality.”18 Kim uses the term to describe the process through which South
Koreans have been inculcated into American racial ideologies vis-à-vis militaryoccupation, mass media, and complementary ideas in South Korea and channeledthrough Japan. Kim’s formulation highlights the fact that U.S. imperialism in Asia
since World War II has been a key source for racializing Asians and interpellatingthem into American ideologies. While my own use of “imperial racial formation”
finds synergy with Kim’s, I modify it to address consumptive practices in order tocomplicate understandings of race as they pertain to beauty ideals. In other words,
while U.S. discourses on cosmetic surgery have focused on race, I reframe the issue
through the lens of U.S. imperialism in South Korea, which allows me to more

18

Kim, Imperial Citizens, 3.

24

broadly understand how gendered consumptive practices in South Korea continue tobe constituted by the legacy of U.S. imperialism.
As stated in the section above, neoliberal markets in South Korea havebrought new forms of bodily enhancements, permanent or otherwise, as means ofself-care and management. Thus, I see consumption practices as a primary vehicle
through which neoliberal ethics play out. I agree with Nguyen and Tu’s formulationof consumption practices as technologies of the self. Building on Foucault, they
understand consumption as a set of practices through which individuals inhabit
different subject positions “within fields of power and knowledge production.”
Thus, consumption is more than the accumulation of stuff but the practices throughwhich identities and in this case, appearances, are transformed. I argue that suchconsumptive practices are a form of “body work.” According to sociologist Debra
Gimlin, “body work” is “work on the self. By engaging in body work, women areable to negotiate normative identities by diminishing their personal responsibility fora body that fails to meet cultural mandates.”19 Gimlin’s “body work” is a method forreconciling the separation between “the body” and “the self” and takes place inaerobics classes, weight control organizations, and beauty salons in addition to plastic
surgery clinics. While my use of the term “body work” builds on Gimlin’s, I
significantly depart from her definition because I use the term to suggest both thework that women do to their bodies as well as the labor performed by their bodies.
Thus, the concept of “body work” aptly illustrates the different but gendered ways in
19

Debra Gimlin, Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2002), 6.

25

which imperial racial formation, in the development of capitalized and militarized
modernity, has mobilized South Korean women’s bodies in multiple ways dependingon their social and class locations.

Neoliberalism and the Body
Whereas Korean studies scholars see questions of beauty and consumption asconsequences of South Korea’s rapid modernization and Asian American studies
scholars frame Asian American beauty consumption within the politics of race,
scholars of Economic Globalization and The Body frame these issues within debates
about economic rational actors and embodiment. These scholars are concerned withwhether or not people can make rational choices about their bodies, for instance, andhow to take people’s experiences with embodiment seriously. Perhaps mostcompelling is that these debates nod to the ways in which people are increasingly
considering their bodies as domains of self-entrepreneurship, management and care.
As such, these scholars have asked whether these engagements can be considered
ethical, especially given the politics of neoliberalism on a global scale.
According to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, while commodification of the body is
not specifically a result of globalization, new technologies have generated newmarkets for bodies and body parts (Scheper-Hughes 2003). In other words, althoughtransactions concerning the body have existed for centuries, late capitalism has
opened up the range of transactions possible through a litany of new technologies,
thus creating a world of haves and have-nots in which the body itself has become a26

prized commodity. Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas offer perhaps the most
optimistic view of the relationship between biology, technology and citizenship (Roseand Novas 2004). They argue that in the West, biological citizenship is catalyzing a
specifically active form of citizenship wherein practices of biological choice are taking
place within a “regime of the self” through which people are increasingly seeing
themselves as enterprising individuals, actively shaping their lives through acts ofchoice.
Significantly, these aspects of “biological citizenship” echo the imperatives ofneoliberal governmentality that proffer individuals as responsible for their own selfcultivation and management. As David Harvey, Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo
Garcia note, as economic policy, neoliberalism promotes the freedom of the market
through deregulation and privatization at the expense of collective good by cutting
public expenditure of social services (Harvey 2005, Martinez and Garcia 2007). Yet,as many scholars assert, neoliberalism does not simply shift state functions to theprivate sector but also functions as a mode of governmentality that shifts strategies ofgovernment to private individuals (Brown 2003). The model neoliberal citizen, then,calculates her choices within multiple spheres—economic, political, social—rather
than attempting to alter these spheres.
Neoliberalism has not only had profound effects on individual bodies,
however, but on populations of laboring bodies as well. Third World women havebeen disproportionately and intentionally affected by neoliberal economic policy
since the First World orchestrates—indeed, engineers—the poverty-stricken
27

conditions of their home countries in order to create a pool of laborers that will dothe jobs that no one else will do (Chang 2000, Parrenas 2001, Louie 2001). Nowhereis the debate on the bodily effects of economic globalization more heated, however,than in the realm of sex work. Many Western feminist scholars vie for anunderstanding of sex work as another form of labor and for sex workers to berecognized as agentive laborers who deserve safe and fair working conditions(Chapkis 2003, Doezma 2001, Kempadoo 1998). On the other hand, many Third
World feminists disagree, pointing to the global and geopolitical structures that
unevenly shape women’s choices (Aguilar 2004, Lacsamana 2004, Moon 1997).
As with Asian American studies scholarship, scholarship that addresses plastic
surgery consumption in this field also focuses on agency/structure debates. Kathy
Davis shows that plastic surgery consumers, like others engaged in selling theirbodies, body parts or manipulating their bodies for medical rather than cosmetic
reasons, are motivated by a sense of ownership over their bodies and the desire tolook “normal” (Davis 1995). In her following book, however, Davis notes a culturalshift in discourses on the body and plastic surgery more specifically such that
discourses of “normal” or “abnormal” have shifted to discourses of difference andindividuality. Discourse matters: whereas discourses of ab/normality framed plastic
surgery as a solution for extraordinary circumstances, discourses of equality frame it
as a neutral technology that can apply to everyone since we are all “equally” different(Davis 2003).

28

While scholarship on Economic Globalization and The Body has begun toaddress the effects of neoliberalism, both as economic policy and governmentality, on
the body, much of this scholarship continues to focus on the either/or framework
concerning agency and structure and whether or not people can be rational economic
actors when it comes to their bodies. My project focuses instead on the industries,
institutions and histories that shape women’s beauty and body choices. Rather thanunderstanding cosmetic surgery as either inherently empowering or oppressive, myproject maps the competing discourses and counter-discourses with which women
have to contend. That is to say, I situate Korean women’s agency within thediscursive formations that shape their terms for agentive action. In so doing, I do
not discount the possibilities for agency but attempt to account for the larger
historical, economic, and political forces that set the stage for women’s everyday
choices.
Moreover, debates in the field are uneven in the sense that these rational
economic actors are often assumed as Western and white, thus making much of thisscholarship questionable in non-Western contexts. And, while many scholars ofcolor have shown the disproportionate effects of neoliberalism on Third World
women laborers, this scholarship has not yet adequately addressed the effects ofneoliberalism on middle-class consumption practices in non-Western contexts. My
work thus makes a particular contribution by placing the middle-class cosmetic
surgery consumer in conversation with the presumed lower-class militarized sex

29worker as a means of understanding how militarized and capitalist modernity has
placed distinct but related demands on women’s laboring bodies.
To these ends, I understand neoliberalism as not only a set of economic
policies but also as a mode of governmentality that shifts strategies of government to
private individuals. Scholars such as Wendy Brown have illuminated thatneoliberalism works on an ideological level so that neoliberal subjects areinterpellated as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life and are thus “controlled
through their freedom.”20 Moral autonomy is measured by a capacity for self-care andthe ability to make choices that will benefit the citizen no matter how constrained
those choices are. And since everything is measured as a calculation or purchase,
neoliberal governmentality affects everything from our evaluations of “right andwrong” to life choices, like college education or the decision to undergo plastic
surgery.
Such a proliferation of neoliberal governmentality as common sense requires
ideological and cultural work with social and cultural institutions constituting
neoliberalism as social ethos. I view beauty and culture industries, feminist discourses
and state agencies as a few amongst these sites. In particular, I identify several
cultural forms that work as “technologies of subjectivity” including The Oprah Winfrey
Show and Hallyu, and more specifically, Korean television serials. Anthropologist
Ahiwa Ong suggests that “technologies of subjectivity rely on an array of knowledge
and expert systems to induce self-animation and self-government so that citizens can
20

Wendy Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory & Event 7, no. 1(2003), 7.

30

optimize choices, efficiency, and competitiveness in turbulent market conditions.”21
Indeed, through their affective narrative strategies, these cultural productions codify
neoliberal mandates governing women’s bodies impelling them toward “selfimprovement” vis-à-vis the consumer market. These gendered cultural productions
are powerful precisely because they travel globally, further solidifying thetransnational connectivities that link women where global capital and culturalrepresentation meet.

(Trans)nationalism
While Postcolonial theory has laid out complicated understandings of colonial
relationships, feminist scholars have intervened to show that gender and sexuality
permeate colonialism (albeit contradictorily in different contexts) in ways that often
play out on female bodies. In particular, these scholars have shown the link between
colonialism, capitalism and the exploitation of women’s bodies through state andcultural violences (Davis 2003, Smith 2005, Trask 1999). More recent transnational
feminist scholarship has begun asking how we can understand these varied bodily
experiences in relation to one another. For instance, Ella Shohat’s Talking Visions
pays close attention to the particularities of the gendered and sexed body such that
Talking Visions puts female genital surgery, rape and cosmetic surgery in conversation
with one another without claiming equivalence (Shohat 1994). Furthermore, in

21 Aihwa Ong, neoliberalism as exception: mutations in citizenship and sovereignty, (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006) 6.

31

reclaiming the gendered and sexed body, Talking Visions seeks to avoid converse
pathologies that moralize and essentialize Asianness, Africanness, Nativeness, etc.
Transnational feminist scholars have also shown that gender permeates bothnation and nationalism and is critical to the construction of the boundaries andparameters of both. According to these scholars, women are symbolized within
nationalisms that have very real consequences for whether or not they emerge as
enfranchised citizens or as wards of their communities (Williams 1996, Kandiyoti
1994). More often than not, because nationalisms are predicated on masculinities,
women’s issues and concerns are relegated to the background. Norma Alarcon,
Caren Kaplan and Minoo Moallem offer instead, the space between woman andnation as “the space or zone where we can deconstruct these monoliths and renderthem more historically nuanced and accountable to politics.”22 The investigation
between woman and nation is not a domestically demarcated project, however, but
actually allows us a way of destabilizing the nation such that transnational inquiries
and investigations are made possible. In addition, such a deconstruction of thenation-state opens the door toward refusing “global feminism” that assumes anessential “woman,” and makes possible instead a transnational feminism. According
to Inderpal Grewal such affinities can be traced through “transnational

22

Norma Alarcon, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo Moallem, “Introduction” in Between Woman
and Nation: Nationalism, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, eds. Norma Alarcon, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo
Moallem, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) 12.

32

connectivities” or the “transnational connections [that] produce groups, identities,
nationalisms.”23
While transnational feminist scholars have emphasized transnational
methodologies, which illuminate how certain ideas, goods and bodies travel acrossnational borders, little scholarship exists on how ideas of beauty and neoliberalmandates for self-management travel across national borders. Furthermore, althoughmany scholars have shown the effects of American consumer culture outside of the
U.S., few studies have shown how non-American industries affect non-Westerncommunities. My dissertation fills this lacuna within existing literature byinterrogating how South Korean popular cultural forms globally disseminate a
specifically South Korean capitalist modernity through representational strategies thatfind synergy with its medical tourism industry. At the same time, my dissertation also
pays careful attention to the specificities of a local context and examines how feminist
practices contend with these global and transnational industries. In so doing, I join
the ranks of transnational scholars such as Nadine Naber who examines how womennegotiate transnationally mediated discourses of femininity (Naber 2009).
My own usage of the term “transnational” is informed by Ahiwa Ong’s
theorized articulation of globalization with transnationality. Ong defines
globalization as “new corporate strategies” and in contrast, defines transnationality as“the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space—which has

23

Grewal, Transnational America, 23.

33

been intensified under late capitalism.”24 Moreover, she defines transnationalism as“the cultural specificities of global processes, tracing the multiplicity of the uses andconceptions of ‘culture.’”25 Her formulation emphasizes how transnationalism isfacilitated by global capital and interests, which finds salience to my project’s
examination of the industries and institutions productive of consumer practices andthe transnational proliferation of ideas and governmentalities. By examining
processes of imperial racial formation and the circulation of cultural productions, I
argue that South Korean beauty culture is constituted by and constitutive oftransnational flows of peoples, discourses and goods. In turn, these movements
create networks, interconnectedness and indeed, cultures of interconnectedness—“transnational connectivities.”

METHODOLOGYMy dissertation employs a Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies (TFCS)
methodology. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan propose Transnational Feminist
Cultural Studies as an alternative to liberal versions of feminism that celebrate
multiculturalism as a management of diversity as well as masculinist interpretations ofMarx that erase gender. Instead, Kaplan and Grewal argue for a practice thatincorporates economic, cultural and political concerns through a marrying of
poststructuralism, Marxism, postmodernism, postcolonial theory and transnational

24

4.

25

Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999),
Ibid.

34

feminism. Central to these theories is a transnational frame that centralizes gender as
an analytic category. Whereas cultural studies and postcolonial studies inquiries havebeen nation-specific, TFCS opens the space of inquiry to the global economy in order
to “acknowledge transnational patriarchal links of culture and capital as important
reactionary interests.”26 To this end, Grewal and Kaplan propose “transnational
feminist practices” or “an attention to the linkages and travels of forms ofrepresentation as they intersect with movements of labor and capital in a
multinational world.”27 Their conception of TFCS focuses on drawing linkages,
rather than similarities, univeralisms, or essentialisms, “among diverse, unequal, anduneven relations of historically constituted subjects. […] Linkages suggest networksof economic and social relations that occur within postmodernity vis-à-vis global
capital and its effects.”28 Such linkages are not purely for academic sake, however,since theorizing linkages (rather than similarities) allows for practicing solidarity andcoalitional work.29

26

Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond the
Marxism/Poststructuralism/Feminism Divide,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalism,
Transnational Feminisms, and the State (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) 361.
27
Kaplan and Grewal, “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies,” 357.
28
Kaplan and Grewal, “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies,” 359.
29

While they do not call it TFCS, Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd find synergy with Grewal and Kaplan in The
Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Like Grewal and Kaplan, Lowe and Lloyd argue for a study of culturethat does not see it as separate from the spheres of economy or politics: “We suggest that ‘culture’ obtains a‘political’ force when a cultural formation comes into contradiction with economic or political logics that try to
refunction it for exploitation or domination. Rather than adopting the understanding of culture as one spherein a set of differentiated spheres and practices, we discuss ‘culture’ as a terrain in which politics, culture, and theeconomic form an inseparable dynamic” (1). As such, Lowe and Lloyd argue for the study of cultural
productions as alternative forms that provide a window into people’s analyses of economics, politics and social
relations. In particular, Lowe and Lloyd seek to show critical resistances to neocolonial capitalism andmodernity, not as “postmodern” instances of resistance or contradiction as in the sense of after or even as
returns to premodern tradition but rather, as concurrent contradictions to manifestations of modernity in the
postcolonial period. Like Grewal and Kaplan, Lowe and Lloyd are also invested in drawing linkages or what
they call “lateral connections.” They argue for the importance of “exchanges and collaborations across sites

35

In this vein, my methodology privileges culture as a crucial site forunderstanding gendered economic and ideological processes. As such, my projectexamines cultural productions in order to take stock of the various ways in which
South Koreans articulate, resist, critique and are interpellated by neoliberal mandates
that champion cosmetic surgery as a viable form of self-management. This motley
cluster of cultural productions include Korean films (Kim Ki-duk’s Address Unknown
and Time and Bong Man-dae’s Cinderella), Korean television serials (Before and After
Plastic Surgery Clinic, My Lovely Samsoon and Boys Over Flowers) and Korean Womenlink’s
independently produced satirical educational video, Knifestyle. I do not assert thatthese cultural productions represent the totality of the field but rather, that they
exemplify how neoliberal mandates are proliferated and/or resisted in conjunction
with global capitalist industries. Thus, I identify these as part and parcel to thestructure of knowledge and power governing South Korean, Asian, and Asian
American women’s bodies today. The specific method of discourse analysis allows
me to expose these structures through close readings that locate these discourses
within a larger web of social, historical and political relations of power.
Yet, my primary source material is not limited exclusively to South Korean
cultural production. I put these in conversation with other cultural productions suchas a U.S. mainstream and internationally broadcast television show (The Oprah WinfreyShow) and an independent Korean American documentary film (good for her). By
connecting subjugated practices that cut across the orthodox categories that have organized historical
understanding: the people, the nation, the epoch, the state” (5).

David Lloyd and Lisa Lowe, “Introduction,” in Politics in the Shadow of Capital (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1997), 1 – 32.

36

placing these discourses in relation to U.S. discourses regarding South Korean
women and cosmetic surgery, I reveal the linkages between South Korean and Asian
American women. To be sure, such linkages do not equate one with the other but
instead, illuminates both the intimate ties created by global capital and sharedhistories as well as the geopolitical differences shaping location specific discourses
and thus, women’s daily lives. As outlined above, TFCS has particular political andfeminist valences. Rather than privileging a unitary subject of “revolution,” TFCS
scholars call for an attention to the multiple resistances that speak to the “scatteredhegemonies” of the postmodern era.30 Centering gender and transnationalism withan attention to geopolitical differences allows for transnational alliance building
through “linkages” that enable alliances that are keenly aware of transnational
structures of power. In this sense, my project seeks to allow for solidarities that are
more relevant to the realities of different women’s lives, across national borders.31
In order to fully grapple with the intersections between cultural production
and practices and “movements of labor and capital in a multinational world,” myproject also deploys interdisciplinary strategies. That is to say, I use archival researchand in-depth interviews to reveal how these cultural productions travel in conjunction
with or go against the grain of global capital in the forms of Hallyu and medical
30

Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist
Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
31
Such critical inquiries go beyond “global feminism” that assumes an essential “woman,” andmakes possible “‘imagined communities of women’ with divergent histories and social locations,woven together by the political threads of opposition to forms of domination that are not only
pervasive but also systemic.”
Alarcon, Kaplan and Moallem, “Introduction,” 13.

37

tourism in addition to beauty industries. In so doing, this dissertation engages withthe formations of capital that undergird women’s beauty choices rather thanpresenting a myopic view that pathologizes individual women for their beauty andconsumption choices.

CHAPTER SUMMARIESCHAPTER ONE. Lessons from “Around the World with Oprah:” Neoliberalism,
Race and the Geopolitics of Beauty
In 2004, on an internationally televised episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show,
Oprah likened South Korean women’s plastic surgery consumption to “me [Oprah]having surgery to not look black.” Her take on the topic was clear when she
explained, “I don’t get it.” In recent years, South Korean and Korean American
women appear frequently in the U.S. media for their plastic surgery consumption.
These discourses—concerned with whether or not South Korean and Korean
American women want, in Oprah’s words, “not to look Asian”—are limited to
examinations of individual women’s choices from an American perspective thatengenders either/or analyses: women’s beauty choices are either empowering or
oppressive. This chapter begins with a discussion of the abovementioned Oprah
moment and suggests that Oprah’s framing of plastic surgery in the South Korean
context is contingent on Oprah’s production of neoliberal feminism based on liberal
notions of choice. Moreover, given her global reach these neoliberal feminist
subjects are not produced equally but are discursively constructed along a First
38

World/Third World divide wherein First World women are praised for their abilities
to make rational choices while Third World women are not.
On the other hand, independent documentary film, good for her, takes to thestreets of Seoul in order to understand how South Korean women assert their agency
through cosmetic surgery in order to access social power. By juxtaposing these twovery different media representations, this chapter argues that, despite their differing
depictions of Korean women’s plastic surgery consumption, both representations’continued focus on the individual fails to interrogate the neoliberal rationalities
propelling the plastic surgery industry on a global scale. In so doing, I argue, these
representations uphold neoliberal feminist ethics, which serve to undergird thecosmetic surgery industry.

39

CHAPTER TWO. Consuming Commodities: Body Work, Gender, and Modernity inSouth Korean Film
Starting with Korean comfort women and extending to U.S. military
camptown prostitutes and military brides, the figure of the yangkongju has
simultaneously been both the catalyst for demands for justice as well as the allegoricalfigure of the nation’s shame and domination. In marked contrast, another signifier
has also emerged in recent popular depictions of Korean women—the specter of the
Korean plastic surgery consumer, which has come to signify South Korean
modernization and (excessive) consumption. This chapter places these two figures
within the same analytical frame in order to theorize their shared affinities. That is tosay, while much intellectual work has pointed out the discursive function(s) of the
yanggonju and the ways in which she allegorizes the Korean nation, this chapter
considers both figures of Korean women as distinct iterations of gendered
corporealities or embodiments of Korean history. As discursive conjurings and aslived experiences, these archetypes illuminate how South Korea’s modern history—
under the auspices of modernization and militarization—have demanded different
types of “body work” from gendered bodies depending on their social and classlocations. This chapter uses controversial Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s films,
Address Unknown and Time, and Bong Man-dae’s horror film, Cinderella, as entry points
into thinking about these two types of “body work” as mutually imbricated inprocesses of imperial racial formation. This chapter articulates these two previously
unjuxtaposed figures as instantiations of how capitalism, (neo)colonialism, and40

neoliberalism mobilize gendered bodies towards different ends. Said differently, thischapter argues that these types of body work have emerged within Korea’s modern
history as two distinct interventions in identity.

41

CHAPTER THREE. Entertaining Beauty: Hallyu, Cosmetic Surgery and South
Korea’s Burgeoning Medical Tourism Industry
In the last five years the South Korean government has sought to turn its
booming domestic plastic surgery industry into an international one and since 2007,
the number of medical tourists has quintupled from 20,000 to 100,000. Indeed, in
my recent interview with a representative from Seoul Tourism Organization’sMarketing Division, she conceded that despite this growth, their organization has
focused little on advertising for its cosmetic surgery market. She observed that Hallyu(the Korean Wave) is their advertising given its worldwide popularity. Referring toSouth Korean popular culture forms from music to film to television serials, therepresentative underscored Hallyu actors, storylines and aesthetics’ effectiveness inbringing in overseas patients.
By focusing on popular television serials (Before and After Plastic Surgery Clinic,
My Lovely Samsoon, and Boys Over Flowers), this chapter asserts that South Korean
dramas utilize neoliberal representational strategies that find synergy with medical
tourism’s marketing strategies. In illuminating the mutually constitutive nature of
Hallyu and South Korea’s medical tourism industry, this chapter argues that Hallyu
and Korean dramas more specifically, not only regulate social anxieties about plastic
surgery but also act as transnational “technologies of subjectivity” that proliferate
neoliberal mandates championing the consumer market and cosmetic surgery inparticular. I contend that these cultural productions construct a fantasy space forviewers that, depending on their geopolitical location, enacts either nostalgic or42

aspirational “Korean Dreams.” The medical tourism industry plays on such dreams
posing cosmetic surgery, and traveling to South Korea to undergo it, as a rational
economic investment in part because of how it is affectively tied to Hallyu’s narrativeand representational strategies.

43

CHAPTER FOUR. “Love Your Body:” Lookism, Feminist Organizing, andDangerous Corporations
South Korea’s neoliberal era has ushered in new standards for feminine selfempowerment that are measured on a scale of competitiveness on the labor andmarriage market, displacing traditional emphases on motherhood as the definitivemarker of femininity. Since South Korea’s 1997 IMF Crisis, rates of cosmetic surgery
have risen to the highest per capita globally with recipients citing fierce competition
for jobs as their major reason for undergoing procedures. As a result, South Korean
feminists of the non-profit organization Yŏsŏng Minuhoe, known in English as Korean
Womenlink, have taken to the streets holding signs emblazoned with the words,“Love your body the way it is.” Their “Love Your Body” campaign sought to strikeat the heart of a salient feminist issue in contemporary South Korean society:“lookism” or the economic and social devaluation of women whose features do notconform to a modern beauty aesthetic that is productively shaped by Korean media,
medical industries and histories of imperial racial formation.
This chapter provides a close examination of Womenlink’s “Love Your Body”
campaign, through close reads of their satirical educational video, Knifestyle, archival
documents, newspaper articles and interviews. While Asian American feminists,
scholars and mainstream outlets focus on the salience of race in Asian/American
cosmetic surgery consumption and other U.S. feminists largely focus on patriarchy,
Womenlink’s campaign exemplifies how feminist organizing can, and should, address
the intersections of these organizing logics with capitalism as a driving and many44

times, predatory force. By focusing their campaign on the perhaps particularly South
Korea concern of lookism, Womenlink centers the specific geopolitical concerns ofcontemporary South Korean women. In so doing, the “Love Your Body” campaign
ceases to focus on the individual and her capacity to make rational or moderatechoices and instead interrogates the predatory practices of the beauty industry itself.

45

CHAPTER ONE
LESSONS FROM “AROUND THE WORLD WITH OPRAH”:
NEOLIBERALISM, RACE, AND THE GEOPOLITICS OF BEAUTY
On October 6, 2004, viewers went “Around the World with Oprah” andreceived a rare glimpse inside the lives of thirty year-old women from seventeen
different countries.1 Audiences learned that “21 percent of French women are
overweight compared to a whopping 62 percent of Americans.”2 Kuwaiti women
were touted as having “extravagant lifestyles, complete with mansions and servants.”3
Oprah revealed that, on average, Cuban women have three husbands by the age ofthirty. While these little-known “facts” may be interesting, the show highlighted
them as unique and exotic precisely because of their marked difference from theperceived lifestyles and attitudes of 30 year-old American women. When Oprah
turned her gaze (and that of middle-class American housewives) eastward, shehighlighted Korean women’s penchant for plastic surgery as their defining exotic
characteristic.4

1“The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Around the World with Oprah (Syndicated, October 6, 2004).
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Oprah’s magazine readers may shed light on her television demographic, which seem to be largely
female and middle class. According to <www.Oprah.com>, 13,265,000 people read O, the Oprah
magazine. Of these, ninety percent are women with the median age of 43.1 years and a medianhousehold income of $66,422. The website does not provide demographics according to race orregion.
<www.Oprah.com> (accessed 15 April 2005).
2

46

The show’s South Korea correspondent, and host of National Geographic
Ultimate Explorer, Lisa Ling announced, “30 year-old South Korean women are goingunder the knife in droves, shedding traditional Korean looks for more Westernfeatures. […] In Asian cultures, it’s always been considered more beautiful if you haverounder eyes and more Western features.”5 Obviously dismayed, Oprah tried to
draw a parallel that her viewers might more readily relate to: “So is the idea not tolook Asian? […] I’m looking at those women. They still look Korean. That would
be like me having surgery to not look black […] I don’t get it.”6 Ling attempted toinsert Korean women’s self-image and subjectivity into the dialogue by underscoring
their assertions that motherhood, not beauty, defines Korean femininity. The focusof the segment, however, remained not only on how much and what kinds of plastic
surgery Korean women undergo, but also their motivations for doing so. These
motivations were painted as the products of internalized racism and described asdecidedly self-loathing.7
Oprah’s “trip” to South Korea, as mediated by Ling, is emblematic of U.S.
discourse surrounding South Korean women’s plastic surgery consumption, most of
5

Ibid.
Ibid.
7
To be sure, plastic surgery has reached unparalleled heights in South Korea since the 1980s (whenits economy peaked before the Economic Crisis of 1997), surpassing American consumption. While
reports vary, a Korean weekly magazine reported in 1989 that somewhere between 20 to 30 percent
of all unmarried Korean women in their early twenties have cosmetic surgery performed on theireyes, noses, mouths, or breasts. A more general statistic notes that in 2000, thirteen percent of
Koreans engaged in some form of cosmetic surgery compared to three percent in the US. And, as
stated previously, amongst the various procedures available to patients—everything from thestandard breast enlargement to calf reductions—the double eyelid surgery or ssangkkŏp‘ul procedure,is the most popular bodily alteration.
Dennis Michael Hart, From Tradition to Consumption: The Rise of Materialist Culture in South Korea, (Seoul:
Jimoodang Publishers, 1991) 256.
Elizabeth Pyon, “Plastic Surgery Boom Changing Faces of Korea,” Korea Herald, 4 February 2000, 1.
647

which—from Oprah to the Wall Street Journal—focuses on the double eyelid surgery orssangkkŏp‘ul procedure as it is called in Korea.8 Because of the racialized
connotations of this particular procedure and the fact that it is by far the mostpopular amongst Korean and Korean American women, debates surrounding thessangkkŏp‘ul procedure revolve around questions of agency and choice. Most
typically, these discourses reduce Korean women’s plastic surgery consumption to adesire to “not look Asian,” a “false consciousness” explanation exemplified by
Oprah’s and Ling’s discursive treatment of South Korean women. Much as the veil
has come to symbolize Middle Eastern women’s oppression in both popular andacademic discourses, the ssangkkŏp‘ul procedure has come to signify South Korean(and in many instances, Korean American) women’s acquiescence to not only
patriarchal oppression but racial oppression as well.9 In both cases, U.S. discourses
obfuscate Middle Eastern and South Korean women’s volition while essentializing
and normalizing Euro-American women as liberated feminist subjects.10

8 In 1993, the Asian Wall Street Journal (this same article appeared in the Wall Street Journal the samemonth) featured an article entitled, “Urge to ‘Go Anglo’ Sends Koreans Scurrying to the Cosmetic
Surgeon.” The article notes that the doctor’s patients include “Korea’s young and affluent women(and some men) who want to ‘go Anglo’ with Caucasoid features.”
Steve Glain, “Urge to ‘Go Anglo’ Sends Koreans Scurrying to the Cosmetic Surgeon,” Asian WallStreet Journal, 24 November 1993, 1.
The ssangkkŏp‘ul procedure is the Romanization of the Korean: “쌍꺼풀 수슬.”9
For a brief discussion and overview of the veil in academic writing, see Sondra Hale’s “The Westand Veiling,” <http://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/home/article.asp?parentid=14575>(accessed 09 December 2007).
10
Scholars of gender and Middle Eastern studies have written against teleological narratives regarding
modernity and women’s emancipation. In Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender andSexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, Afsaneh Najmabadi contests understandings of modernity asnecessarily liberatory using Iranian women’s unveiling as a case in point. Najmabadi asserts that
Iranian women’s bodies were disciplined in new ways once they unveiled. Because the veil no longer
contained the sexual energies thought to be inherent in women, it was replaced by an “invisible veil”
or veil of chastity, which “was to be acquired through modern education, as an internal quality of the48

This chapter seeks to go beyond the psychologization of these debates and ofSouth Korean women in particular, in order to ask what such psychologicalmusings—and their attendant discourses on “natural” and “normal” bodies—mightinstead obscure about the very political nature of beauty itself. As Victoria PittsTaylor writes, “the intensity of our focus on the subject” or patient “decenters otheractors: the surgeons, the psychiatrists, the technologies, the media, the ideologies, thestructure of medicine.”11 Using “Around the World with Oprah” as a starting point,then, this chapter examines beauty at the intersection of race, technology, and(geo)politics in order to show that in an era of neoliberalism, plastic surgery itself is aneoliberal rationality that Oprah herself normalizes as such. Like other forms of selfmanagement, self-care, and self-improvement, topics that lie at the core of Oprah’s
shows, plastic surgery as well as racially marked forms of plastic surgery, is often
rationalized as an investment in the self towards a more normal, if not better,
future.12 As this chapter will show, such a framing of plastic surgery is contingent on
Oprah’s production of neoliberal feminist subjects vis-à-vis her espousal of aneoliberal feminism based on liberal notions of choice. Given her global reach, theseself. The body of modern woman was to contain its own unruly sexuality and shy away from its own
public presence” (152). As such, women’s behaviors—embodied and discursive—changed
significantly as a result of their newfound “freedom.”Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Women’s Veil and Unveil” in Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards:
Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press) 2005.
11
Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2007) 184.
12
Throughout the dissertation I choose to use the term “racially marked plastic surgery” rather than
“racialized plastic surgery” since all forms of plastic surgery forms, even those undertaken by white
consumers, are racialized. The term “racially marked” instead nods to the ways in which nonwhitesubjects and their acts are always already marked.

49neoliberal feminist subjects are not produced equally, however, but are discursively
constructed along a First World/Third World divide.

NEOLIBERALISM AND THE RISE OF OPRAHThe Oprah Winfrey Show is not the only global phenomenon to have come outof Chicago. Neoliberal economic theory was popularized in the United States by
Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago School of neoliberalism, who won theNobel Prize in economics in 1976.13 According to David Harvey, Chile was the first
country to undertake the neoliberal experiment. The United States supported a
successful coup d’état against Socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973, allowing
Augusto Pinochet to bring in “the Chicago boys,” a group of Chilean economists
who were trained at the University of Chicago School of neoliberalism (and were
funded by the United States to do so), to restructure the Chile’s socialist economy infavor of the business elite.14 Keeping a watchful eye on the Chilean context, both theUnited States and Britain also turned to neoliberal policies in the early 1980s under
the leadership of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher respectively.15 Globally,
neoliberal policies have spread over the last 30 years under U.S. leadership of theInternational Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Band, albeit unevenly.

13David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 22.
Harvey, A Brief History, 7 – 9.
15
About using Chile as a test case for neoliberal policy Harvey writes, “Not for the first time, a brutal
experiment carried out in the periphery became a model for the formulation of policies in the centre(much as experimentation with the flat tax in Iraq has been proposed under Bremer’s decrees)”(Harvey, A Brief History, 9).
1450

As economic policy, neoliberalism promotes the freedom of the market
through deregulation and privatization at the expense of collective good by cutting
public expenditure of social services.16 Domestically, such policies had dramaticeffects during the Reagan administration and thereafter. New markets opened due tothe deregulation of everything from telecommunications to airlines.
Deindustrialization and capital flight abroad became more and more common whilelabor unions were increasingly under attack. Meanwhile, corporate and top personal
tax rates were cut, opening doors for monopoly consolidation.17 Yet, as manyscholars assert, neoliberalism does not simply shift state functions to the private
sector but also functions as a mode of governmentality that shifts strategies ofgovernment to private individuals. Thus, as Wendy Brown contends, the effects ofneoliberal governmentality are far-reaching from the “soul of the citizen-subject toeducation policy to practices of empire.”18 Neoliberalism works on an ideologicallevel so that neoliberal subjects are interpellated as entrepreneurial actors in every
sphere of life and are thus “controlled through their freedom.”19 Moral autonomy ismeasured by a capacity for self-care and the ability to make choices that will benefit
16

Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia outline five main points of neoliberalism in “Neoliberalism Defined”: 1) Total freedom of movement for capital, goods and services 2) Cutting public
expenditure of social services 3) Deregulation 4) Privatization and 5) Eliminating the concept of“The Public Good” for “Individual Responsibility.” These scholar activists assert that neoliberalism
has amounted to nothing short of neocolonialism abroad.
“Neo-liberalism Defined,” <http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/econ101/neoliberal
Defined.html> (accessed 27 June 2007).
17
Harvey takes issue with assumptions that neoliberalism is a set of economic policies that have
inadvertently classed effects. Harvey asserts that from their onset in the United States and abroad,the neoliberal turn has served to reconsolidate class power.
18
Wendy Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory &Event 7, no. 1 (2003), 3.
19
Brown, “Neo-liberalism,” 7.

51

the citizen no matter how constrained those choices are. The model neoliberal
citizen, then, calculates her choices within multiple spheres—economic, political,
social—rather than attempting to alter these spheres. And since everything ismeasured as a calculation or purchase, neoliberal governmentality affects everythingfrom our evaluations of “right and wrong” to life choices, like college education or
the decision to undergo plastic surgery.
Such a proliferation of neoliberal governmentality as common sense has
required ideological and cultural work, however.20 In seeking to understand how
consent for neoliberalism as a hegemonic discourse was constructed in the 1970s,
Harvey asserts that “we must look […] to the qualities of everyday experience.”21 In
this vein, The Oprah Winfrey Show provides a window into examining how neoliberal
rationalities are proliferated within contemporary U.S. cultural landscape precisely
because of her focus on the everyday. Significantly, Oprah departed from themodern day talk show format established by Phil Donahue in favor of one that tells
real people’s stories. Instead of tackling politics, scandals, and world news—at least
not exclusively—the Oprah show examines “the trivial,” or the “microscopic textureof everyday life.”22 Oprah does not just document everyday life, however, but

20

In “A Short History of Neoliberalism,” Susan George reminds us that neoliberalism is aconstructed set of ideas with which a small group of elites has struggled to capture hegemony.
George contends that once we realize that it is a constructed set of ideas, we can realize that anotherset of ideas can someday replace it.
<http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/econ101/neoliberalism.html> (accessed 27 June2007).
21
Harvey, A Brief History, 40 – 1.
22
Eva Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003) 51.

52

significantly influences it through her everyday reach into the lives of her viewers visà-vis her daily television show and the rest of her multimedia global empire. In otherwords, Oprah’s show is part and parcel of the ways in which civil society alsoengenders neoliberalism, which, as Michel Foucault describes, extends “the rationalityof the market, the schemes of analysis it proposes, and the decision making criteria itsuggests to areas that are not exclusively or primarily economic.”23
As Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal policies took center stage in the United States,
so too did Oprah as what cultural studies scholar Eva Illouz calls “a biographicalicon.”24 Unlike other celebrity success that hinges on beauty and youth, Oprah’snotoriety has been built on her “therapeutic biography.”25 Since her show went
national in 1986, Americans have been privy, not only to her humble beginnings as a
Mississippi schoolgirl but also to her personal revelations about child abuse, poor
self-esteem, and drug use. In sharing these stories, however, Oprah does not focus
on the hardship itself so much as her ability to overcome the psychological obstacles
these hardships posed. Time and again, Oprah has presented herself as “a female
response to Horatio Alger, offering a feminine parody of the masculine myth of selfhelp.”26

My use of Oprah’s first name throughout this chapter (Oprah as opposed to Winfrey) is intentional.
Because she demands to be known globally, not as “Ms. Winfrey” but merely as “Oprah,” I use her
first name to highlight the unforeseen effects of the familiarity she herself cultivates.
23
Michel Foucault, “The Birth of Biopolitics,” in Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity
and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1994) 73 – 80.
24
Illouz, Oprah Winfrey, 30.
25
Illouz, Oprah Winfrey, 34.
26
Illouz, Oprah Winfrey, 33.

53Perhaps more importantly, however, her “therapeutic biography” is ultimately
put in the service of her viewers. Oprah uses herself as an example of women’s
potentiality to achieve and self-manage despite gender, race, class or psychologicaladversity. In so doing, Oprah positions herself as “every woman” although she is
one of the most influential and wealthiest people, not only in the United States but
also in the world. Oprah consistently brings her own personal advisors and trainers
on her show, making their knowledge and thus help available for mass consumption
usually through their mass marketed self-help books or programs. As such, Oprah
fuses self-care with the consumer market by drawing…on the basic therapeutic creed that we are perfectible and that identity canand perhaps ought to be shaped by willful self-management and introspection.
This creed is congruent with a structural feature of the consumer market: boththerapeutic and consumer activities are set into motion by a state of perpetual
dissatisfaction and a Sisyphean desire to fashion and improve one’s own self.
The Oprah Winfrey Show solicits the viewer-consumer within this fine and dual
dynamic of dissatisfaction and self-improvement.27
By sharing her story, Oprah impels her guests and her viewers to share their own
therapeutic narrative and begin their own self-made journey to self-improvement,
which often begins in the consumer market.
These therapeutic imperatives find synergy with the political and economic
ones at the crux of neoliberalism. In particular, we find such rhetoric undergirding
Republican Party values, which privilege discourses of individual solutions to social
problems. In this capacity, The Oprah Winfrey Show can be seen as a “technology of
subjectivity.” Anthropologist Ahiwa Ong suggests that “technologies of subjectivity

27

Illouz, Oprah Winfrey, 164.

54

rely on an array of knowledge and expert systems to induce self-animation and selfgovernment so that citizens can optimize choices, efficiency, and competitiveness inturbulent market conditions.”28 Indeed, by marrying the therapeutic world with theconsumer market and by employing multifarious self-help experts in multiple arenas,
Oprah Winfrey offers her viewers multiple modes of “self-animation and selfgovernment.” Through confession and therapeutic advice from Oprah herself as wellas professionals, through community building amongst audience members and otherguests as well as countless others on her website, the Oprah show simply put, helps
people deal with their lives. In many ways, however, this “help” puts forth a logic
that is in tune with the neoliberal rationalities that have become so commonplace inevery sphere of life since the Reagan administration. Thus, The Oprah Winfrey Show isa powerful global media form that buttresses neoliberalism as social ethos.
Given Oprah’s positionality as an African American woman and that her
audience is largely female, her espousal of neoliberal rationalities is in may instances
specifically gendered. Oprah, the richest woman in entertainment and the only black
female billionaire, is perceived as a beacon of both feminine and African American
success.29 Moreover, Oprah has made it clear that a priority of the show is “toempower women,” to be what narrative studies scholar Corinne Squire calls

28

Aihwa Ong, neoliberalism as exception: mutations in citizenship and sovereignty, (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006) 6.
29“In Pictures: The Richest 20 Women in Entertainment,”<http://www.forbes.com/2007/01/17/richest-women-entertainment-tech-mediacz_lg_richwomen07_0118womenstars_slide_2.html> (accessed 09 December 2007).

55

“televisual feminism.”30 I argue that Oprah’s televisual feminism is a brand ofneoliberal feminism that equates female empowerment with (consumer) choice.
According to transnational feminist cultural studies scholar Inderpal Grewal,
this kind of consumerization of feminism has become widespread:
Empowerment, self-esteem, and self-help through spiritual and new
age movements, exercise and health club attendance, and talk shows
and books on the topic, along with new manifestations ofcosmopolitanisms, became key to dominant feminist practices[by the end of twentieth century].”31
Just as Oprah’s show marries therapeutic discourses with consumer culture throughthe privileging of self-fashioning, so too does Oprah’s show like western feminism
more generally, yoke feminism to consumer culture through a privileging of choice.
As Grewal outlines, in activist circles internationally against domestic violence or infavor of reproductive rights, feminists have largely posed “having choices” as the
opposite of “being oppressed.” This centering of choice as a representation offeminist agency has created a situation in which “feminism was engaged in a struggle
with neoliberalism but also dependent on it for its existence,” since “the concept ofchoice is essential to participation in democracy as well as to consumer culture.”32
As we shall see in the following section, neoliberal feminism, and Oprah’s
espousal of it, is not neutral but rather, serves to discursively construct South Korean
women only in relation to American women, erecting a First World/Third World
30

Corinne Squire, “Empowering Women? The Oprah Winfrey Show” in media studies: A Reader Second
Edition, eds. Paul Marris and Sue Thornham (New York: New York University Press, 2000) 354 –355.
31Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005) 16.
32
Grewal, Transnational America, 28.

56

divide. Moreover, by psychologizing South Korean women, “Around the World with
Oprah” elides the ways in which neoliberal rationalities govern the bodies of bothWestern and non-Western women.

NEOLIBERAL FEMINISM AND “AROUND THE WORLD WITH OPRAH”
Nowhere is the link between consumer culture, feminism and neoliberalism
more evident in “Around the World with Oprah” than in her treatment of American
consumers of plastic surgery. In the following segment, we see the logic of themarket informing Oprah’s interpretation of Americans electing plastic surgery
procedures in Brazil:
WINFREY: Thank you. I hear Brazil is known as the mecca of plastic
surgery. It is, right?
Ms. LING: Huge numbers of operations happen and, in fact, a lot…
WINFREY: That a lot of American women…
Ms. LING: A lot of Americans, because it’s significantly less expensive. I’ve
traveled throughout South America—Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil—and I’malways shocked by how many American women I encounter there because it’sless expensive and you can vacation in Rio while you’re—while you’rerecovering.
WINFREY: Get a bikini wax, wear a thong, and go home.
Ms. LING: Yeah.33
Without a trace of irony, Oprah and Ling, on the heels of the South Korean segment
on plastic surgery, deem Brazil the “mecca of plastic surgery” and note that “Huge

33

The Oprah Winfrey Show, October 6, 2004.

57

numbers of operations happen.” In marked contrast to the South Korean segment,
American (ostensibly white) women are lauded for their economic investment as
Oprah and Ling make note of American women’s cost-effective choice to undergocosmetic surgery and vacation at the same time. As such, Oprah and Ling highlight
American women’s abilities to “optimize choices, efficiency, and competitiveness inturbulent market conditions.”
Not only does this failure highlight American women’s capacity for neoliberal
rationality but it also animates liberal assumptions that Euro-American (read: white)
subjects, guided by their individuality, are able to make choices in ways that nonAmerican subjects cannot. In other words, Americans electing plastic surgery inBrazil are not only choosing to do so for somehow “better” reasons than their
Korean counterparts, but smart enough to do it for cheap, and in a tropical location
at that. Thus, we see what Chandra Mohanty, in her now seminal “Under Western
Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” characterizes as a FirstWorld/Third World divide.34 And the demarcation is clear: Euro-American womenare characterized as “educated, as modern, as having control over their bodies and34

In her newer “Under Western Eyes Revisited,” Mohanty admits that she now prefers the “OneThird/Two-Thirds Worlds” demarcation rather to the more outdated “Western/Third World.”
While the former is a non-essentialist categorization, she asserts that it “misses the history ofcolonization that the terms Western/Third World draw attention to” (227). In order to highlight the
U.S. continued neocolonial relationship to Korea, I have chosen to use these terms throughout thischapter. American media forms and media empires like Oprah’s especially, continue to havediscursively colonial relationships with non-Western nations even if they are, like Korea, Second
World economically.
Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes Revisited,” in Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,
Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) 227.

58

sexualities, and [exercising] the freedom to make their own decisions.”35 The“average third world woman” is a necessary part of such discursive selfrepresentations of Euro-American women, thus seemingly stabilizing Western
feminism even as it continues to be a contested site at home. In marked contrast, the“average third world woman” “leads an essentially truncated life based on her
feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being ‘third world’ (read:
ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimizedetc.).”36
In this case, however, South Korea’s status as an “industrial tiger” complicatesthe construction of South Korean women as “average third world women.”37 After
its political independence from Japan in 1945 and the subsequent Korean War, South
Korea rapidly industrialized in the 1960s and 1970s under the dictatorial regime ofPark Chung-hee. By the 1980s, the fruits of such industrialization were realized by aburgeoning middle class with money to spend and a flourishing consumer culture

35

Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Third
World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991) 56.
36
Ibid.
Leti Volpp makes an almost identical argument, in “Feminism versus Multiculturalism,” contendingthat in contrast to third world women Western women are portrayed as “liberated, and in total
control of their lives. But the assumption that Western women enjoy complete liberation is a
product of discursive self-representation, which contrasts Western women’s enlightenment with thesuffering of the ‘Third World woman.”Leti Volpp, “Feminism versus Multiculturalism,” Columbia Law Review 101, no. 5 (2001), 1198 -99.
37
In his chapter, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’ Aijaz Ahmad
contends that the First World/Third World binary falls apart when one considers that “countries of
the Pacific rim, from South Korea to Singapore, constitute the fastest growing region within global
capitalism. The list could be much longer, but the point is that the binary opposition which Jameson
constructs between a capitalist First World and a presumable pre- or non-capitalist Third World is
empirically ungrounded in any facts.”
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, (London: Verso, 1992) 101.

59

within which to spend it. Thus, South Korea’s rapid modernization created multiple
spaces in which tradition and modernity collide. As a result, South Korea, like Japan,
is often depicted as a place run amuck with technology, which often gets recoded asperverted excess. In other words, South Korea’s technological advancement as well
as Korean middle-class participation in bourgeoisie lifestyles, aptly symbolized bycosmetic surgery consumption, aggravates American anxieties much in the same way
Japan’s status as an economic threat to the U.S.—vis-à-vis their dominance of theautomobile industry—did in the 1980s.38 Rather than the “poor, uneducated,
tradition-bound” Third World woman, then, South Korean women in this instanceare constructed as an “other” defined by the excesses of modern consumption.
Moreover, this discursive representation exists alongside that of Euro-American
women whose consumption is implicitly represented as rationally self-controlled.
We see this dynamic in motion in “Around the World with Oprah.” Although“Around the World with Oprah” departs from the standard format of the Oprah
show, which typically exports American suffering abroad, offering instead a
postmodern pastiche of international women’s experiences for American
consumption, we see the therapeutic narrative at play in Oprah’s treatment of Korean
women.39 Part and parcel of the therapeutic narrative is the identification of a
psychological problem or maladjustment. Clearly here, since the Korean plastic

38

Perhaps the most well-known consequence of American anxieties, animosities and fears towards
Japan’s success within the automobile industry is the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin who was killed in
Detroit, Michigan during an altercation with two ex-employees of Ford who thought he wasJapanese.
39
Illouz, Oprah Winfrey, 167.

60

surgery craze is described as the outcome of Korean women’s desire to look “moreWestern,” Oprah (with the help of Ling) identifies Korean women’s malady asinternalized racism:
Ms. LING: I think there’s a desire—in Asian cultures, it’s always been
considered more beautiful if you have rounder eyes and more Westernfeatures. I mean, if you notice on my eye—I’m Chinese—I have this sort offlap of skin over my eyes. What’s happening in Asia is they’re lifting this skinand making it more deep-set, and it’s happening so frequently in Korea that a
lot of women do it before they even get married. They destroy all the
pictures.
WINFREY: So is the idea not to look Asian? Because you—I’m looking at
those women. They still look Korean.
Ms. LING: They still look Asian.
WINFREY: That would be like me having surgery to not look black.
Ms. LING: Not look black. Right.
WINFREY: You still look black to me, you know.
Ms. LING: I know.
WINFREY: I don’t get it. Yeah.40
In her efforts to put Korean women’s experiences within the US context, Oprahtranslates Korean women’s experiences as equivalent to that of Oprah “having
surgery to not look black,” something that, in the American context, signals
pathology of the worst kind. Significantly, the issue at hand is not cosmetic surgery
itself but the implicit idea that Korean women’s choices are constrained byinternalized racism, making some choices better than others. Thus, (unfettered)40

The Oprah Winfrey Show, October 6, 2004.

61

choice becomes a measuring stick for feminist liberation and Korean women fallshort.
Oprah is able to draw this parallel precisely because she is not white and assuch, her blackness gives her the currency with which to name South Korean
women’s actions and desires as they relate to whiteness. This statement assumes that
biological essentialisms correlate to race and that South Korean women and black
women have a shared relationship to whiteness as women of color. Critical race theorist
Kimberle Crenshaw writes that in the same way that “women of color experience
racism in ways not always the same as those experienced by men of color,” women ofcolor experience “sexism in ways not always parallel to experiences of white
women.”41 Crenshaw thus critiques the idea of “woman” as a unitary, universal
subject. Similarly, I argue here that there is no unitary, universal subject called“woman of color.” While South Korean women and black women are engaged inoverlapping struggles as members of a globalized world, structured and dominated byinstitutionalized white supremacy, translating South Korean women’s experiences
solely through the lens of African American women’s experiences effaces the specifichistorical contingencies and cultural meanings that create South Korean women’scontemporary situation. As such, Oprah’s statement effectively centers American
women and represents South Korean women only in relation to that universal
subject.
41

Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence
Against Women of Color” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, ed.
Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gay Teller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995)
360.

62

Accordingly, Oprah’s show, like other debates on plastic surgery, creates adistinction between non-racialized and racialized plastic surgery forms based onassumptions about “natural” and “normal” body types. In the following segment on
30-year old Brazilian women, this logic regarding racially marked plastic surgery
forms takes a different turn:
WINFREY: This is so cool, seeing how 30-year-olds live around the world.
Our next stop, Brazil. Now if you’re a 30-year-old woman in Brazil, you’re
spending quite a bit of time in a thong at the beach, so having a beautiful bum
is a must. Listen to this: They do more bottom implants there than anywhere
else in the world. Can you imagine?
Ms. LING: They gotta shake it.
WINFREY: They gotta shake it. Here we go. OK. Take a look.42
Rather than the bewilderment and judgment resounding through Oprah’s reactions to
the Korean segment, the assertion that Brazilian women get “bottom implants”
garners a more neutral, if not playful reaction. In fact, Oprah does not uphold
trenchant feminist views that categorize all forms of plastic surgery as genderedbodily mutilations but instead seems to find Brazilian women’s engagements with“bottom implants,” an ostensibly racially marked plastic surgery form, normal since“They gotta shake it.” Unlike Korean women, who Oprah perceives as electing
racially marked plastic surgery “not to look Asian,” the assumption undergirding this42

The Oprah Winfrey Show, October 6, 2004.

63

segment is that Brazilian women, known for their curvaceous backsides, want to look
like themselves.43
According to gender and cultural studies scholar Kathleen Zane, suchassumptions about the way people do and should look actually reify sociallyconstructed hierarchical notions of racialized traits. Speaking specifically toassumptions about the “Asian eye,” Zane contends that “Like the ‘Oriental’-ized
script used for representing Asianness in titles or signs […] the Asian eye (a slashedicon) is a racialized inscription identifying the Asian as Other.”44 That is to say,racialized physical traits from the “Asian eye” to the Brazilian backside, are parts of aWestern representational system that enacts power and domination throughrepresentation and thus, posits the white body as “normal.” These assumptions
obscure the fact that all forms of plastic surgery are both gendered and racialized,even those procedures performed on white women (and men). As Kathy Davis
explains: “White women, with their ostensibly ‘unmarked’ identities, participate in theprivilege and oppressive mentality of Northern European ideals of feminine beauty

43

Technically, Korean women are attempting to look like other Korean women. Somewhere
between 25 and 50 percent of Koreans are born with the epicanthic fold. Moreover, significant
circulation of Korean dramas and pop music around the world has made Korean beauty hegemonic
within Asia and Asian American communities, the subject of chapter three. In many cases, Koreanand Asian American women strive not to emulate whiteness so much as to emulate the looks of
Korean actresses and pop stars.
Sandy Kobrin, “Asian-Americans See Negative Side to Eyelid Surgery,” Chicago Tribune, 25 August
2004, sec. Women’s eNews, 1.
44Kathleen Zane, “Reflections on a Yellow Eye: Asian I(\Eye/)Cons and Cosmetic Surgery” in
Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed. Ellen Shohat (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1998), 167.

64

when they have cosmetic surgery, making it a specifically ethnicized and racializedpractice.”45
The type of intense scrutiny of cosmetic surgery patients of color exemplified
by Oprah and Ling is particular to the United States as a reflection of its racial
anxieties and has given way to “ethnic appropriate” forms of plastic surgery in the
United States. In her book, Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture,
Pitts-Taylor reads an episode of Extreme Makeover, the first in a string of plastic
surgery reality shows, featuring a Filipina woman. The show’s producers and doctors
take great pains to present her makeover and “ethnic cosmetic surgery” in general as“more multicultural, less whitening, and thus more acceptable for people of color.”46
These sentiments seem to match up with Oprah’s lines in the proverbial sand: lesswhitening, more acceptable for people of color.
It would make sense, then, that Asian Americans electing the ssangkkŏp‘ulprocedure would also receive the kind of discursive treatment exemplified by Oprah’s
South Korea segment. Interestingly enough, however, some media reports treat
Asian Americans differently than their diasporic counterparts. The Los Angeles Sentinel
reported in 2002 that Asian American cosmetic surgery consumption had increasedby 300 percent while Latinos experienced a 200 percent increase compared to a 34
percent increase in white patients between 1999 and 2001. The article cites threemain reasons, taken from the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive

45

Kathy Davis, Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery (Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003) 99.
46
Pitts-Taylor, Surgery Junkies, 49.

65

Surgery, for this jump in numbers—a growing middle-class with expendable income,medical advances that reduce scarring for darker-skinned patients and finally, that“the American media has helped awareness that a single standard of beauty no longer
exists in multi-ethnic America.”47 Despite the fact that the article goes onto affirm
that the ssangkkŏp‘ul procedure is the most popular (presumably amongst the Asian
American patients), it asserts that minority patients “seek to enhance rather than shed
their ethnicity.”48
This juxtaposition between Oprah’s treatment of South Korean women and
The Los Angeles Sentinel’s treatment of Asian Americans illustrates what Elizabeth
Haiken calls “The Michael Jackson Factor.” Haiken writes that “Jackson’s haunting
face signals not only that all is not well in never-never land; it suggests that somethinglarger has gone awry in twentieth-century North America.”49 Racially marked plastic
surgeries invoke not only uneasy feelings about the patient’s well being but about thewell being of the nation as a whole. In other words, “the fact that the image ofAmerica [Michael Jackson’s] face reflects is so unflattering accounts for much of our
discomfort.”50 The urge to avoid this “image of America,” helps explain why the
Asian American case is characterized so differently from the South Korean one.
Clearly, then, racially marked plastic surgery conjures up racial anxieties in the
U.S. context and in “Around the World with Oprah,” Oprah maps both U.S. notions
47“Rise in Minority Patients, Other Trends in Facial Plastic Surgery,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 16 May
2002, A13.
48
Ibid.
49
Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997) 177.
50
Haiken, Venus Envy, 182.

66

of race as well as their attendant racial anxieties onto South Korean women. In sodoing, Oprah obscures geopolitical and historical specificities of the Korean context
despite South Korean women’s attempts to insert their own subjectivities into thenarrative. Returning then, to Oprah’s South Korean segment, we see this silencing in
effect when Ling states that “everyone I spoke with agrees the thing that mostdefines a South Korean woman is her role as a mother.”51 Following this statement,
Ling’s interviewee states that taking “care of my children is—I think is the veryhappiest thing in my life.” Another woman declares that, “Korean women are verystrong moms.”52 Oprah, visible with disdain, says, “I don’t get it […] But the
women are really still concerned about their families…” to which Ling replies,“Absolutely.”53 Implicit in Oprah’s statement is that these two issues, South Korean
women engaging in plastic surgery and their self-conception as good mothers, cannot
exist simultaneously. In other words, “excessive” modern consumption does not a
traditional mother make! Thus, not only are South Korean women silenced—andOprah and Ling’s commentary about them given more authority—but Korean
women’s reverence for the traditional role of motherhood is painted as irreconcilable
with South Korea’s (post)modernity. As such, Oprah’s segment not only fails to
address the historical and social forces shaping South Korean women’s subjectivities
but also produces Korean women outside of their own self-conceptions.54

51

The Oprah Winfrey Show, October 6, 2004.
Ibid.
53
Ibid.
54
According to feminist scholar Cho Haejoang, compulsory motherhood remains consistent withcurrent demands on South Korean women to be at once maternal, youthful and sexy as well as
52

67

The colonizing effect of these discourses are powerful precisely because theireffects are not isolated but rather, inform relations between First World and Third
World women as well as relations between various types of women within thelandscape of the United States. Oprah’s assertions that South Korean women want
to “not look Asian” as well as her non-verbal reactions reproduce American
audiences’ opinions not only about South Korean women but also about Korean
American women and perhaps Asian American women as well since Asian ethnic
groups have historically been lumped together within US racial paradigms. Womenof color within American national borders are often framed in similar ways as theirinternational counterparts.55 Asian Americans, particularly marked by dominantAmerican culture as “perpetual foreigners,” are especially susceptible to theinterchangeability between Asians abroad with Asians at home.56
As such, ideas about Asian American women’s foreignness and difference are
fueled by representations like those in Oprah’s South Korea segment. Orientalist
claims about South Korea are ever more complicated, however, by Lisa Ling’s
career-oriented just as Ling’s respondent suggests when she says “Korean women are very strongmoms” despite their cosmetic surgery consumption.
Cho Haejoang, “Living with Conflicting Subjectivities: Mother, Motherly Wife, and Sexy Woman in
the Transition from Colonial-Modern to Postmodern Korea” in Under Construction: The Gendering ofModernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, ed. Laura Kendall (Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press, 2002) 165 – 196.
55
In her book, Compositional Subjects: Asian/American Women, Laura Kang shows how representationsof Asian and Asian American women are necessarily related. By focusing on four popularized figuresof Asian/American women—writing self, desiring body, national citizen, and transnational worker—
Kang shows how Asian/American women have been figured through mutually imbricated modes ofidentity formation.
Laura Kang, Compositional Subjects: Asian/American Women (Durham: Duke University Press) 2002.
56
Perhaps the most well-known consequence of American anxieties, animosities and fears towards
Japan’s success within the automobile industry is the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin who was killed in
Detroit, Michigan during an altercation with two ex-employees of Ford who thought he wasJapanese.

68positionality as an Asian American woman. Although Ling is not specifically Korean
American, given that the racial schema of the U.S. conflates all Asian ethnic and even
Pacific Islander groups into one category, Ling’s status as an Asian American serves
these purposes adequately. Much like the other experts Oprah employs on hershows—life strategists, psychologists, home decorators—Ling, as a person of Asiandescent, stands in as an “expert” on Asia, thus being authorized to make historicaland even psychological claims.
Accordingly, Ling’s assertion that, “In Asian cultures, it’s always been
considered more beautiful if you have rounder eyes and more Western features,” isparticularly discursively violent to Korean women given her “authority.” Ling’s useof the word “always” stabilizes and fixes Western facial features as the normative
beauty ideal in Asia while also erasing historical contingencies that have made these
ideals hegemonic or more specifically, the historically uneven colonial and neocolonial relationships through which the U.S. has engaged Asia. Thus, just as
Oprah’s blackness allows her to speak about women of color’s relationships towhiteness, Ling’s Asianness gives her license to speak for all Asians. The fact that
Ling’s (as well as Oprah’s) race is put into service within this segment is clear when
one imagines the discomfort that might result from a white correspondent making
similar claims. Thus, the show’s application of an a priori homogenous notion of
women (of color) to women in Korea, not only robs them of their own historical andpolitical agency and subjectivity, once again centering American women as the69

ultimate referent to others’ experiences, but also serves to homogenize Asian women
and women of color’s experiences more generally on the domestic front.
Ironically, Oprah and Ling liken South Korean women to U.S. women ofcolor in ways that flatten their crucial differences but fail to connect South Koreanand American women vis-à-vis their neoliberal justifications for engaging in plastic
surgery. In Oprah’s South Korean segment, Ling notes that “Korean women say
looking more Western means you have better chance of getting a good job andfinding a husband.”57 That is to say, Korean women do not describe theirmotivations for electing plastic surgery as a desire to “not look Asian” but rather as
acts of self-entrepreneurship and management, the very neoliberal rationalities
espoused by Oprah herself. Although both Ling and Oprah gloss over these
explanations in favor of racialized ones, Elizabeth Lee’s documentary film, good for her,offers a counterpoint to Oprah’s Orientalist depictions of Korean women.
Written, directed and produced by Korean American filmmaker Elizabeth
Lee, good for her is a Fulbright Foundation funded documentary film that hit the Asian
American film festival circuit in 2004, the same year that “Around the World with

57

Ibid.
Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas assert that people are not only more active in their choices regarding
health, recovery and self-care but are increasingly holding themselves responsible for the aspects of
their health and body that are under their control. Significantly, they point out how medical
technologies are particularly salient ways through which modern citizen subjects remake themselves,echoing the imperatives of neoliberal governmentality that proffer individuals as responsible for theirown self-cultivation and management.
Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, “Biological Citizenship” in Global Assemblages:
Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, eds. Aihwa Ong and Steven J. Collier (Boston:Blackwell Publishing, 2004) 439 – 463.

70

Oprah” aired.58 In good for her Lee attempts to tell a multilayered story about themultiple subjectivities of Korean women and begins this process with her own selfreflexive insights. She asks, what if cosmetic surgery in South Korea might be “ameans by which to access power in Korean society.”59 In order to find out, Lee
explains, “I needed to take the conversations outside the confines of my Westernhead and bring it into classrooms, homes and coffee shops in Seoul and seek myanswers that way.”60 Notably, this self-reflexive and self-conscious process composes
the first five minutes of Lee’s film, signaling her attention to the possible andprobable elisions her documentary, as an act of translation, might entail.
Through multiple sections titled, “power in being like others,” “power
external,” “understanding her power,” and “power internal,” Lee offers a picture of
Korean women that highlights their engagement with cosmetic surgery as agentive.
The women in Lee’s film reveal the multiple ways in which Korean women utilize orconceive of plastic surgery as a means of navigating the terrain of Korean
womanhood in an unduly competitive society. For example, 24 year old Jieun Oh, a
student at Ewha University likens the ssangkkŏp‘ul procedure to making an
investment: “I think changing yourself by means of plastic surgery is like making an
investment on yourself and caring for yourself.”61 Such an investment has very realpractical impetuses as well as implications. As another interviewee states, “theeconomic situation has gotten even worse (since the Economic Crisis of 1997). There
58

good for her, dir. by Elizabeth Lee (2004; Fulbright Foundation, video).
Ibid.
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid.
59

71

are so many people that need employment but only a handful get jobs. So naturally,
the competition has become fierce. People try to have better English abilities thanothers. For women, a better face and height, which is also important.”62
Lee’s interviewee alludes to the Economic Crisis of 1997 also known as the
Asian Debt Crisis and in South Korea, the IMF Crisis, which began on November
21, 1997 when South Korea became the subject of IMF bailout because it lacked theAmerican dollars necessary to pay back loans from foreign financial institutions.
Under the neoliberal regime of Kim Dae Jung, South Korea’s first civilian president
who took office but a month after the crisis began, South Korea’s unemployment
rates soared and workfare policies were implemented.63 According to Jesook Song,neoliberalism in South Korea has become a “social ethos of moral-economic valuethat gains its explanatory power through a wide variety of social agents.”64 As Songsuggests, neoliberal governmentality, as evidenced by Lee’s subjects, is as much a
concern in South Korea as it is in the United States.65 Although Lee’s depiction ofSouth Korean women is markedly different from Oprah’s given her attention to theiragency, Lee—like Oprah—fails to look beyond cosmetic surgery consumption as an
62

Ibid.
Interestingly, male plastic surgery patients usually cite employment as their main motivation although
as we see here, it is also a popular motivation for women. While plastic surgery rates for Koreanmen, as for American men, have increased in recent years, women still dominate the market.
American men also cite competition in the job market as their number one reason for electing plastic
surgery.
63
Jesook Song, “Family Breakdown and Invisible Homeless Women: Neoliberal Governance during
the Asian Debt Crisis in South Korea, 1997 – 2001” positions 14, no. 1 (2006), 40 – 42.
64
Song, “Family Breakdown,” 55.
65
Neoliberal governmentality is perhaps even more of a concern for South Korean people than for
Americans or at least manifests in more obvious ways within South Korea’s structure of labor. For
example, photos are required along with resumes making appearance an immediately crucial factor
on the job market.

72

individual choice in order to question neoliberalism as a “social ethos of moraleconomic value.”
In “Under Western Eyes Revisited,” Mohanty reflects on her seminal essay
some ten years after the fact. Mohanty illuminates that in writing about thedifference between First and Third World women she had hoped to illuminate how“difference allows us to theorize universal concerns more fully.”66 Similarly, in
underscoring the limitations of translating South Korean women’s experiences
through the lens of U.S. women of color, we also see that neoliberalism as both
economic policy and governmentality and its attendant neoliberal feminism, areuniversal concerns affecting both American and Korean women (amongst others).
While Oprah focuses on the racialized connotations of Korean women’s plastic
surgery consumption, Lee focuses on their ability to access power and negotiate
Korean femininity through that consumption. Neither, however, problematizes theirsubjects’ neoliberal rationalities nor the free market ideology governing their bodies.
Moreover, neither connects booming rates of cosmetic surgery consumption in boththe United States and South Korea. That is to say, by focusing on the individual,
both Lee and Oprah neglect to ask what global conditions might allow for this kindof mass consumption of cosmetic surgery on the part of women all around the world.
It is precisely such questions that the psychologization of South Korean women andan overdetermined focus on rational choice obscures.

66

Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes Revisited,” 226.

73

CONCLUSIONThe South Korean segment was cut out of subsequent airings of the show,
narrowing Oprah’s trip around the world to a mere sixteen, rather than seventeen
countries. Presumably, outcries from South Korean and Korean American fans, as
documented on Oprah.com’s message boards, as well as organized demands for a
public apology prompted Oprah to leave the segment on the cutting room floor.
Although this deletion perhaps signals the sensitivity of the Oprah genre to viewer
commentary, no official statement or public apology was ever released. While The
Oprah Winfrey Show has undoubtedly brought much needed attention to global anddomestic issues of other sorts, raising awareness and resources for causes such as
AIDS relief in Africa, to dismiss the lessons from Around the World with Oprah becauseof Oprah’s philanthropic work elsewhere, misses the other types of cultural insightthe Oprah show provides. Oprah Winfrey’s continued attention to the everyday
makes her show, and “Around the World with Oprah” in particular, an ideal sitethrough which to expose the (geo)politics of beauty and beauty practices at theintersection of race, technology and neoliberalism.
The Oprah Winfrey Show purports to empower women as a feminist outlet for“women’s political, economic and educational advancement.”67 As we have seen,
however, “women” is a category that rests upon the universalization of “American
women.” And while “Around the World with Oprah” certainly tackles issues
relevant to many women—beauty, dissatisfaction, body image and bodily

67

Squire, “Empowering Women?,” 357.

74

transformations—it also illuminates how neoliberal feminism, as espoused by Oprah,manages and constructs women’s relationships to one another domestically andacross national borders through the televisual medium. While Oprah is largely
thought to cater to a white, middle-class demographic in the US, the show is exported
to 120 countries around the world and presumably, many of the women of thesecountries are Oprah’s mainstay viewers as well.68 Thus, “Around the World with
Oprah” provides many lessons with respect to transnational feminisms by
exemplifying how the mapping of US racial logics onto other geopolitical contexts
serves to discursively colonize. As such, the Oprah segment flattens the historical
specificities that shape South Korean women’s lives and instead constructs them only
in relation to American women. Such representations are powerful precisely in theirability to perpetuate US cultural hegemony while obscuring the political andeconomic structures that uphold US hegemony in general.

68

Sheryl Wilson, Oprah, Celebrity and Formations of Self, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003) 3.

75

CHAPTER TWO
CONSUMING COMMODITIES: BODY WORK,GENDER, AND MODERNITY IN SOUTH KOREAN FILM
MY BODY LIESOVER THE OCEAN
MY BODY LIES OVER THE SEA
MY BODY LIES OVER THE DMZOH BRING BACK MY BODY TO ME
BRING BACK, BRING BACK, OH BRING BACK MY BODY
TO ME.1- Yong Soon Min, Kindred Distance
In 2006, the South Korean film 200 Pounds Beauty (미녀는 괴로워 2006)
garnered over 6.23 million admissions, making it a sleeper hit and South Korea’s
most successful comedy to date.2 Surpassing even Shiri’s (쉬리 1999) 6.21 million
box office admissions, 200 Pounds Beauty is the eighth biggest box office draw inSouth Korean cinematic history.3 Criticized in some circles, on the one hand, as proplastic surgery and hailed by others, on the other hand, as a satirical indictment of
1

Yong Soon Min, “Kindred Distance,” in Vestiges of War: The Philippine American War and the Aftermathof an Imperial Dream, 1899 – 1999, ed. Angel Shaw et al. (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 300.
2
Nigel D’Sa, “200 Pounds Beauty Weighs in at Box Office,” HanCinema: The Korean Movie and Drama
Database, February 2, 2007, accessed December 1, 2010, http://www.hancinema.net/200-poundsbeauty-weighs-in-at-the-box-office-8630.html.
3
Ibid.
Released in 1999, Shiri (Kang Je-kyu), action movie starring Lost’s Eunjin Kim, combined Hollywood
style with Korean content and style. The film outdid James Cameron’s Titanic and was the biggest
box-office hit in Korean history at the time.

76

South Korea’s “booming surgery culture,” 200 Pounds Beauty chronicles Hanna’s
journey from obese back-up singer to sleek and sexy headliner.4 Saving up moneyfrom gigs as Korea’s most famous pop star’s “ghost singer” and as a sex hotline
operator, Hanna undergoes major surgery and reemerges with an ideal face and bodyaccording to dominant 21st Century South Korean beauty standards. As a result, her
outward appearance is finally considered as beautiful as her voice. Her popularity
eventually surpasses even the woman whose voice she had secretly supplied, yet theattempt to keep her former identity (and looks) a secret proves too much a burden
for the pure hearted Hanna who eventually confesses her secret at a major concert totens of thousands of fans. Albeit shocked at first, masses of fans accept Hanna forher honesty, thus catapulting her even further into stardom and providing a tidy
ending to the film.
The same year 200 Pounds Beauty took the box office, controversial director
Kim Ki-duk and lesser-known director Bong Man-dae also released films about
Korean plastic surgery consumption.5 In stark contrast to 200 Pounds Beauty’s
innocuous and seemingly empowering mainstream and normalizing portrayal ofplastic surgery, Kim’s art house film Time (시간 2006) and Bong’s horror flick
Cinderella (신델레라 2006) use the generic conventions of psychological thriller andhorror to problematize plastic surgery consumption in multiple ways. The emergence
Frances Gateward, “Introduction” in Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema,
ed. Frances Gateward, (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007) 6.
4
Kim Yong-hwa, No Hye-yeong and Suzuki Yumiko. 200 Pounds Beauty, 미녀는 기로워. DVD(Kim Yong-hwa, 2006: 120 min)5
Joo Jung-wan, “On Celluoid Plastic is Murder,” August 29, 2006, accessed on December 1 2010,
http://www.hancinema.net/on-celluloid-plastic-is-murder-7017.html.

77

of these three films in the same year signals not only that plastic surgery is a social
issue being explored in South Korean film but also a new intersection in themarketplace—that of the ascendency of the consumption of plastic surgery
procedures for aesthetic purposes with the more established visual consumption offilm. Given the plastic surgery patient’s recent representational ubiquity within
Korean film (and television serials), this figure can be seen as a new female archetypethat has risen to prominence alongside her real life counterpart—the throngs ofSouth Korean women undergoing the knife at the highest rates per capita globally.6
Although the plastic surgery consumer is a relatively new archetype, the wellknown and well-established figure of the Korean woman who has had sexual
encounters with Japanese and especially American servicemen has figured
prominently within Korean film since its early inception until today. Starting with the
Korean comfort women and extending to U.S. military camp town prostitutes andmilitary brides, this figure has simultaneously been both the catalyst for demands forjustice within Korea as well as the representational figure for the diaspora’s disgraceand historical domination. Not only do we see the yangkongju on the news but also in
documentaries such as Byeon Yeong-ju's The Murmuring (낮은 목소리 1 1995),
Habitual Sadness (낮은 목소리 2 1996) and My Own Breathing (낮은 목소리 3 2000)
6

A more general statistic notes that in 2000, thirteen percent of Koreans engaged in some form ofcosmetic surgery compared to three percent in the US and more recently, the Chosun Ilbo reported
through informal research that nearly one in every two women have had some kind of plastic
surgery.
Jyeon Hyeonsuk, “One Out of Every Two People Have Had Facial Plastic Surgery (특별취재팀,“두명중 한명, 얼굴 고쳤다,”)” Chosun Ilbo, October 26, 2009.
“It’s official: South Korea has the world’s highest rates of plastic surgery but…” Asian Plastic Surgery
Now, accessed October 1, 2011.

78

and in fictional accounts such as Ahn Junghyo’s novel Silver Stallion (은마는 오지않는다) as well as the 1991 movie remake by Chang Kil-su, just to name a few.7
Yangkongju, literally “Western princess,” is a pejorative term for U.S. military
prostitutes. According to sociologist and performance artist Grace Cho, theyangkongju “is at once a hypervisible object of loathing and desire for Koreans on thepeninsula and a shadowy figure hidden in the collective psyche of the Korean
diaspora.”8 Allegorizing the Korean nation, then, the colonized female bodies of the
comfort woman and the yangkongju represent Korea’s subjugated status and(neo)colonial relationships with Japan and the U.S. at the same time signifying
Korean men’s emasculation. The figure of the yangkongju has thus come to signify
Korea’s turbulent modern history even as, or perhaps especially because, she isshrouded in shame.

7

Released in 1995, The Murmuring documents the lives and testimonies of former Korean comfort
women living at the House of Sharing as they seek justice for the crimes committed against them.
Habitual Sadness and My Own Breathing, sequels to The Murmuring, were released in 1996 and 2000
respectively.
The Murmuring, Najeun Moksori 1. VHS. (Byeon, Yeongju, 1995: 98 min)
Habitual Sadness, Najeun Moksori 2. VHS. (Byeon, Yeongju, 1996: 98 min)My Own Breathing, Najeun Moksori 3. VHS. (Byeon, Yeongju, 2000: 98 min)Ahn Junghyo’s Silver Stallion is a fictional tale of a Korean village destroyed by the Korean War. The
story is told through the perspective of Mansik, a village boy, whose mother is raped by American
soldiers and subsequently becomes a prostitute.
Ahn, Junghyo. Silver Stallion: A Novel of Korea. New York: Soho Press, 2003.
Korean American writer Nora Okja Keller’s fictional work, Comfort Woman, brings the comfort
woman issue into a diasporic and transgenerational frame as Beccah, a biracial second generation
Korean American, is forced to care for her mother, Akiko, a former comfort woman. Keller
followed Comfort Woman with Foxgirl, a novel about Hyun Jin, a girl whose only family becomes her
best friend, Sookie, a teenage prostitute kept by an American soldier.
Keller, Nora Okja. Comfort Woman. New York: Viking, 1997.
Keller, Nora Okja. Foxgirl. New York: Viking, 2002.
8
Grace Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy and the Forgotten War, (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 2008), 3.

79Accordingly, Asian Americanist scholarship on the yangkongju also abounds.
Korean American women scholars, artists and writers have especially focused onthese tropes, such work constituting a genre unto itself. In her essay “Teumsae e-kkiin yosong: Korean American Women Between Feminism and Nationalism,” Asian
American studies scholar Elaine Kim attempts to critically engage with these works
by asking about “Korean American women’s fascination with this topic?” in order toscrutinize the use of Korean women’s bodies as a visual trope.9 Kim posits several
possible reasons for the affinity between Korean and Korean American women, suchas a desire on the part of Korean American women to challenge sexual moralism byidentifying with the yangkongju instead of with the Korean nation-state itself.
Ultimately, Kim posits a romantic affinity between Korean and Korean American
women:
Korean American women may be interested in comfort women and sex
workers because as Asian women living in the U.S., they too are marginalized
and suspected as possible traitors to the Korean nation, and because they too
feel subject to the processes of racialization and sexual objectification…
Perhaps it is their interstitial location between two powerful patriarchal
nationalist discourses that allows these Korean American women writers andartists to recognize themselves in those sisters across the waves.10
Kim uses a language of ethnic and feminist sisterhood that locates Korean American
scholars’ investment in the yangkongju within a seemingly natural transnational affinitythat binds Korean and Korean American women. In so doing, she contends that9

Elaine Kim, “Teumsae e-kki-in yosong: Korean American Women Between Feminism andNationalism,” in Violence and the Body: Race, Gender, and the State, ed. Arturo J. Aldama (Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 2002), 36.
10Kim, “Teumsae e-kki-in yosong,” 39.

80

Korean American work on Korean sex workers “does not push the reluctant Korean
female body onto a stage lit up for pornography and commodification.” Instead, sheasserts, Korean American scholars are reaching for “the mutual lines of affinity” thatlink Korean and Korean American women “in a mutual struggle to understand andstruggle against our respective experiences of colonization, racialization, and gender
oppression.”11 Indeed, because such notions depend on ethnic affiliations, Kim falls
into the trap of essentializing such affiliations as natural forms of sisterhood.
Literary critic Laura Hyun Yi Kang, on the other hand, writes against suchromantic visions of Asian American scholarly work. Kang contends that, despite
Asian American scholars’ good intentions and perceived affinities, such projects
produce—rather than simply depict—certain kinds of subjects. These
representations have overtly political effects. That is to say, such scholarship does, if
unintentionally, “push the reluctant Korean female body onto a stage lit up for
pornography and commodification.” Marking a distinct turn in Asian American
studies away from scholarship that “gives voice” to a previously unheard or unseen
subject, recent scholars like Kang have interrogated how figures of Asian and Asian
Americans themselves come to be constructed by scholarly, activist and artistic
productions. Moreover, because these constructs are never neutral, it remains criticalto interrogate the producers’ investment in these circulating representations.
Specifically, Kang examines Asian women as sites/sights of transnational labor.
Kang’s juxtaposition of the homophones “sites” and “sights” reveals Asian women as

11

Kim, “Teumsae e-kki-in yosong,” 42.

81both laboring bodies as well as visual constructs that perform labor themselves. By“placing the labor conditions of Asian women workers in export-oriented
manufacturing alongside those in international sex tourism,” Kang seeks to“interrogate the mechanical and the eroticized constructions of the Asian female
body, as well as any assumed separation of these two stereotypes.”12 Such inquiries
require us to ask, “How and why have these presumably contradictory properties ofbusiness and pleasure become attached to this particular racialized and gendered
body?”13 Building on Kang’s query, this chapter pairs two distinct contemporary
representations of Korean women—the surgery consumer and the yangkongju—inorder to stitch together their “assumed separation.” Accordingly, this chapter unveils
the specific geopolitical circumstances that have constructed these two stereotypes in
an attempt to understand the meanings they produce for Korean women in Korea
and abroad.
Unlike the image of the usually disenfranchised and lower class yangkongju, thespecter of the Korean plastic surgery consumer has emerged as a marker of South
Korean modernization. In the U.S., as I have outlined in the previous chapter byusing the example of The Oprah Winfrey Show, discourses on Korean women’s
cosmetic surgery consumption usually focus on the ssangkkŏp‘ul procedure (or double
eyelid surgery as it is commonly referred) and so this image of the Korean woman
signifies self-internalized racial oppression. As a result, Korean women emerge in

12

Laura Kang, Compositional Subjects: Asian/American Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000),
427.
13
Ibid.

82

academic scholarship and media portrayals as cultural dupes, victims of a sort of“false consciousness” that explains their plastic surgery consumption. On the other
hand, such discursive framings in South Korea, both popular and academic, focus
more centrally on South Korea’s rapid modernization, flourishing consumer culture
and rampant postmodernity. In other words, while U.S. discourses on the topic (andAsian American studies itself) are overly concerned with the salience of race in the
self-identity fashioning of South Korean women, South Korean discourses (as well as
Korean/Asian studies) are more troubled by the excesses of late capitalism.
This chapter places the yangkongju and the plastic surgery consumer—figuresthat have heretofore not been juxtaposed—in the same analytical frame in order totheorize their shared affinities. That is to say, while scholars such as Grace Cho,
Kandice Chuh, Laura Hyun Yi Kang, and Lisa Yoneyama have pointed out thediscursive function(s) of the yangkongju and the ways in which she allegorizes the
Korean nation, both figures of Korean women are distinct iterations of gendered
corporealities or embodiments of Korean history. As discursive conjurings and aslived experiences, these archetypes illuminate how South Korea’s modern history,
under the auspices of modernization and militarization, has demanded different typesof body work from gendered bodies depending on their social and class locations—just as Hanna is at once a plastic surgery consumer and a sex-line operator andembodies each of these as distinct ways of negotiating her circumstances.
According to sociologist Debra Gimlin, “body work” is “work on the self. By
engaging in body work, women are able to negotiate normative identities by83

diminishing their personal responsibility for a body that fails to meet cultural
mandates.”14 Gimlin’s “body work” is a method for reconciling the separation
between “the body” and “the self” and takes place in aerobics classes, weight control
organizations, and beauty salons in addition to plastic surgery clinics. While my useof the term “body work” builds on Gimlin’s, I significantly depart from her definition
because I use the term to suggest both the work that women do to their bodies as wellas the labor performed by their bodies. I do not equate the two but rather, ask what
we can learn by reading in tandem representations of the yangkongju and plastic
surgery consumer. Just as the films 200 Pounds Beauty, Time and Cinderella’s release in
the same temporal frame provided viewers with multiple meanings about andcritiques of plastic surgery, this chapter fleshes out the multiple vantage points thatarise when these two figures are positioned relationally and theorized together.
Given South Korea’s Cold War context, I argue that both positionalities emerge as
distinct instantiations of how capitalism, (neo)colonialism, and modernity havemobilized gendered bodies towards different ends. In other words, these seemingly
disparate forms of “body work” provide insights into the affective and material ways
in which women’s bodies are utilized and transformed in the service of capitalist
modernity.
As transnational feminist cultural studies scholars have shown, many“modern” ways of being—such as the professionalization of housewifery, theorganization into nuclear families or even women’s entrance into educational
14

Debra Gimlin, Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2002), 6.

84

institutions—were new coercive norms that subjected women to new forms ofcontrol and disciplines even as they perhaps subverted other forms of patriarchy.
Although modernization in non-Western countries has come to signify
Westernization and more insidiously, liberation and progress, as Lila Abu-Lughod
argues, modernity is a messy and complicated process that “ushered in new forms ofgendered subjection (in the double sense of subject-positions for women and formsof domination) as well as new experiences and possibilities.”15 As such, I suggest thatthe two related but distinct forms of body work discussed above should not be taken
for granted as inevitable outcomes of South Korean modernization. I argue insteadthat both types of body work are imbricated within the same “processes ofentanglement,” to borrow Abu-Lughod’s phrase, originating from the (neo)colonial
encounter.16 The disentanglement of these processes illuminates how gender
operates through militarization and modernization such that female bodies are not
only the object of power struggles but also the sites upon which notions of tradition
and modernity are enacted, performed and constructed.
Using controversial director, Kim Ki-duk’s films, Address Unknown (수취인불명 2001) and Time, and Bong Man-dae’s horror film, Cinderella, as entry points into
thinking about the discursive relationship between the yangkongju and the plastic
surgery consumer as well as the plastic surgery consumer’s distinct significations, thischapter examines how these two types of body work are undergirded by processes of15

Lila Abu-Lughod, “Introduction” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East,(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 13.
16
Abu-Lughod, “Introduction,” 16.

85

imperial racial formation. Said differently, this chapter mines the ways in which U.S.
imperial practices have distinctly shaped and normalized the necessity for these formsof body work. By bridging the analytical and geopolitical insights of Asian American
studies and Korean studies, this chapter provides a transnational framework fromwhich to argue that within the context of South Korea’s capitalist modernity, both
sex work and plastic surgery emerge as interventions in identity. As a result, the body
becomes a means for new, albeit differently classed, subjectivities. Ultimately, thischapter seeks a richer understanding of the various ways in which Korea’s modern
history has been both written and enacted upon Korean women’s bodies.
Finally, this chapter shows that these films offer a complex and critical analysis
of Korea’s modern consumption of plastic surgery by putting the phenomenon into
the larger context of colonialism, militarization and modernization. Specifically,
Korean film provides an apt medium for thinking about the shifting representationsof Korean women through the process of Korea’s rapid industrialization. While theyangkongju emerges as a symbol of the (neo)colonial past, despite the fact thatmilitarized sex work continues to abound, the plastic surgery consumer signifies not
only the present moment but a prosperous future. According to anthropologist
Nancy Abelmann, “In a patriarchal society such as South Korea with its history ofnational loss and displacement, it is easy for male subjectivity to take on particular
representational salience.”17 This chapter attempts, instead, to foreground female
subjectivity by examining the effects of gendered modernities on Korean women vis17

Nancy Ablemann, The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea,(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003) 188.

86

à-vis body work. Although Kim, and to a lesser extent Bong, has been panned byfeminists, this chapter shows that these films are productive of a feminist
postcolonial critique of South Korea’s capitalist modernity and neocolonial ties to theU.S.

HALLYU AND THE RISE OF KOREAN FILM
Although South Korean cinema, like plastic surgery, has become one of thecountry’s internationally known and thriving industries, its history is wrought with
political censorship and struggles for cultural hegemony that have shaped the now
booming industry. The development of the medium was stifled during the colonial
period through World War II and until the end of the Korean War. Beginning in the
mid-1950s, however, South Korea experienced what is known as its Golden Age offilm, characterized by a neorealist mode of art cinema that explored Korean values
and national struggles.18 Films of the era such as Aimless Bullet (오발탄 1961), whose
main character maintains Confucian values in an impoverished post-War Korea(while his sister becomes a yangkongju), illustrate how film became a medium throughwhich Korean society struggled with economic devastation, national division andchanging values. As such, South Korean cinema produced over a hundred films ayear during this period with that figure doubling by the 1960s.19

18

Aaron Han Joohn Magnan-Park, “Hallyu: The Koreanization of world culture” in Korean Wave, ed.
The Korean Herald, (Seoul: Jimoondang, 2008) 236.
19
Gateward, “Introduction,” 4.

87The rise of the military dictator Park Chung-hee and militarized democracy,
however, saw the end of the Golden Age and ushered in the dark age of Koreancinema—two decades of censorship and regulation that lasted through the Chun
Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo administrations.20 The national agenda’s dual
imperatives of anti-communism and rapid industrialization demanded an inflexible
ideology that hampered directors’ creative freedom. At the same time, the emergenceof Hollywood blockbusters and their global marketing threatened South Koreancinema from without until the production/distribution of Korean feature films
reached a low of seventy-three films in 1982 with most people assuming South
Korean cinema was near extinction.21 Reacting against Americanization, the Screen
Quota Civil Society was established in 1985 and the government increased the
mandated number of screening days of Korean films from 121 to 146.22 Directors
also responded and soon, what is now known as the New Wave of Korean cinema
was born with the emergence of directors such as Park Kwang-su and Jang Sun-woo
who not only reinvigorated the national film industry but defied the traditional
apprenticeship system for directors by branching out on their own.23
In addition to these milestones, the loosening of censorship, changes in tradelaws and the 1980’s democratic movements renewed South Korean cinema in the
1990s. As Hollywood films began to dominate the South Korean market, South

20

Magnan-Park, “Hallyu,” 237.
Gateward, “Introduction,” 5.
22
Lee Hyang-jin, “Identity politics of contemporary Korean cinema,” in Korean Wave, ed. The
Korean Herald, (Seoul: Jimoondang, 2008) 225.
23
Ibid.
21

88

Korean cinema flourished as a form of cultural resistance to Western culturalimperialism and hegemony.24 In order to compete with Hollywood, Korean directors
developed a hybrid style that combined commercialism and artistic experimentalism
in a way that, as art historian Young Min Moon contends, embraces “the narrative
structures and technical elements of Hollywood cinema while unraveling thepsychological ‘knot’ in Korean history.”25 As such, Korean cinema’s renaissancebegan in the early 1990s with a plethora of “sex-war” comedies that reinvigorated
Hollywood’s romantic comedy formula.26 After the success of these comedies suchas Kim Ui-Seok’s Marriage Story (결혼이야기 1992), Korea’s major businessconglomerates took notice and corporations (known as chaebol in Korean parlance)such as Samsung began funding Korean films, allowing Korean cinema to create bigbudget blockbusters rivaling Hollywood and Hong Kong in technical polish anddepth. By 1997, when espionage thriller Shiri broke the box office record in Korea
held by James Cameron’s Titanic, thus besting Hollywood in the minds of many
Koreans, South Korean cinema had officially reemerged as a commercial and artistic
force. In 2001, local cinema accounted for 45 to 50 percent of the overall ticket sales,

24

Cultural sociologist Lee Hyang-jin argues, “The sense of crisis surrounding the loss of cultural
identity resulted in the revival of the film industry. Accordingly, the thriving film culture incontemporary Korea is the result of cultural resistance to the power of Western-led globalization.”
Ibid.
25
Young Min Moon, “Violence and modernity: The Re-inscription of Memory,” personalcorrespondence December 30, 2010, 6.
26
Tom Vick, Asian Cinema: A Field Guide, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008) 158.

89

making South Korea’s one of the largest commercial film industries after the U.S. andIndia.27
With such domestic success, Korean producers began pursuing overseas
distribution, thus initiating what is currently a global love affair with Korean cinema,along with other Korean popular cultural forms. In fact, Korean pop culture is often
referred to as Hallyu or “the Korean wave.”28 First coined by Chinese journalists todescribe the influx of South Korean popular music, television serials and films andtheir vast popularity with youth, Hallyu has achieved cultural hegemony in much of
Asia for the last decade. In fact, many cultural critics and academics posit Hallyu’s
popularity, along with Bollywood, as a signal that global culture is no longer
dominated by Western e.g. American cultural forms.29
While other foreign film markets have reached success through a particulargenre such as Hong Kong action movies or through just a few particular auteurs as is
the case of the Taiwanese market, South Korean films have reached international
27

Darcy Paquet, “The Korean Film Industry: 1992 to the Present,” in New Korean Cinema, ed. ChiYun Shin and Julian Stringer, (New York: NYU Press, 2005) 33.
And, despite the fact that the U.S. forced South Korea to lower its quota to 72 days per year in 2006,
Korean cinema continues to do well—a testament to the quality and diversity of the films produced
there.
28
Jeeyoung Shin, “Globalisation and New Korean Cinema,” in New Korean Cinema, ed. Chi-Yun Shinand Julian Stringer, (New York: NYU Press, 2005) 58.
29
Nadia Kim notes that Hallyu has “taken much of Asia by storm (e.g., Japan, China, Taiwan,
Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia) and garnered the attention of some Western audiences” and “alongwith other examples (Bollywood), begun to change the tide of global culture.”
Nadia Kim, Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA, (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2008) 40.
Outside of Korean ethnic enclaves such as Los Angeles’ Koreatown, hallyu is most noticeable in the
U.S. in Hawai‘i where Korean serials are available at mainstream drugstores such as Long’s Drugs. In
fact, Korean dramas are so popular in Hawai’i that Brent Anbe wrote and directed a film about
Korean dramas and the local women who love them. Ajumma, are you Krazy? Hawai‘i’s First Kimchee
Comedy chronicles the zany adventures of three local women’s attempt to meet their favorite Korean
actor when he comes to Hawai‘i. Ajumma, are you Krazy? toured the film festival circuit in 2009.

90

acclaim on a variety of levels, through a variety of genres and directors.30 Moreover,
Korean films address myriad social and cultural concerns—tensions between Northand South Korea, South Korea’s rapid industrialization, changing relationships
between the genders as a result of modernization, class struggles—through a diverse
array of film genres. From touching family flicks such as Lee Jeong-hyang’s The Way
Home (집으로 2002) to science fiction films such as Lee Si-myung’s 2009: Lost
Memories (로스트메모리즈 2002) to horror films like Kim Ji-Woon’s A Tale of Two
Sisters (장화, 홍련 2003), the Korean film renaissance has spurred the production offilms of every genre that have gained international popularity. In fact, Korean films
have thrived at international film festivals ever since Im Kwon-taek’s Chunhyang(춘향뎐 2000) was nominated for an award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002.
Since then, in addition to Im, directors such as Lee Chang-dong, Kim Ki-duk (who
we will examine further in the following section) and Park Chan-wook have broughthome awards from Cannes, the Venice International Film Festival and the Berlin
International Film Festival.31
The South Korean government laid the foundation for such international
success and notoriety when in 1994 President Kim Young-sam announced his

30Vick, Asian Cinema, 160.
Lee, “Identity politics of contemporary Korean cinema,” 229.
South Korean cinema experienced its first downturn in exports in five years in 2007. Markets varied,
however. Exports to Asia, a market that favors commercial films, decreased while exports to
Europe, a market favoring arthouse films, remained constant. Films to Hungary, Poland and SouthAmerica where commercial films are more popular, actually increased.
Lee, “Identity politics of contemporary Korean cinema,” 230.
31

91

segyehwa or globalization policy.32 The policy took a two-pronged approach toglobalization—one that was committed to national advancement on the international
stage in all regards, economic, political, cultural, and another that focused on thedomestic success of the Korean economy. Accordingly, the government recognized“culture as an industry that can produce a huge profit” and sought an even higher
level of domestic success by Korean films, as I note above in my discussion of
Hollywood’s encroachment on the South Korean film industry.33 Since the late
1990s, however, “the promotional endeavour has increasingly aimed at the elevationof Korean cinema’s international profile and the growth of international sales.”34
Notably, the South Korean government’s emphasis on culture as an export has also
served to bolster its burgeoning medical tourism industry. According to Samuel Koo,
president and CEO of Korea’s Tourism Board, South Korea had 7.8 million tourists
in 2009, 60,000 of whom were medical tourists seeking mostly cosmetic and dental
procedures.35 In 2009, the South Korean government’s Ministry of Tourism andCulture began promoting medical tourism as a viable international industry andsignificant efforts are being made to market medical tourism abroad.36 In manycases, Hallyu’s multiple forms—film, television serials, and music—serve not only as
cultural products in their own right but also as international advertisements for South
Korea’s plastic surgery clinics (the subject of chapter three).
32

Shin, “Globalisation and New Korean Cinema,” 53.
Ibid.
34
Shin, “Globalisation and New Korean Cinema,” 55.
35
Samuel Koo, “Korea in the Global Village and the Effort to Strengthen its Brand Power,” (lecture
presented at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea, May 20 2010).
36“South Korean Hospitals to Attract Foreign Patients from May,” Asia Pulse News, 28 April 2009.
33

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South Korean cinema has developed as a cultural and industrial medium
through which the “psychological ‘knot’ in Korean history” has been (re)enacted,
revisited and explored. As the following sections on Kim Ki-duk’s and Bong Mandae’s films will show, Korean women’s bodies have also been primary sites on which
and through which these histories and conflicts have played out. As two parallel sitesof capitalist modernity, Korean cinema provides a rich entry point for thetheorization of how the gendered violence of militarization and modernization—as
forms of body work—intersect.

UNRAVELING HAN IN KIM KI-DUK’S ADDRESS UNKNOWN AND TIME
Kim Ki-duk is an unusual South Korean director in that, while he is infamousin his native country, he enjoys more critical success internationally. Kim has
garnered “Best Director” accolades at the Berlin and Venice International Film
Festivals for his films Samaritan Girl (사마리아 2004) and 3-Iron (빈집 2004). In
addition, ten of his fifteen feature-length motion pictures are available in the U.S.
home video market—an unprecedented number for any Korean director.37 His
perhaps greatest international recognition, however, was when New York Museum ofModern Art (MoMA) held a then-complete retrospective of his work in 2008.38
Unlike other directors, particularly art cinema ones, Kim Ki-duk is from aworking class background and spent much of his youth working in factories before
37

Hye-Seung Chung, “Beyond ‘Extreme’: Rereading Kim Ki-duk’s Cinema of Ressentiment,” Journal ofFilm and Video, 62(2010): 97.
38
New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), accessed on April 1, 2009,http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/597.

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serving mandatory military conscription in the Marines, the most physically andmentally harrowing branch of the Korean military.39 Upon finishing, Kim traveled toParis to learn cinematography and made his debut on the Korean cinema scene in1996 with his film Crocodiles (악오 1996). Known for his violent and unapologetic
portrayals of his cynical view of humanity, his films reflect his own disenfranchised
and working class past. His films typically tell the story of marginalized men, many ofwhom are either taciturn by choice or literally mute but physically strong.
Prostitution also figures prominently in his films and, for this, Kim has been widely
criticized in feminist circles. Kim’s films tend to incite “love it or hate it” receptions
that characterize his films as either gratuitous or, as film programmer Tom Vicknotes, “honest expressions of Kim’s worldview […] made with great skill.”40
Nevertheless, the controversies and debates surrounding Kim’s works
converge upon one thing: the extremity of his films. Because Kim does not shy awayfrom graphically portraying violence in his films from rape, dog beating, selfmutilation to murder, his work is typically described simply as “extreme.” In fact, in
Korea Kim remains generically elusive as his films are simply known for their “brutal
yopgi (translated as bizarre, grotesque, or horrific) aesthetics.”41 Building on
Nietzsche’s theorization of ressentiment, however, Hye Seung Chung asserts that Kim’s

39“The Kim Ki Duk Page,” accessed on April 1, 2009, http://koreanfilm.org/kimkiduk.html.
Vick, Asian Cinema, 166.
41
Chung, “Beyond ‘Extreme,” 102.
40

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films are a means through which he “avenges the cruelty of a classist, conformist
society.”42 Attempting to recuperate his work’s value, Chung argues the following:
Kim’s visceral cinema can be read as an example of the ‘body genre’ theorized
by Linda Williams. According to Williams, there are three major body genres:(1) Pornography, characterized by gratuitous sex and nudity; (2) horror films,
characterized by gratuitous violence and terror; and (3) melodramas,characterized by gratuitous emotion and affect.43
These genres intersect in their ability to compel viewers to mimic the bodily
sensations experienced by the characters on screen. Thus, in an attempt to illustratethat Kim’s films are not simply gratuitous, Chung contends that “[t]he extremity of
Kim’s cinema should not—indeed, cannot—be divorced from its historical and social
context.”44
The very historical specificity of Kim’s extremity suggests, however, that han
rather than ressentiment undergirds Kim’s films.45 While perhaps only shades apart inmeaning since han, too, can be roughly translated into resentment, han departs
significantly from ressentiment in that it is uniquely Korean. Han is best described as aninventory of historical memory that deals with Korean people’s collective trauma and42

Chung, “Beyond ‘Extreme,” 101.
Chung, “Beyond ‘Extreme,” 104.
44
Chung, “Beyond ‘Extreme,” 105.
45
Arguing against critics who assert that ressentiment is a passive reaction through which Natives areconstituted by their own wounds, Glen Coulthard asserts that ressentiment is a cathartic event that
reminds Natives that the colonial situation is not of their own doing. Moreover, ressentiment asrighteous anger is ultimately productive when it topples the structures that lead to ressentiment in thefirst place.
Glen Coulthard, Settler Colonialism and White Supremacy Plenary Session #2, (paper presented at
the national Critical Ethnic Studies and the Futures of Genocide Conference, Riverside, California,
March 11 2011).
43

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suffering.46 Not surprisingly, Kim’s invocation and (re)enactment of such historicalmemory has not fared well with Korean audiences.47 Despite his success abroad,domestically Kim has had to repeatedly defend his films. As a result, Kim withdrew
from the Korean media for two years, reemerging in 2006 to hold a press conference
for Time. Critiquing the big studios’ domination of the Korean film industry andunderscoring the fact that his films are received better in North America and Europe
than in South Korea, Kim suggested that he would “stop ‘exporting’ his films toSouth Korea should Time sink at the box office.”48 In the face of criticism from fansand critics alike afterwards, Kim was forced to offer a public apology for hisstatements.
I argue that Kim owes his failures at the Korean box office to the fact that his
body of work is not only a cinema of ressentiment but of han. As Koreanist James
Freda has cogently outlined, discourses on han are critical antidotes to the historicalamnesia characterizing modernity’s promises of linear progress and happiness vis-àvis consumption. As such, discourse on han “seeks to retrieve the cultural forms
through which the experiences of suffering can be recognized and dealt with.”49 Yet,
Kim’s films are never simple depictions of the past but are almost satirical in theirjuxtaposition of the mundane with the extraordinarily inhumane. Writing about
46

Koreanist James Freda has argued that han “acts as historical memory treating the legacy of
suffering incurred in Korea.”
James K. Freda, “Discourse on Han in Postcolonial Korea: Absent Suffering and Industrialist
Dreams,” accessed on March 1, 2011, http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v3i12/freda.htm, page4.
47
Ironically, the South Korean government posits han as one of the emotional attributes responsible
for K-dramas’ unprecedented popularity amongst Asian fans (see chapter three).
48
Chung, “Beyond ‘Extreme,” 106.
49
Freda, “Discourse on Han in Postcolonial Korea,” 15.

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Filipino American artists, Asian American cultural studies scholar Sarita See cogently
argues that:
While the artistic and cultural practices serve as complex and powerfulrecording devices—acts of memory that index and counter the power
dynamics of imperialism—the emergence of a Filipino American cultural
moment cannot be described simply as an essentialist project of recovery.
The subjectivities produced by these texts are marked by playfulness andslipperiness: a relentless, ingrained kind of punning.50
In a similar vein, Kim’s films engender an unsettling complexity that neither offer tidy
resolutions nor simply bolster Korean nationalism but instead, force audiences toconfront their historical and collective suffering. Although many films such as Tae
Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (태극기 휘날리며 2004) have dealt with historical
topics such as the Korean War, they provide narrative solutions to national trauma
through filmic conventions and appeals to emotion.51 Contrarily, Kim unsettles
audiences by connecting the present to the past. The use of han put forth by his films
illuminate robust critiques of capitalist modernity and South Korean entanglementswith the U.S. That is to say, despite characterizations of Kim as “extreme” orgratuitous for gratuity’s sake, Kim’s films not only force a general Korean audience tohistoricize the present within a genealogy of imperial violence but also filmicly depict
han as a contemporarily lived experience.
Telling the story of three teenage outcasts who live in a camp town near theoutskirts of a U.S. military base, Kim’s fourth film Address Unknown (2001)
50 Sarita Echavez See, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2009) xviii.
51
Released in 2004 and directed by Je-gyu Kang, director of Shiri, Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
is often described as the Korean version of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and was the mostsuccessful Korean movie up to that time.

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exemplifies how Kim makes use of the body genre as a form of han.52 Set in the
1970s, the film addresses the painful legacy of the Korean War, namely, thecontinued presence of the U.S. military in South Korea. As such, the three main
characters, while friends, each experience the military differently. Chang-gook is theabandoned teenage son of an African American serviceman who lives with hismother on the outskirts of the camp town in an immobilized bus. She is clearlymarginalized from their small town for having had a relationship with an African
American soldier and continues to hold onto the belief that she and Chang-gook will
someday be reunited with his father. To this end, she writes and sends Chang-gook’s
father letters, which are constantly returned, hence the title of the film, Address
Unknown. While Chang-gook is strong and physically intimidating, his friend, Ji-hum,is a slender, artist type (said to be based on Kim Ki-duk himself) who is constantly
harassed by neighborhood bullies. Chang-gook more than once comes to his rescue
and although both of them are seen as outsiders, Chang-gook, through his physicalstrength, is able to, at least momentarily, defeat the neighborhood bullies for the bothof them. Eun-ok, the only girl in this motley crew, is an outcast because of her
physical appearance. Having been shot in the eye with a sling shot by her own
brother as a young girl, Eun-ok is blind in one eye, which she keeps covered with her
hair. The neighborhood kids frequently torment her by making fun of her physicaldisability. According to Kim, all three of these characters are scarred and serve to52

In her article, Chung also provides a read of Address Unknown. My read departs from hers,
however, in that it focuses specifically on how Address Unknown address the bodily affects South
Korea’s social and historical contexts have had on Korean women.

98illustrate different sides of military culture and war.53 Eun-ok’s storyline is ofparticular interest, however, as it marries several of the issues raised here: bodily
alteration, sex, race, gender and imperial racial formation.
Although Eun-ok begins the film as a regular, though physically different,
schoolgirl, circumstances soon find her making the critical decision to become ayangkongju. Raped by the same neighborhood bullies who harass Ji-hum, she has an
abortion and is kicked out of school. At the same time, her family finds out thatrather than dying in the Korean War as a hero, her father was a deserter to the North
Korean army, rendering his government pension null and void. Now a complete
outcast and in need of money, Eun-ok begins to consider James, the U.S. serviceman
who propositions her, a viable option. Eventually, through promises of eye surgery
that would restore her eye/sight and make her look normal, Eun-ok becomes James’s
girlfriend and exchanges her affection, both emotional and physical, for the surgery
and material security.
While the eye surgery in this movie is not the ssangkkŏp‘ul procedure andreconstructive surgery rather than cosmetic, it serves as an entry point to thinking
about cosmetic surgery as a modern and imperial technology for several reasons.
First, in the film, Eun-ok elects the surgery in order to look “normal.” Although she

53

Address Unknown International Release DVD, Bonus Features: Interview with the Director
Although Kim held trenchant views against U.S. neocolonialism, he has said that his views towards
individual soldiers changed when he was scouting for shooting locations and witnessed firsthand the
dilapidated conditions of the camp town: “…the deapseated military culture and the imperialist
sentiments…cannot be a matter of one or two U.S. soldiers.” As quoted from his own website in
Myung Ja Kim, “Race, Gender, and Postcolonial Identity in Kim Ki-duk’s Address Unknown” inSeoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, ed. Frances Gatewood (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2007), 251.

99

is blind in one eye, this disability does not affect her day-to-day ability to do things or
get around. It is her desire to no longer be marginalized that motivates her decision.
When Ji-hum tries to talk her out of the surgery, she replies, “Do you want me to live
marginalized forever?”54 An intervention in identity rather than appearance, the desire
to look “just like everyone else,” or at least how society discursively constructs how
everyone should look, is a powerful motivator to elect bodily alteration.55 Thus, Eunok’s surgery as well can be viewed as a move to alter her identity and status vis-à-vis
her appearance.
Second, as many Asian American scholars, including David Palumbo-Liu,
Eugenia Kaw and Nadia Kim, have pointed out, the ssangkkŏp‘ul procedure waspopularized in Korea through the U.S. military in order to build public relations
between Americans and Koreans after the Korean War:56
The U.S. military indeed doled out not just food but ‘stuff.’ The stuff
included a public relations program wherein the military offered freereconstructive surgery to Korean war victims as well as plastic surgery,namely the double eyelid procedure in which a fold is cut into the eyelid.57
We see these historical facts play out in the film when James cuts out a picture of aneye, tapes it over Eun-ok’s blind one and says, “You’d be a shoe in for Miss America.
54

Kim, Address Unknown, 2001.
Feminist scholar Kathy Davis has shown that recipients of plastic surgery often use the discourseof normalcy to justify their choices. In other words, rather than vanity, plastic surgery recipients
often choose to undergo surgery in order to fix the flaw that categorizes them as abnormal.
Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery, (London, England: Routledge,
1994), 5.
56Palumbo-Liu, David. “Written on the Face: Race, Nation, Migrancy, and Sex,” in Asian/America:
Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) 81 – 115.
Kaw, Eugenia. “Medicalization of Racial Features: Asian American Women and Cosmetic Surgery.”
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 7(1):82.
57
Nadia Kim, Imperial Citizens, 53.
55

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Do you want eye surgery? Good ole U.S. hospital…”58 Cultural critic Lisa Lowepoints out that medical services as humanitarian efforts, did not only build public
relations but did the work of empire building through a regime of morality that
cemented the liberated/liberator, colonized/colonizer relationship. 59 James andEun-ok’s exchange indicates that the military hospital is the only place where suchtechnology is available and for Eun-ok, an already marginalized camptown girl and assuch, a U.S. serviceman is her only avenue to accessing that technology. Thus, Eunok performs labor with her body in order to receive labor for her body. Her body (andher affections, physical and emotional) becomes, in essence, the only capital she has
and she invests that capital accordingly.
The cut-out eye James places on Eun-ok’s is clearly that of a white woman’s,
however, and according to African American Studies scholar Myung Ja Kim,
“represents the fantasy of Western beauty and the implied American dream for her.
James represents the typical colonizer, a benefactor with political and economic
power who can provide an eye operation.”60 As Kim illuminates, race in this instanceis about more than just an individual’s looks or looking like “Miss America.” White
beauty instantiates modernity, the cut-out eye a glossy symbol of not only feminine
beauty but of a life inside the margins. In other words, rather than signifying Eunok’s fantasies of attaining beauty, the cut-out blue eye symbolizes her desires for

58

Kim, Address Unknown, 2001.
Lisa Lowe, Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide Closing Plenary Presentation,(paper presented at the national Critical Ethnic Studies and the Futures of Genocide Conference,Riverside, California, March 12 2011).
60
Kim “Race, Gender, and Postcolonial Identity,” 25659

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bodily wholeness and the better life whiteness and subsequently, the United States
represents. Thus, even though Eun-ok wants nothing more than to be “normal,”normalcy here is represented through not only a white aesthetic but also a whitebenefactor, exemplifying what Nadia Kim calls “imperial racial formation” or “thelink between the state and dominant representations” that “has forged the superiority
and normativity of White America and, in relation the inferiority and Otherness of
Korea and its people.”61 As Address Unknown illustrates, this “inferiority andOtherness” is about more than just racial aesthetics, however, and is intimately tied toempire, militarization, technology and capital. As such, “imperial racial formation” asa concept and its emphasis on American imperialism, aptly describes racialized plastic
surgery procedures in South Korea.
Asian American scholars often overdetermine the salience of race in suchprocedures while Korean scholars focus their critiques on South Korea’s materialist
and consumer culture. The concept of imperial racial formation, however, illustrates
how understandings of racial superiority and inferiority are linked to formations ofempire with very real material outcomes (i.e. wanting a better future vis-à-vis looking“normal”) that extend beyond simply the desire to look white, which is how theseprocedures are often oversimplified within Western discourses. In other words,
Kim’s film problematizes the issue of plastic surgery, illuminating how, like sex work,
it is embedded within structures of colonial dominance. In fact, Korean historian Lee
Young-ah has recently shown that Koreans’ engagement with plastic surgery as a

61

Kim, Imperial Citizens, 56.

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colonial technology dates back even further to the Japanese colonial period.62
Although Korea’s first plastic surgery clinic opened in 1961 at Yonsei Severance
Hospital, newspaper articles can be found discussing the merits of plastic surgery as
early as the 1920s. Lee argues that Japan’s obsession with eugenics and ethnology as
well as their own relationship to whiteness as the “superior race” led to their embraceof plastic surgery as a means of remedying perceived physical inferiority. The desire
to erase or transform physical inferiority was not simply an aesthetic endeavor,
however, but imperative to the continuance and survival of racial and nationalgroups. Following this logic, many upper class and educated Koreans also began toponder the merits of plastic surgery given Korea’s tenuous global position as a colony
of Japan subject to the superiority of the Japanese and the West. According to
Korean historian Henry Em, post-colonial studies poses new questions for the studyof Korean history in regards to knowledge production during the Japanese colonial
period.63 Such inquiries problematize Euro-centric notions that privilege the West as
well as Japan, rather than relying on and thus reproducing their imperial terms. This
fruitful marrying of post-colonial studies with Korean studies exposes the various
technologies of colonial control and domination that subjectified Korean society
during the Japanese colonial period. In this vein, Lee illuminates how quotidian andfeminized notions such as beauty, in addition to state concepts such as sovereignty,
were constructed vis-à-vis processes of colonial knowledge production, illustrating

62

Lee, Young-ah, 한국 근대초기 미용성형수술의 풍경, (paper presented at Seoul National
University’s Women’s Studies Institute, Seoul, South Korea, Spring 2010).
63
Henry Em, “Introduction,” ed. Henry Em, Asea Yon’gu 51, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 1 – 6.

103

that from its very introduction, plastic surgery in Korea has always been imbricated inprocesses of imperial racial formation.
Although Eun-ok has the surgery and emerges whole and indeed beautiful, herbliss over her new appearance and boyfriend is short-lived and ironically, thenormalization of her appearance only further marginalizes her since she is now ayangkongju. In an interview included in the International release of Address Unknown,
Kim notes that he wishes to expose Americans not only to the U.S.’s prolonged
military presence in Korea but to the hardships faced by American soldiers abroad aswell. Accordingly, James does drugs to escape the difficulties of military life andbecomes increasingly violent, eventually going AWOL. Plotting his escape, Jamesasks Eun-ok if she will remember him if he leaves and sends for her later. Then, as
was customary practice of U.S. soldiers, he takes out a knife to tattoo her breast withhis name (we see this kind of tattoo on Chang-gook’s mother’s breast) in an effort toliterally inscribe himself upon her body, violently marking Eun-ok as his sexualizedcommodity. Shocked and horrified, Eun-ok fights for her life and finally succeeds ingetting the knife away from him. She points it at him, to which he responds, “Goahead, stab me” with a smirk, knowing full well that her strength could never match
his.64 It is at this moment that Eun-ok turns the knife to herself and after a split
second pause, gouges out her newly restored eye, effectively reclaiming her bodyfrom her American military boyfriend and benefactor.

64

Kim, Address Unknown, 2001.

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The scene described above can be considered the pinnacle scene of the film
and perhaps where “body genre” most aptly describes Address Unknown’s generictrappings. As viewers, we, too, viscerally experience Eun-ok’s eye gouging, made all
the more real by the sound of flesh—her eye—being torn, cut and mutilated by the
knife. Because the viewing conjures a kind of liberation via horror, disgust and fear,
Kim’s scene graphically exposes how Korea’s continued neocolonial relationship with
the U.S. is punctuated by military violence, sexual abuse and geopolitical power thatpermeates personal lives, relationships and real life bodies. While Kim supplies thenarrative with another yangkongju, Chang-gook’s mother, and her story is ultimately
tragic, as is Chang-gook’s, here through Eun-ok, Kim reclaims and redeems the
Korean nation from its indebtedness to the U.S. Like Eun-ok, who could not accessthe technology she needed to restore her to normalcy yet frees herself from James,
Kim seeks to do the same for a nation that rebuilt and recovered from the Korean
War through American aid. By reclaiming her eye and thus her body through selfmutilation, Eun-ok liberates herself not only from James but also from the“American Dream.”
Playing on Myung Ja Kim’s use of the phrase, here (and throughout the rest of
the chapter) I offer the “American Dream” as a theoretical means of bridging theinsights of Asian American Studies scholars with those of Korean Studies scholars.
“American Dream” in this context provides a frame for putting assimilation tohierarchized racial difference (privileging of whiteness and Euro-American features)
together with the formidable power of consumer culture. While the phrase and idea105

of the “American Dream” usually refers to the aspirations of immigrants within U.S.
national borders, I am instead referring to the work that empire does in establishing
aspirational desire within those outside of the physical borders of the U.S. but inside
the reach of U.S. empire. What critical ethnic studies scholar Dylan Rodriguez has
called the “ascendancy of white life,” the American Dream in this context refers to
the ways in which U.S. empire sets up the parameters for not only beauty but forhumanity.65 Surgery, then, as an intervention in identity rather than appearance,
becomes a means through which a better life is secured, one that is symbolized bywhiteness itself. While Asian American Studies scholars often lament the privilegingof whiteness as an aesthetic because it signals internalized racism and self-loathing,
Korean Studies scholars have instead focused on the devastating effects ofmaterialism and consumer culture in Korean society. By framing women’s actions
within the notion of the “American Dream,” however, we are able to understand thatwithin the frame of neoliberalism, bodily alterations and excessive participation in themarketplace are inroads through which Korean women aspire to secure the fantastic
lives that American neocolonialism and capitalism have promised. South Korean
women’s bodies intersect with imperial and corporate affective pedagogy vis-à-vis
processes of imperial racial formation that are underpinned by neoliberal mandates
for “body work.” In other words, whiteness in this case, is not so much about looks
but rather, about first world living. Since U.S. empire has come to them, Koreans

65

Dylan Rodriguez, (paper presented at the national Critical Ethnic Studies panel at the American
Studies Association national convention, San Antonio, Texas, November 19, 2010).

106need not immigrate to the U.S. but merely migrate to the marketplace to consume theAmerican Dream.
In today’s modernized South Korea, the context within which many Korean
women and some men are electing to undergo plastic surgery is certainly distinct
from that of Eun-ok. As Myung Ja Kim points out, however, “in Address Unknown,
Kim is sending a clear message that history is not the past but the present; and,without a real confrontation with history, especially the dark and shameful past, we
will just repeat it in the future.”66 Kim plays out this repetitive cycle in his thirteenthfilm, Time, which was released in 2006.67 In it, Kim extends his comments on thelimitations of plastic surgery as a means of identity formation and transformation andperhaps more importantly, critiques linear notions of progress signified by suchgendered technologies. When read in tandem, Kim’s films asks us to us tointerrogate what, if any, kinds of progress Korean society has made between the twocontexts depicted. In so doing, Kim puts forth a type of recuperative praxis, whichaccording to Freda, “neither flees into the future not (sic) the past but confronts thepresent in a lived awareness of alienation.”68
A psychological thriller, Time tells the story of a couple who has been together
for two years. Insecure that her boyfriend, Ji-woo, is growing tired of her, Seh-hee(세희) disappears and decides to undergo a full makeover in the hopes of renewing

66

Kim “Race, Gender, and Postcolonial Identity,” 260.
In further evidence of Kim’s international popularity, Time was financed by a Japanese company,
Happinet Pictures.
Chung, “Beyond ‘Extreme,” 101.
68
Freda, “Discourse on Han in Postcolonial Korea,” 14.
67

107

their love through her new found looks. Distraught over her disappearance, Ji-woo
grows increasingly agitated until he meets Sae-hee (새희).69 The two begin dating
until she reveals her true identity. Unable to cope with Sae-hee’s revelation that she isindeed, his original girlfriend, Ji-woo decides that he too, must undergo a complete
makeover so that the two can start anew. Tables turned, Sae-hee begins toexperience Ji-woo’s madness. Ultimately, Ji-woo dies in a car crash and a devastatedand incoherent Sae-hee finds herself again in the plastic surgeon’s office where heoffers, as a solution, to make her “unrecognizable.”70
Most notably, Kim links the two films through a scene in which Seh-hee,preparing for her first makeover, cuts out various facial parts from a magazine. She
chooses each part separately—one blue eye, a green eye, a white woman’s nose andlips. Reminiscent of the scene in Address Unknown when James calls Eun-ok a “shoein” for Miss America, here too, we see that Seh-hee’s body work also entails “thefantasy of Western beauty.” Although “the implied American dream for her” may be
more subtle in this film, the juxtaposition of the two women’s lives and social
contexts—Seh-hee has what Eun Ok could only dream of and yet she is perhaps justas, if not more, discontent and alienated—illuminates Kim’s desire to portray the
emptiness of the American dream as modernity and its implied progress andconsumer fulfillment.

69

The difference in her names before and after surgery in English is perhaps best explained as thedifference between Sara and Sarah.
70
Kim, Time, 2006.

108

To be sure, Kim portrays Seh-hee in an almost cartoonish fashion. Obsessedwith her boyfriend’s growing disinterest and insecure about her looks enough toundergo massive surgery, it becomes difficult at times to extract Seh-hee’s humanity
or agency from this film. His purported portrayal of the hysterical woman, usually a
sex worker and something of a hallmark in Kim’s films, has generated most of thefeminist critiques leveled against him. Myung Ja Kim, however, offers an alternative
reading of these figures:
Through the representation of these characters, Kim seems to deconstruct
the dichotomies of moral/immoral, good/evil, chaste/promiscuous, college
girl/prostitute. Exerting the twisted and displaced power of madness andgrotesqueness, they desperately attempt to turn themselves into selfdetermined individuals of their own autonomous subjectivity and sexuality. In
this sense, Kim’s films can be interpreted as antiheroic farces, criticizing thedehumanizing cultural assumptions against marginalized women.71
When read together, the female characters in Address Unknown and Time gesture
towards the shared affinities linking the sex worker (commodity) and plastic surgery
patient (consumer). While the sex worker is often portrayed as destitute and working
against constrained choices, the plastic surgery consumer is characterized by theexcesses of consumer culture. The hysteria that Kim depicts is not class specific,
however, which can perhaps be read as Kim’s critique that hetero-patriarchy itself
maddens women. Although these representations may not be empowering per se,
Kim’s female protagonists reveal the varying demands placed on female bodies andthe distinct ways in which patriarchy shapes and limits women’s choices. They pushback, however, within those limitations through “their own autonomous subjectivity
71

Kim, “Race, Gender, and Postcolonial Identity,” 254.

109

and sexuality.” Moreover, Kim is just as graphic in depicting the violence of plastic
surgery as he is depicting sexual violence. Unlike mainstream portrayals such as 200
Pounds Beauty that gloss over the actual procedures thus positing plastic surgery
instead as some sort of magical, painless and instantaneous transformation, Timeopens with a surgery sequence not for the faint. Replete with sutured and slashedbody parts, Kim’s use of body genre here illuminates yet another mode of physicalviolence and pain experienced by the female body, distinct from yet related to that of
Eun-ok’s. Since the film opens with these scenes, before the viewer has beenacquainted with the main character, these scenes not only indicate the corporeal
violence experienced by Seh-hee herself but the violence experienced by thethousands of Korean women daily frequenting plastic surgery clinics in South Korea.
That is, Kim’s film opens with an indictment of plastic surgery as gendered violence.
In addition to the contemporary reality of the physical violence of plastic
surgery, Kim shows us that “history is not the past but the present” on a national
level vis-à-vis Sae-hee’s double existence. Much like Korea’s national division, which
has engendered not only a physical border—the DMZ—but an historical one thatrecounts history as either before or after the Korean War, Sae-hee’s existence, too,
becomes ever after about the demarcation between her pre and post-surgery self. As
the last third of the film finds her seeking a return to her and Jiwoo’s purer love, theirstate-of-affairs before her surgery, the viewer comes to feel that such a return is futile.
Aptly titled then, time figures prominently in the film with the charactersconstantly lamenting the passage of time and/or their inability to go back in time.
110Ultimately, however, the viewer witnesses as their actions take them back where they
started as Kim ends the movie with one of the opening frames of Seh-Hee bumping
into a woman who has just exited a plastic surgery clinic. Their collision causes thewoman to drop the photo she is carrying and Seh-hee offers to have it fixed. Only
this time, the viewer realizes that the woman Seh-hee bumps into is a newlytransformed and “unrecognizable” Sae-hee and that the photo is of Sae-hee,disheveled and hysterical, just before she undergoes surgery yet again after Ji-woo’s
death. Rather than following Seh-hee as she goes to have the frame fixed as the film
does originally, our gaze fixes on Sae-hee as she escapes into a huge crowd, becoming
just one in many, many similar faces. By ending his film as such, Kim denaturalizes
linear notions of progress, especially as they pertain to technologies such as plastic
surgery. The film ends where it begins indicating the absence of a teleological end
point of progress symbolized by technologies such as plastic surgery.
And ironically, although U.S. discourses critique Korean women for emerging
post-surgery looking more Euro-American and thus different from their assigned
racialized traits, Kim ends his film highlighting the uniformity and conformity of
Korean looks as a product of the plastic surgery craze. His ending is all the morepoignant given that, in an era of neoliberalism, plastic surgery is often proffered as a
viable solution to individual problems. As a method of self-management and care,
plastic surgery has become normalized as a means of remedying an undisciplined
body. As Sae-hee blends in with the rest of the crowd, the camera zooms farther andfarther out, enlargening the sea of people into which she disappears. Sae-hee is no111

longer an individual but has effectively rejoined the collective consciousness. This
final scene ties Sae-hee’s individual predicament to the collective suffering signified
by han. Just as Kim begins the movie with a generalized scene optimizing thephysical pain of plastic surgery, he also ends with a scene of the masses that says justas much about Korean women and the nation as a whole as it does about one filmic
character. As such, Kim’s film brings together the past and present as well as theindividual and the collective in order to show plastic surgery as a form of genderedviolence—of han—that continues to permeate and unsettle the lives of Koreans
today.
Not only does Kim bring these insights to bear on plastic surgery as atechnology, however, but to the film industry as well. Much in the same way that
doctors slice, suture and stitch bodies, so do directors splice, edit and cut film inorder to tell easily packaged and palatable stories. As outlined in the previous section,
Korean film has been a medium through which filmmakers have both propagandized
and critiqued South Korea’s national narratives. Sae-hee’s holding of the frame andSeh-hee’s breaking of it can be read as Kim’s critique of the medium and industry offilm as a type of cosmetic surgery for the nation. Kim asserts that like plastic surgery,film cannot be considered a teleological technology but rather, one with politicallyladen historical origins that gets mediated within specific contexts towards different
political ends. Significantly, the South Korean government is zealously marketing
both cosmetic surgery and Korean film as international industries. As stories ofmultifarious genres enter the international market, South Korean corporations sell, in112

addition to movie tickets and dvds, South Korean “looks.” Meticulously surgeoned
actors represent the hope of obtaining such beauty vis-à-vis South Korea’s medical
tourism market. In many parts of Asia, such “looks” have come to signify, not theAmerican Dream, but the “South Korean Dream” of capitalist modernity.

THE HORRIFIED BODY (GENRE) IN BONG MAN-DAE’S CINDERELLAAs of yet unwritten about in academic texts on Korean cinema, Bong Man-dae
is a much lesser known director than his notorious counterpart, Kim Ki-duk. An
actor, director and screenwriter, Bong directed fifteen straight-to-video films as well
as a television series in 2004 and is perhaps best known as a soft core porn director.72
Bong’s star is on the rise, however, as he recently participated in the IPhone 4 Film
Festival, which featured a dozen short films made by well-known Korean directors
exclusively on their IPhones.73
If, as Chung asserts, Kim’s corporeal effects can be read as an example ofWilliams’ “body genre,” then Bong Man-dae’s 2006 horror film, Cinderella, offers an
example of how horror and melodrama operate together within this genre. The film
begins with Hyunsu’s mother carrying a birthday cake down a dark set of stairs andfinding a young girl who has hanged herself. After this suicide flashback, the movie
proceeds in chronological time and revolves around Hyunsu, a high school student,
72“Bong Man-dae Biography” accessed on December 1, 2010,
http://www.hancinema.net/korean_Bong_Man-dae.php.
73
Lee Hyo Won, “Lights! IPhone! Action!” accessed on December 1, 2010,
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/art/2010/09/141_73647.html.
Directors’ shorts were available for viewing on the IPhone 4 Film Festival’s website from October 6
through the 31 and also screened at theaters in Seoul.

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whose mother is a plastic surgeon and whose friends, one-by-one, elect surgery at her
hands. Strangely enough, after each friend goes under the knife, the friend ishaunted, feeling as if something is grossly wrong with her face until she is compelled
to mutilate it. Amidst this gruesome plot, the viewer, along with Hyunsu herself,
begins to understand that Hyunsu’s own story is key to what is happening to her
friends. Burned beyond recognition as a toddler when her mother leaves her in thecar (while she argues with Hyunsu’s father) and it explodes, Hyunsu nearly loses herlife. Unable to accept either her near death or her disfigurement, her mother
serendipitously meets an orphaned girl who asks her to take her home. She does andin what she perceives as an act of motherly love, Hyunsu’s mother removes the faceof the orphaned girl and puts it on Hyunsu, allowing her to live a normal life with abeautiful face. Unable to kill the orphan child afterwards, Hyunsu’s mother locks thegirl in her basement, raising her there secretly and promising her, “I’ll make you a
new face; I will make you pretty.”74 Ultimately the viewer discovers that it is theorphan girl who has hung herself—driven mad by her jealousy and resentment
towards an unknowing Hyunsu—and it is the orphan’s ghost who now haunts
Hyunsu and her friends from beyond, seeking revenge for her stolen face and life.
As outlined in the previous section, Williams’ “body genre” includes
pornography, horror and melodrama. She groups these three types of film under one
rubric because all three elicit physical responses from the viewer that mimic what ishappening to the characters’ bodies on screen. Furthermore, as Williams writes,

74

Bong, Cinderella, 2006.

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although the violence, gore and sentimentality of these genres have often beencharacterized as gratuitous, they serve the function of problem-solving:
The deployment of sex, violence, and emotion would thus seem to have very
precise functions in these body genres. Like all popular genres, they addresspersistent problems in our culture, in our sexualities, in our very identities.
The deployment of sex, violence, and emotion is thus in no way gratuitousand in no way strictly limited to each of these genres; it is instead a culturalform of problem solving.75
While Williams attempts to think comparatively about these types of film, Bong’s
Cinderella is unique in that it combines the horror genre with what Williams calls“weepies,” commonly known as “chick flicks” such as Steel Magnolias and Terms ofEndearment. In so doing, Cinderella can be read as an indictment of both plastic
surgery and motherhood within modern Korean society.
On the one hand, Cinderella is a story of maternal pathos. Like Debra Winger
in Terms of Endearment or Bette Midler in Stella, two films Williams uses to exemplify“weepies,” Cinderella also features a longsuffering mother who harbors a dark secretin the service of bettering her daughter’s life. As Williams points out, “In these
fantasies the quest for connection is always tinged with the melancholy of loss.
Origins are already lost, the encounters always take place too late, on death beds orover coffins.”76 Indeed, Hyunsu’s mother is overcome by loss on multiple fronts—
not only does she nearly lose Hyunsu as a child but then again as a teenager once
Hyunsu begins to unravel the truth about her past in order to recover her own lost
origins. To make matters worse, Hyunsu’s mother is guilt-ridden over the loss of the
75

Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader,ed. Sue Thornham, (New York: New York University Press, 1999) 276.
76
Williams, “Film Bodies,” 279.

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orphan girl. Directed by this guilt and at the orphan ghost’s bidding, the film ends
with Hyunsu’s mother about to operate on Hyunsu only this time to remove her facein order to put it on the orphan’s corpse, back to its rightful owner. Unable,
however, to cut into Hyunsu’s face, her mother falls to the ground weeping.
Enraged, the orphan girl’s ghost descends on Hyunsu and attempts to do what her
mother could not. In just the knick of time, Hyunsu’s mother saves her by assuaging
the angry ghost, telling her “I’m your mother, baby. And you are the pretty one.”77
Leading the ghost away from the table to save Hyunsu, her mother loses her daughter
again—this time in order to save her. As such, even as the film’s final scene is one of
the most horrific, replete with the final scare notorious to horror films that makes
audiences jump out of their seats, it ends with the ultimate sense of loss andunfulfilled connection between Hyunsu and her mother.
While this story is indeed fantastical, Korea’s modern history—from awoman’s perspective—is a tale of changing notions of femininity yet unwaveringmotherly sacrifice.78 As feminist scholar Cho Haejoang points out, Korean
femininity has undergone three major shifts in the 20th Century. The shift fromtraditional patriarchy to modern patriarchy or from mother-centered to a wifecentered patriarchy, marks Korean women’s first major transition in the 20th century.
During Japanese colonial rule, although the patrilineal principle that privileged fathers
77

Bong, Cinderella, 2006.
At the time of writing this chapter, American doctors performed the first full face transplant in the
U.S., making the Cinderella’s storyline perhaps a bit less fantastical.
Katie Moisse, “Complete Face Transplant Gives Texas Man New Lease on Life,” ABC News,
accessed on March 21, 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/full-face-transplant-dallaswiens-texas-construction-worker/story?id=13184195.
78

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remained culturally salient, mothers were placed at the center of the household since
many men either emigrated to find work or joined independence movements.
Accordingly, this first generation of women was expected to be hardworking, wise
and self-sacrificing. Not only did they take care of their immediate families but theyalso orchestrated the well being of their extended families. As Cho notes, however,their self-sacrificing was recognized and appreciated since most Koreans lived in suchdestitution that deferred gratification was the order of the day. Beginning in the
1960s and extending through to the 1980s, however, the second generation of
Korean women experienced the nuclearization of the family and their own“housewifization” and as such, their main objectives were to make their families
modern and middle-class.79 Since many of these women grew up in poverty but
could raise their children in relative affluence, a new generation of middle-classmothers put an emphasis on middle-class values: a better apartment, their children’s
education, and advantageous marriages for their children.80
The third transition, ushered in with consumer culture, occurred between the
1980s and 90s affecting the third generation of Korean women who came of age inthe 1980s and grew up during the democratic student movements and the women’sliberation movement in Korea. While the women’s movement was isolated to elite
79

As transnational feminist scholars point out, such modern ways of being were themselvesdisciplinary in the Foucauldian sense.
80
Cho credits these women as the backbone of change in Korea: “I regard women of this generation
as the main source of the Korean economic transformation’s vitality. With such a strong yearning
for modernity, refusing to live like their own mothers who struggled for mere survival, disregarding
their incompetent fathers and husbands, they have transformed their society as well as themselves”
Cho Haejoang, “Living with Conflicting Subjectivities: Mother, Motherly Wife and Sexy Woman in
the Transition from Colonial Modern to Postmodern Korea,” (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i
Press, 2002) 176.

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circles, rhetoric of “self-realization,” urging women to define themselves as
individuals rather than through family relations, circulated widely. As radical
movements of the 1980s died down, however, and consumer culture escalated, ideals
privileging individuality transformed into narcissistic individuality. According to Cho:
In the name of individuality and self-expression, the image of the feminine
as embodied in a lovely and sexy woman was being constructed. Womenbought the image, partly out of a desperate striving to escape their mothers’
hold, to fashion themselves in their own style as promised by the newopportunities for consumption. Ironically, these newly feminine daughters
were manufactured by the ambitious women of the previous generation, who
encouraged them to undergo cosmetic surgery on their eyes and noses,
believing that an improved appearance would change their daughters’ life
chances in marriage and employment.81
As Cho cogently states, motherhood has become implicated in neoliberal forms ofself-management as mothers (and women more generally) attempt to advance theirchildren’s lives vis-à-vis consumer culture. In a highly competitive society, especiallyin the aftermath of the 1997 Economic Crisis, mothers have become critical to themaintenance of the plastic surgery industry. Hyunsu’s mother, both a sacrificial
mother and a plastic surgeon, is perhaps the most telling representation of thisphenomenon. While Kim’s Time offers a critique of Korean postmodernity and theexcesses of capitalism, Bong’s film takes this critique a step further by showing how
neoliberalism and consumer culture has come to define even the most intimate ofrelationships—that between mother and daughter.
Accordingly, Hyunsu and her mother’s relationship is defined by body workon multiple levels. As a plastic surgeon, Hyunsu’s mother works on bodies as a81

Cho, “Living with Conflicting Subjectivities,” 182.

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profession and as a mad science. Given the film’s Frankensteinian undertones,
Hyunsu’s mother literally illustrates how Korean mothers, in the desire to secure theirchildren’s futures, make their children into their own creations. Echoing Kim’s
critiques not only of cosmetic surgery but of the film industry, Bong points out thatmothers also edit and splice their children, literally and figuratively in order to achievesociety’s ideals. For example, If You Were Me 1 (여섯개의 시선 2003), an omnibus
film comprised of six shorts commissioned by the South Korean Human Rights
Commission, documents how some Korean children undergo lingual frenectomy or
tongue cutting surgery because their parents believe the procedure will improve theirEnglish pronunciation.82 While the documentary wrought much controversy upon its
debut, catalyzing debates similar to those around the ssangkkŏp‘ul procedure, theexample offers a more utilitarian example of such neoliberal impulses. That is to say,while discourses around cosmetic surgery procedures often center beauty even when
its recipients cite practical reasons for undergoing them, frenectomies illustrate a casein which physical selves are altered for purely practical and functional reasons. Little
evidence exists, however, to suggest that these procedures actually work especiallygiven the hundreds of thousands of Korean Americans who speak perfect English
without ever having undergone them.83 Korean academies or hagwŏns, which Koreanchildren notoriously attend after school to improve their skills in English, Math andScience, also offer another example of how Korea’s highly competitive society
82

If You Were Me 1, 여섯개의 시 1. DVD. (Park, Gwang Su and Park, Jin Pyo, 2003: 110 min)
Demick, Barbara. “A snip of the tongue and English is yours!” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2002.
http://web.archive.org/web/20061210222056/http://www2.gol.com/users/coynerhm/a_snip_of_t
he_tongue_and_english.htm
83

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engenders conformity to trends and neoliberal solutions in order to secureadvancement. The Washington Post reports that Korean parents spent 15.6 billion
dollars in 2006 on English language tutors alone and at least 24,000 children in thefirst to twelve grades left the country to study English abroad.84 As these examples
show, pressures abound in South Korea for mothers to mold their children in thehopes of bettering their future.
Yet, Hyunsu and her mother work on their bodies in less permanent andmundane ways as well. In multiple scenes Hyunsu is bathed by her mother andreceives facials and facial masks from her mother—everyday occurrences for many
Korean mothers and daughters who often bond by sharing beauty secrets andpractices.85 When the viewer realizes, however, that Hyunsu’s mother puts hardening
masks on Hyunsu’s face not only to give her better skin but also because she gives
the orphan girl the hardened masks to wear, the film puts the mundane together withthe horrific. In doing so, Bong denormalizes commonplace beauty practices. For
Hyunsu, this economy of beauty is deadly, cultivating between her and her mother acloseness that kills. While such mundane forms of body work do not usually end indeath for real life practitioners, one questions what other forms of being become
foreclosed by these practices and standardized notions of beauty.

84

Cho, Johee, “English is the Golden Tongue for S. Koreans,” July 2, 2007.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/01/AR2007070101259.html
85This is certainly true in my own family. My own relationship with my mother is characterized byvisits to the spa and sharing of beauty products and techniques. My cousin recently took what shelearned from her mother to the bank when she launched her own skincare line based on her mother’s
beauty practices and secrets. Another cousin recently opened an elite health spa that features
traditional Korean skincare and healing methods.

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Despite the fact that Cinderella tells a tale of maternal pathos, it is also a horror
story. As Williams outlines, American horror stories often contend with issues ofsexual difference:
Some of the most violent and terrifying moments of the horror film genre
occur in moments when the female victim meets the psycho-killer-monster
unexpectedly, before she is ready […] This surprise encounter, too early, often
takes place at a moment of sexual anticipation when the female victim thinks
she is about to meet her boyfriend or lover. The monster’s violent attack on
the female victims vividly enacts a symbolic castration which often functions
as a kind of punishment for an ill-timed exhibition of sexual desire.86
While the “problem-solving” enacted in American horror films has to do with sexual
difference, disciplining young girls’ sexual identities and desires at the same timeteaching the young adolescent male spectators often drawn to this genre, Cinderella
does not involve sexual relationships at all. In fact, save Hyunsu’s father’s character,there are no males in the storyline. Neither Hyunsu nor her friends have boyfriends
or love interests. For these girls, terrifying moments occur once they go under the
knife, receiving the new face the orphan girl herself has been promised but neverreceived. Rather than the “ill-timed exhibitions of sexual desire” that do American
victims in, Hyunsu’s friends are victimized for exhibitions of vanity and the easy fix
plastic surgery as modern science presents.
Accordingly, Bong’s film is rife with tension between the traditional and themodern and perhaps more profoundly between North Korea and South as
represented by Hyunsu and the orphan girl’s dichotomous existence. Here, Bong’s
film finds synergy with Kim’s in that he, too, illustrates the salience of history to the86

Williams, “Film Bodies,” 279.

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contemporary situation of Korea: “history is not the past but the present.” Hyunsu,
like discursive depictions of South Korea, epitomizes the excesses of capitalist
modernity with her privileged lifestyle, Western style home and her mother’s
profession and status as a divorcee. The orphan girl on the other hand, isolated andliterally stuck in time as a child despite her maturing body, is anachronistic, much as
popular discourses paint North Korea. This binary is fortified by the orphan girl’s
grandmother’s attempts to locate her. In an early scene, Hyunsu waits for the bus
with her friends before her birthday party. At the bus stop a grandmother, hunchedover and wearing working class clothing, hands out leaflets of a missing child.
Hyunsu receives one of the leaflets, which later becomes a clue to her origin story as
the child looks like her. She first thinks that she is the orphan girl in the leaflet only
to discover that it is her face that she has taken. In stark opposition to the glossy
materialism and wealth characterizing Hyunsu’s modern home, the grandmotherrepresents traditional Korea, the loss of which produces anxieties in South Korea’s
postmodern capitalist society, while the orphan girl—North Korea—is literally
sequestered from the world. In this vein, the orphan girl seeks her lost face, haunting
Hyunsu, her mother and her friends with her demands to “give me back my face.”
Hyunsu’s friends, however, describe the orphan girl’s grip on them as an inability to“stop wanting to mess up my face” because of the feeling that “this isn’t my face.”
Their cries are always for a return to realness, much like Seh-hee’s desire to return toher pre-surgery life and love with Jiwoo. In marked contrast, Hyunsu’s mothercontinually tells the orphan girl, “I’ll make you a new face.” Read together, these122constant iterations throughout the film create a back and forth between the
traditional and the modern, a desire to “go back” versus a desire for something new,
between North Korea and South.
This tug of war is also subtly alluded to by the characters’ use of language.
The word “mine” (naŭi) is rarely used in the Korean language in regards to familial
relationships. Instead, “our” (uri) is often used to indicate a possessive relationshipbetween family members and romantic partners. For example, even though ahusband is married only to his wife, a wife will commonly refer to her husband as uri
namp‘yŏn or “our husband” despite the fact that the possessive relationship is inrelation to her and her alone. In a scene where Hyunsu is receiving a facial from her
mother, she describes her mother as “my mother” to which her mother asks, “My
mother? Not our mother?” and Hyunsu replies, “No, you are my mother.”87
Similarly, when Hyunsu’s mother confronts her ex-husband about his relationshipwith Hyunsu, she tells him that she is “my daughter.” When he interjects that she isalso his, she says, “No, she’s mine, not ours.”88 Most noticeably, in all of Hyunsu’s
mother’s flashbacks of the orphan girl as a small, happy child (before she loses herface), she laughs, throws her arms around Hyunsu’s mother and calls her “ourmother.”89 While these linguistic differences may seem minute, Bong’s
differentiation between possessive terms can be read as an indictment of eroding
Korean values. That is to say, uri indicates a different understanding of “I” that does

87

Bong, Cinderella, 2006.
Ibid.
89
Ibid.
88

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not see itself as an individual but rather, as part of a collective. Thus, “my mother” is
not mine alone but a collective being with relationships that extend beyond themother/child connection. As such, Hyunsu and her mother’s departure in terms ofclaiming one another indicates a vast departure from traditional understandings offamilial ties, values and language. In comparison, the orphan girl and her
grandmother represent a purity of the past and a lost innocence. Bong juxtaposes thetwo pairs—Hyunsu and her mother; the orphan girl and her grandmother—in orderto highlight the loss accompanying modern, meaning Western, practices and ways ofliving. In other words, while modern discourses often emphasize what is to begained when non-Western countries adopt Western ways, Bong illustrates theirreversible cultural as well as material consequences.
Like Kim, however, Bong’s storytelling falls into sexist pitfalls. His symbolic
dichotomy—traditional/modern; North/South Korea—is highly gendered and as
mentioned above, there are no males in the storyline except for Hyunsu’s father.
Although her father is a conductor of a symphony and listed as “Vivaldi” in herphone, alluding to the fact that his lifestyle is perhaps more Western as well, he plays
no significant part in her life nor the decisions made by her mother. Furthermore,when not at Hyunsu’s home, Hyunsu and her friends are largely depicted in art class
where they sculpt one another from large clay blobs. It is here in these gendered
spaces, where only the girls reside attempting a European art form, that many of thegruesome scenes occur. For instance, two of Hyunsu’s friends, possessed by theorphan girl after both having surgery, turn from their clay to one another and cut into
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each others’ faces with their sculpting knives. They are found drenched in blood,
admiring their work. Thus, Cinderella is a gendered indictment of consumerism andcapitalist modernity as is often the case in nationalist narratives. As Laura Nelson
points out:
The imagined inability of women, as a class, to restrain their desires is seen
as leading to the social disharmonies of conspicuous consumption, thefinancial ruin of spending beyond one’s means, and the corrupting adoptionof foreign ways and things. […] This sense that the nation is made vulnerable
through its women-as-consumers seems almost sexual, metaphorically related
to the idea that the nation’s women need to be protected from the predations,or temptations, of foreign men.90
Here, Nelson points out that consumption and sex—body work—allegorize struggles
over national boundaries. In other words, the gendered female body provides avehicle through which contestations over tradition and modernity are enacted andperformed.

CONCLUSION
In Korean and Korean American studies as well as popular depictions about
Korean women, the yangkongju has emerged as a particularly fetishized object of study
that symbolizes feminist calls for justice. The plastic surgery consumer, on the other
hand, has emerged as a representation of South Korean women’s excessive
consumption and internalized racial oppression. By reading these figures together
through the films of Kim Ki-duk and Bong Man-dae, I have attempted to show that,90

Laura Nelson, Measured Excess: Status, Gender and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000) 144.

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like the yangkongju, the plastic surgery consumer is also embedded within a history ofcolonial domination, militarized capitalism and imperial racial formation. Indeed,
these films demand that the viewer contend with Korea’s modern history and theways in which Korea’s entanglements with U.S. empire have made specific demands
on gendered bodies. In theorizing intersections between sexual labor and bodily
manipulations, both distinct types of body work, we can begin to have larger
conversations that do not fetishize the female laboring body or castigate female
consumers but rather, put the two into conversation in order to understand how
capitalism and (neo)colonialism mobilize gendered bodies towards different ends.
Rather than conceiving of plastic surgery consumers as cultural dupes who have given
into the false consciousnesses created by structures of racism, sexism and/or
consumer culture, connecting women’s everyday beauty choices to their larger
historical contexts provides new strategies for understanding these issues. Far morethan just frivolous concerns, beauty choices—women’s body work—are the everyday
manifestations of gendered historical legacies that emerge as interventions in identitythat women often see as inroads to the procurement of the “American Dream.”
These legacies resonate throughout the diaspora and by opening our frame ofreference to the myriad ways in which women’s bodies are subjected we can perhaps
conceive of new methods of thinking about and organizing around these issues on atransnational scale.

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CHAPTER THREE
ENTERTAINING BEAUTY: HALLYU, COSMETIC SURGERY,AND SOUTH KOREA’S BURGEONING MEDICAL TOURISM INDUSTRY“…we must consider the cosmetic surgery patient as a cultural production, one that iscreated in the process of becoming a patient.”--Victoria Pitts-Taylor1“The Koreans have just begun to realize that culture can be as profitable assemiconductors or cars.”--Doobo Shim2

In 2005, half of all South Korean households tuned in to watch the finale ofwhat was, to date, the most popular South Korean television serial in its genre, My
Lovely Samsoon (내 이름은 김삼순 2005). Dubbed Korea’s Bridget Jones’ Diary, thedrama or K-drama (as Korean television serials are commonly called) chronicles the
exploits of an overweight, single, and almost thirty year old pastry chef embarking on
her career while losing, then finding, love along the way. The lead character, Samsoon,
played by Kim Sun-ah, is a heroine (much like Bridget Jones) with whom average
women can relate.3 Considered overweight and perhaps worse yet, brazen

1 Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture, (New Brunswick:

Rutgers University Press, 2007) 181.
2 Doobo Shim, “Waxing the Korean Wave,” ARI Working Paper, No. 158, June 2011,www.nus.ari.edu.sg/pub/wps.html, 7.
3 In this chapter I use the widely accepted (on fan sites, webpages, etc.) romanized spellings of Kdrama actors’ and characters’ names rather than their McCune-Reischauer transliterations.

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and outspoken by South Korean standards, Samsoon offers a departure from thesvelte heroines typical of most dramas, thus inviting her female viewers to connect
with her struggles with constraining notions of femininity and beauty.4
The first episode finds Samsoon going to a matchmaking company for a
consultation after she catches her boyfriend of three years cheating on her on
Christmas Eve. After the manager asks her a series of questions about her family,
their wealth (or lack thereof), and her position within the family (she is the youngestof three daughters), he asks if she has had any work done on her face. When she
replies that she is 100 percent natural, he responds by saying: “What were you
thinking? How could you not get plastic surgery in today’s world with that face? Just
look at yourself!”5 He then advises her that “It’s easier to get hit by an atomic bombthan for a woman over thirty to find a boyfriend.”6 Aghast, Samsoon retaliates withthe sharp wit that is a hallmark of her character traits. The viewer soon realizes,
however, that Samsoon is dreaming having dozed off in the waiting area of thematchmaking company. When she does meet with the manager after awaking, heasks the same series of questions but rather than asking about or suggesting plastic
surgery, this time he suggests their unlimited dating, special membership for the
exorbitant price of 9,990,000 W—nearly $6,600 U.S. dollars.

4 Just as Renee Zellwegger did for Bridget Jones Diary, Kim Sun-ah also received much media attention
for gaining weight specifically for the role. As in Zellwegger’s case, people debated whether Lee’s
final weight of 52 kilograms (she gained 7 kilograms) really put her in the category of “overweight.”
5 My Lovely Samsoon (내 이름은 김삼순), “Episode 1,” My Lovely Samsoon instant stream, 57:43,
http://www.dramafever.com/drama/8/1/My_Lovely_Sam_Soon/
6 Ibid.

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As the above scene reveals, plastic surgery is considered a rational tool of selfenhancement in South Korea. Women are increasingly going under the knife (andpaying for dating services) to increase their chances on the marriage and labormarkets.7 In fact, women like Samsoon who do not engage in such practices areoften seen as unfulfilling their potential while women who do are deemed protean
go-getters. That the above sequence is but a dream is all the more telling since theseadmonishments are coming from our heroine’s subconscious rather than an externalsource, symbolizing the ways in which neoliberal mandates for self-management are
not only received by women but internalized modes of self-discipline as well. What’smore, that the rest of the series does not focus on cosmetic surgery illustrates how
such issues of body image and modification are quotidian experiences for womensuch as Samsoon.
In my interview with a representative from Seoul Tourism Organization’s
Tourism Marketing Division, she conceded that while medical tourism is a growing
industry for South Korea, their organization focuses little on advertising for its plastic
surgery market. She observed that Hallyu is their advertising given its worldwide
popularity.8 Dubbed Hallyu or “Korean Wave” by Chinese reporters in the late 1990s
for its rippling popularity amongst Chinese teens, Hallyu has culturally dominatedAsia for more than a decade. As such, popular dramas (or K-dramas as they are
7 According to feminist scholar Park Hye Gyong, “Increased economic instability wrought by neo-liberalism bolsters market-oriented social value. After the 1990s and especially after South Korea’s
Economic Crisis in 1997, commercial websites and matchmaking services began to emerge, creating asituation where individuals’ choices for partners for either marriage or dating have become mediatedby markets.”
Park Hye Gyong, Personal Communication, 9 February 2012.
8 Eun Mi Kim, personal interview, March 10, 2010.

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popularly referred) like My Lovely Samsoon not only reflect the normalized practices
and ideas of South Korean society but also circulate them to an international
audience. As noted above, more than half of all Korean households tuned into theseries and according to the Korean Culture and Information Service and Ministry of
Culture, Sports and Tourism, it is considered one of the top ten Korean dramas thathas been “particularly beloved by foreign fans.”9 In fact, during the Ministry of
Culture, Sports and Tourism’s 4-day annual international content market event in2005, My Lovely Samsoon pulled in US $9 million in sales to overseas networks.10
Hallyu seemingly conquered the European market last June when French fan frenzy
made international headlines during the “SM Town Live in Paris” concerts.11 Morerecently, Hallyu casted an even wider net with K-pop sensation Girls’ Generation
making their U.S. late night debut on The David Letterman Show and morning show
debuts on Live with Kelly and Good Morning America with their English single, The Boys.
The marketing representative’s recognition of Hallyu’s popularity is perhaps
unsurprising given its global reach. What is notable, however, is theacknowledgement of the symbiotic relationship between Hallyu and medical
tourism—two booming South Korean industries. This chapter takes seriously the

9 Wi Tack-Whan and Chung Ah-young, K-Drama: A New TV Genre with Global Appeal (Seoul: Korean
Culture and Information Service, 2011) 76.
The other top ten: Jewel in the Palace (2003 – 2004), Winter Sonata (2002), Autumn in My Heart (2000),Sarangbi: Winter Sonata, Jumong (2006 – 2007), Coffee Prince (2007), Full House (2004), Boys Over Flowers(2009), Iris (2009), Secret Garden (2010 – 2011) pages 77 – 87.
10 Doobo Shim, “The Growth of Korean Cultural Industries and the Korean Wave” in East Asian
Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave ed. Chua Beng Huat et al. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2008) 28.
11 “K-Pop Invades Europe,” June 13, 2011, accessed July 1, 2011,
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/06/13/2011061300450.html.

130epigraph at its beginning: “…we must consider the cosmetic surgery patient as acultural production, one that is created in the process of becoming a patient.”12 As
such, this chapter locates popular culture and K-dramas in particular, as an epicenterof the “process of becoming a patient” and attempts to understand how popular
culture representations intersect with consumer practices. I argue that K-dramas act
as “technologies of subjectivity” that proliferate neoliberal governmentalities thatchampion cosmetic surgery (among other things) as viable avenues for selfmanagement and investment. If The Oprah Winfrey Show is exemplary of the ways inwhich neoliberalism operates through the televisual realm in the U.S., as chapter one
asserts, then Hallyu or K-dramas more specifically, operate similarly in the South
Korean context. In other words, K-dramas are cultural mechanisms that reify
neoliberalism as social ethos. This is powerful not only in the South Korean context
but precisely because, like The Oprah Winfrey Show, Hallyu travels transnational
trajectories because of its global popularity.
South Korea expects to welcome 100,000 medical tourists in 2012, most of
who will be cosmetic surgery patients—South Korea’s medical tourism industry’s
most popular and lucrative field.13 These rising numbers of medical tourists point toa significant trend in the healthcare industry today: medical care has increasingly
become a consumer good that is bought and sold through transnational circuits andjust as manufacturers take their businesses abroad for cost effectiveness, medical
12 Pitts-Taylor, Surgery Junkies, 181.
13 Bae Ji-sook, “[KoreaToday] Cosmetic Surgery Emerges as Export Product,” The Korea Times(Korea Today, January 27, 2010),
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/01/117_59782.html.

131consumers are now expected to do so as well. According to medical anthropologist
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, while commodification of the body is not specifically a resultof globalization, new technologies have generated new markets for bodies and bodyparts.14 As such, this chapter illustrates the mutually constitutive nature of Hallyu andSouth Korea’s medical tourism industry. Through its representations of South
Korean capitalist modernity, Hallyu does the affective work necessary to interpellate
Asian women as consumers of medical procedures. As sociologist Charis Thompson
articulates, “It has often been argued that markets need affect; medical migrations
bring this point home for markets that are increasingly capitalized and that take as
their raw material life itself.”15 In other words, cosmetic surgery, and traveling toSouth Korea to undergo it, becomes a rational economic investment in part becauseof how it is affectively tied to Hallyu’s popular culture representations. Hallyu’s
effects are not uniform, however, but constitute different meanings depending on thetransnational connectivities it travels and the contexts within which it is received.
Thus, I argue that Hallyu constructs a fantasy space for its viewers that either
resurrects nostalgic dreams of the past or erects aspirational dreams—a “KoreanDream.” In both cases, emulating South Korean beauty, because of Hallyu’s
enmeshed nature with South Korea’s cosmetic surgery (and other beauty) industries,
is coded as one avenue of embodying such dreams.

14 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Bodies for Sale – Whole or in Parts,” in Commodifying Bodies (Thousand

Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003), 1 – 8.
15 Charis Thompson, “Medical Migrations Afterword: Science as Vacation?,” Body & Society 17, no. 2& 3 (2011): 210 - 211.

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First, this chapter offers a brief history of South Korean television and theglobal rise of Hallyu and K-dramas in particular. Second, this chapter closely reads
popular K-dramas My Lovely Samsoon, Boys Over Flowers (꽃보다 남자 2009), and Before
and After Plastic Surgery Clinic (비포&애프터 서형외과 2008), heretofore referred toas B & A, in order to examine the methods and narrative logics employed by South
Korean dramas to subjectify viewers and normalize cosmetic surgery. Next, thischapter provides an historical overview of South Korea’s medical tourism industry, its
current outlook and marketing strategies. This chapter culminates with a discussionof how the medical tourism industry intersects with Hallyu, arguing that Hallyu
engenders both nostalgic and aspirational dreams amongst its fans that ultimately
render the consumer market a viable space for enacting (at least in part) those
dreams.

THE RISE OF THE KOREAN DRAMA
Like Korean cinema, the history of the Korean drama has also been affectedby the country’s political trajectory. Korea’s first broadcasting company, Kyungseung
Broadcasting Company, was established during Japanese occupation by the ResidentGeneral, the Japanese governing body of colonial Korea.16 Although its radio
programming was mainly propagandist in nature, designed to deliver messages to the
Korean people from the Japanese government, it was the foundation for the Korean
16 Do Kyun Kim and Se-Jin Kim, “Hallyu from Its Origin to Present: A Historical Overview,” inHallyu: Influence of Korean Popular Culture in Asia and Beyond, ed. Do Kyun Kim and Min-Sun Kim(Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2011), 21.

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broadcasting industry and eventually became the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS),which is currently the largest broadcasting company in South Korea. Korea’s shortlived first television network, HLKZ-TV, launched in May of 1956.17 Five years later,
the aforementioned KBS, Tong Yang Television Company (TBC) and Munhwa
Broadcasting Company (MBC) were established and until 1991, Korean television
stations were primarily supported and controlled by the South Korean government.18
The establishment of these television networks brought with them the first era of
Korean dramas. Because little has been written on South Korean dramas before
Hallyu, perhaps owing the government’s central involvement, the following section
outlining the early history of K-dramas relies heavily on a governmental publication,
K-dramas: A New TV Genre with Global Appeal, published by the Korean Culture andInformation Service and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.
Unlike the dramas of today, dramas of the mid-1960s offered little by way ofentertainment and were used instead as education and propaganda tools of theauthoritarian government. The very first drama, Backstreet of Seoul (KBS 1962),
resembled more of a lecture series on the problems of urban life while children’s
drama, Yeong-i’s Diary (KBS 1970), served as a platform for public campaign
announcements. Real Theater (KBS 1964 – 1985) was a major vehicle through which

17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.

The Korean Culture and Information Service’s publication, K-Drama, A New TV Genre with Global
Appeal, does not mention government involvement with television networks and instead describe
KBS as the South Korea’s first public broadcaster and TBC and MBC as the first commercial
broadcasters.
Wi and Young, K-Drama, 59.

134the government drove their anti-communist message home to citizens for two
decades.19
In 1969, the government lifted its ban on commercial advertising andnetworks began to compete with one another for commercial advertisers and more
importantly, viewers. The fierce competition initiated an early “heyday” during which
fifteen dramas aired a day between the three networks.20 The heyday ended, however,when the government imposed content regulations as well as requirements foreducational and news programming. When more households began acquiring
television sets throughout the 1970s, not only did network television’s influence on
everyday life increase but dramas also began to reflect everyday life. For example,
Assi (KBS 1972) and Yeoro (KBS 1972) portrayed the difficulties of the tail end ofJapanese colonial rule in Korea as well as the Korean War while Reed (TBC 1972)
revolved around characters enduring extreme poverty.21 Towards the end of the
1970s and into the 1980s, however, drama storylines reflected new social concerns
for Koreans, moving away from poverty to urban issues involving violent crime.
Color television brought another milestone to Korean drama production,
which utilized the technology to evoke new types of emotions from viewers. Rather
than merely depicting social problems, dramas of the 1980s offered nostalgic looks
back to simpler times by depicting pastoral life and landscapes that contrasted with
South Korea’s urban development. Historical dramas also emerged at this time with

19 Wi and Young, K-Drama, 63.
20 Wi and Young, K-Drama, 60.
21 Wi and Young, K-Drama, 64.

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Founding the Country (KBS 1980) and 500 Years of Joseon Kingdom (KBS 1980) liberallyinterpreting historical facts for the sake of educational entertainment.22
If the 1980s was the decade of color television, then the 1990s was the decadeof cable television, which created intense competition between the networks. With
new developments in satellite technology and interactive cable systems, Korean
citizens had better and more access to television at the same time that they began tohave more disposable income to pay for it. SBS, a new terrestrial broadcaster and thefirst commercial television station, also emerged at this time and initiated a “television
drama offensive” that diversified the storylines, locations and content of dramas
while increasing their numbers.23 Engaged in a “drama war,” all the networks
subsequently began to invest more money in production quality, resulting in
unprecedented spending on dramas.24 For instance, historical drama Eyes of Dawn
(1991 – 1992) depicted Korean history from the Japanese colonial period to the
Korean War and costed some $200 million W (US $132,000) each episode.25
At the same time, the government also relaxed its regulations and censorship,
which contributed to a diversity of new programming. First, dramas began to begeared toward younger audiences vis-à-vis “the trendy drama.” Inspired by Japanese
television programming of the era, Korean trendy dramas, like their Japanese

22 Wi and Young, K-Drama, 65.
23 The Chun Doo-whan administrations forcibly collapsed 29 broadcasters into 2 in 1980—KBS and

MBC.
Shim, “The Growth of Korean Cultural Industries,” 23.
24 Shim, “The Growth of Korean Cultural Industries,” 24.
25 Wi and Young, K-Drama, 66.

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counterparts, were “visual metaphor[s] for capitalist-consumerist modernity.”26 Thatis, vis-à-vis the stylish lives and love relationships of young people, trendy dramas put
forth an image of South Korean lifestyles wherein consumer goods (and the wealth tobuy them) were equated with the seemingly modern. This, coupled with exorbitant
production spending, initiated a second heyday for K-Dramas.27 Young people tuned
into dramas such as Jealousy (MBC 1994) for their hit soundtracks, fashion forward
clothes, and good-looking stars. Second, relaxed surveillance of television content
also led to more political dramas such as Sandglass (1995), which some argue
singlehandedly rewrote Korean history. Still one of the highest rated dramas in
Korean history with a 64.3 percent share for the series finale, Sandglass was the first
popular culture production to depict the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in which hundredsof peacefully protesting civilians were killed by paramilitary troopers.28

GLOBALIZING THE K-DRAMA
Until the late 1990s, Japanese television programming had a monopoly on theexportation of television serials to other Asian regions. Conversely, not a single nonJapanese program had ever been imported to Japan until 2004 when NHK
broadcasted Winter Sonata.29 Several factors led to this turn of events that has
irreversibly changed the popular cultural landscape of Asia. First, the 1997 Asian

26 Chua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi, “Introduction” in East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the

Korean Wave, ed. Chua Beng Huat et al. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008) 2.
27 Ibid.
28 Jennifer Flinn, “History Cast Ashore,” Archive Site, Asia Pacific Arts, UCLA Asia Institute, October28, 2006, http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=56467.
29 Huat and Iwabuchi, “Introduction,” 4.

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Financial Crisis had a twofold effect. The hard hit South Korean economy had thegovernment looking for new export industries and its culture industry was identified
as a potentially major profit-generator. Former President Kim Dae-jung who wasinaugurated in 1998 and formally called himself the “President of Culture,”established the Basic Law for the Cultural Industry Promotion in 1999, which
allocated $148.5 million to the project of exporting South Korean cultural products
abroad.30 Indeed, the government’s promotional policy has been the major factor in
Hallyu’s rapid growth. At the same time, other Asian countries that were also
recovering from the 1997 crisis were experiencing media liberalization and looking
for programming cheaper than the relatively expensive Japanese dramas that werealso waning in popularity. In fact, K-dramas were a quarter of the price of Japanese
dramas and a tenth of the price of Hong Kong television dramas.31 K-dramas, in vast
supply given their government backing, swooped in to fill this demand.
Although MBC sold Eyes of Dawn to Turkey’s national broadcaster (making it
the first drama to be exported to Europe) and What is Love All About to a Hong Kong
network in 1992, Hallyu really first took hold in China.32 As noted in the introduction,
Korean popular culture was first coined Hallyu by Chinese journalists in 1999. Twoyears earlier, China Central Television Station (CCTV) aired its first K-Drama, What
is Love All About, which was such a success that they re-aired it the following year in aprime-time slot. This time, What is Love All About garnered the second highest ratings
30 Sung, Sang-yeon, “Introduction: Why are Asians attracted to Korean pop culture?” in Korean Wave,

The Korean Herald, ed., Insight into Korea Series Vol. 5, (Seoul: Jimoondang, 2008) 16 – 17.
31 Shim, “Waxing the Korean Wave,” 5.
32 Shim, “The Growth of Korean Cultural Industries,” 25.

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ever in the history of Chinese television.33 In 1999, Stars in My Heart became a hit not
only in China but in Taiwan as well and from there, K-dramas began to take up
airwaves in Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia.
Given South Korea’s status as a former colony of Japan, Hallyu’s cultural holdthere has particular significance. In fact, the South Korean government issued a ban
on Japanese cultural forms in 1945 that was not lifted until 1998 with the signing of
the New 21st Century Korea-Japan Partnership allowing media products to flow
freely between the two nations.34 Although Korean music and movies had alreadygained quite a following in Japan by the late 1990s, Winter Sonata’s 2003 debut on
NHK marked the first time a K-drama had been aired for Japanese audiences and it
was an instant national sensation—so much so, in fact, that although the term Hallyu
had already been coined, it came into common parlance that year with Japanese
fanfare. Winter Sonata’s audience shares peaked at 22.2 percent—the highest shareachieved by any drama aired on Japanese television at the time.35 In fact, WinterSonata’s male lead, Bae Yong-Joon (known affectionately by his Japanese fans as
Yonsama or “Prince Yong”) was so beloved, that upon visiting Tokyo in 2004,

33 Ibid.
34 As other scholars have noted, the ban did not prevent Japanese cultural products from influencing

South Korean popular culture since even KBS was guilty of illegally importing Japanese pop culture.
According to Kim Hyun-mee, “Japanese [pop] culture in Korea had already set its roots deep into
the emotional structure of Koreans (as cited by Huat and Iwabuchi).”Huat and Iwabuchi, “Introduction,” 4.
35 Sun Jung, “Bae Yong-Joon, Soft Masculinity, and Japanese Fans: Our Past Is in Your Present
Body,” in Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption, TransAsia: Screen Cultures (Hong Kong
University Press, 2011), 36.
According to the Korean Culture and Information Service, nearly 70 percent of Japanese viewers had
watched at least one episode by the end of 2004.
Wi and Young, K-Drama, 17.

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approximately 3,500 Japanese women swarmed the airport to catch a glimpse of him
causing 350 riot police to come on the scene. Such enthusiastic greetings from fansand political officials had until that point, been reserved only for Hollywood
celebrities.36
Hallyu’s growth and popularity in Asia has been so intense that in 2004, theKorean television programming export figure was $71.4 million from $5.5 million in
1995.37 These figures and Hallyu’s undeniable fandom across Asia has caused manyscholars to conjecture, research and debate just why it is so popular amongst fans.
Although factors such as the government backing and media liberalization provide
structural explanations for how Hallyu caught on, they do little to explain why
individual fans love K-dramas to such an extent. The Korean Culture andInformation Service and the Ministry of Tourism and Culture cite three main reasonsin their government issued book, K-Drama: A New TV Genre with Global Appeal. First,
K-dramas espouse family-based Confucian values, such as respect for elders, withwhich many Asian viewers can relate. More specifically, because K-dramas deal witheveryday life, they “appeal to global audiences because jeong—a Korean term forhuman affection—is usually a central theme.”38 Second, K-dramas tend to be lesssexually and/or violently provocative than Hollywood productions. Using lesssexualized images, romantic dramas in particular leave audiences feeling “warm and

36 Do Kyun Kim and Min-Sun Kim, “Preface,” in Hallyu: Influence of Korean Popular Culture in Asia andBeyond (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2011), 10.
37 Shim, “The Growth of Korean Cultural Industries,” 27.
38 Wi and Young, K-Drama, 42.

140happy.”39 Lastly, K-dramas offer simple stories that are emotionally and dramaticallycharged. Because dramas do not follow a “season” format but often run anywherefrom 16 to 24 episodes, storylines are action-packed, melodramatic and focused on acentral theme.40 While many scholars have noted that K-dramas’ Confucian
sensibilities appeal to Asian viewers’ sense of shared values, the government
publication makes a point to highlight distinctly Korean emotional concepts such as
jeong or han—the Korean term for historical and collective suffering andresentment—as focal points of their appeal.41 Such characterizations exemplify theways in which K-dramas have been used to construct a sense of cultural nationalismthat posits that K-dramas’ global popularity is directly tied to distinct (and perhaps
superior) attributes of Korean culture.
While Hallyu fans’ appreciation for K-dramas’ shared values and emotional
storylines is well-documented, scholars have added to these. Communications
scholar Doobo Shim explains that cultural consumption is a process of negotiation inwhich consumers “invest their time, money, energy and emotional allowances incultural commodities in order to acquire pleasure and make meaning.”42 For viewers
in developing nations such as China and Taiwan, Shim asserts, Korean dramas haveoffered “better terms for negotiation” by providing high-quality entertainment
coupled with Asian values and stories that balance traditional sentiments with

39 Wi and Young, K-Drama, 44.
40 Wi and Young, K-Drama, 45.
41 Ibid.
42 Shim, “The Growth of Korean Cultural Industries,” 26.

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modern cityscapes and lifestyles.43 Cultural studies scholar Sung Sang-yeon’s
respondents, Asians living in Vienna who enjoy K-dramas, put it a bit differently bydescribing it as the “self-confidence and nationalism Koreans show through their
popular culture.”44 In other words, “Korean pop culture has borrowed the best ofWestern popular culture and recreated it according to Korean tastes. That is why
Korean popular culture differs from others—it expresses inner passion and powerfulenergy.”45 That Sung’s respondents would identify these positive attributes as “selfconfidence” and “nationalism” indicate that dramas help fans to negotiate thedevelopment of their own sense of values by serving as a model for such negotiations
amidst economic development. Often, however, this modeling takes place on the
consumer market as will be further discussed in the last section.
In 2006 the export growth rate of K-dramas waned for the first time andmany predicted the end of Hallyu’s reign. Scholars and cultural critics cited Hallyu’s
inability to release fresh products, saying that Hallyu fans would not continue to comeback for the same stories again and again. In order to address these issues, the Korea
Foundation for International Culture Exchange conducted a survey called “TheComprehensive Study for Sustainable Growth of the Korea Wave” from October of2007 to April of 2008.46 The survey was conducted in China, Japan, Taiwan and
Vietnam and concluded that while television programs are still the driving force
behind Hallyu consumption (compared to film and music) production companies
43 Shim, “The Growth of Korean Cultural Industries,” 27.
44 Sung, “Introduction,” 20 - 21.
45 Ibid.
46 Yang Sung-jin, “The Korean Wave needs new strategies to solidify position in Asia” in Korean
Wave, The Korean Herald, ed., Insight into Korea Series Vol. 5, (Seoul: Jimoondang, 2008) 245.

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should concentrate on producing high-quality content and strengthen overseas
distribution networks to continue Hallyu’s success.47 Since there were no regulations
to ensure such high quality, many critics predicted Hallyu’s downward spiral.
Hallyu’s recent resurgence, however, has proved critics wrong. Boys Over
Flowers, the Korean version of Taiwanese Meteor Garden and Japanese Hana Yori Dango,
became a sensation in Asia in 2009. According to Shim, this was a “turning point for
the Korean Wave” because “it marked a new generation of Korean television stars”
since the drama about high school students featured fresh faced and young actors andactresses.48 Moreover, pop singing sensation, Wonder Girls, also hit a milestonewhen they made it into the Bill Board Hot 100 that very same year with their hit,
Nobody. Not only have many K-pop (as Korean popular music is called) stars crossed
over into acting in dramas to increase their visibility and breathe new life to K-dramas,
they have also taken to YouTube to grow their success overseas. As mentioned in
the introduction, K-pop stars recently met with pandemonium during their concerts
in Paris, France and pop group, Girls’ Generation, is currently sweeping the U.S.,
making appearances on national television shows. Most significantly, this new phaseof Hallyu popularity is distinct from Hallyu’s early success:In the early 2000s, [Hallyu] was characterized by scenes of middle-aged
housewives in East Asian countries chasing after Korean actors whom they
were enamored of from watching television and VCDs (video cassette disks).
Now, Korean pop music, or K-pop, has become the centerpiece of the
Korean Wave, and it is largely enjoyed by teenagers around the world—not
just in Asia. As noted, this change is an outcome of the Internet, which brings
47 Yang, “The Korean Wave,” 247.
48 Shim, “Waxing the Korean Wave,” 15.

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us to pay further attention to material aspects and new sensibility of media
practices.49
As Shim notes, Hallyu is reaching a new generation of popularity through new
mediums such as the internet that have increased the popularity of not only K-pop
but of K-dramas as well. What’s more, Hallyu’s popularity has extended beyond Asia
to the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America and North America.50
With Hallyu’s unprecedented success in the late 1990s, the South Korean
government deemed its cultural products—dramas, film, pop music, computer games,
animation, etc.—“cultural technology.”51 Like IT or Bio-Technology, cultural
products were proclaimed one of six technologies that would drive the South Korean
economy into the 21st century. To this end, the government established the Korea
Culture and Content Agency in 2001 whose sole responsibility and initial budget of$90 million was dedicated to the financial investment and administrative support ofdomestic cultural industries.52 In many ways, “cultural technology” is apt
terminology to describe how Hallyu’s trajectory has been intertwined with many
modes of technology and is a story of technological adaptation. From the mere
emergence of the television set to expansion into color, then cable television, theearly days of dramas found writers and producers adapting narratives to these newadvances. With the widespread use of the internet and now smartphones, dramas areriding the wave of technology even further and traveling with viewers from their
49 Shim, “Waxing the Korean Wave,” 16.
50 Do Kyun Kim and Se-Jin Kim, “Hallyu from Its Origin to Present: A Historical Overview,” 22.
51 Shim, “The Growth of Korean Cultural Industries,” 28.
52 Ibid.

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homes throughout their day-to-day lives while reaching even more viewers still.53 At
the same time, Hallyu also intersects with other technologies altogether. Popular
culture’s intersection with the plastic surgery industry is the topic of the following
sections.

K-DRAMAS AS TECHNOLOGIES OF SUBJECTIVITY
As we have seen in chapter one, neoliberal governmentality shapes South
Korean women’s lives and informs their personal decisions. The interviewees in
Lee’s documentary film, good for her, cite economic rationales for wanting to undergocosmetic surgery procedures. According to cultural anthropologist Jesook Song,neoliberalism in South Korea has become a “social ethos of moral-economic valuethat gains its explanatory power through a wide variety of social agents.”54 If The
Oprah Winfrey Show is exemplary of the ways in which neoliberalism operates throughthe televisual realm in the U.S.—as chapter one asserts—then Hallyu or K-dramas
more specifically, operate similarly in the South Korean context. In other words, Kdramas are cultural mechanisms that act as “social agents” in providing the“explanatory power” behind neoliberalism as social ethos. This is powerful not onlyin the South Korean context but precisely because, like The Oprah Winfrey Show, Hallyu
is a “technology of subjectivity” that travels transnational trajectories as outlined in
the previous section. By closely reading scenes from three major K-dramas, My
53 Significantly, Seoul is known as the “bandwith capital” of the world.

Information technologies
have grown side-by-side, then, with “cultural technologies.” I plan to further explore the relationshipbetween the two as well as the plastic surgery industry and patients’ use of the internet as a medium
in the next phase of manuscript writing and researching.
54 Song, “Family Breakdown,” 55.

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Lovely Samsoon, Boys Over Flowers, and B&A, this section examines some of thenarrative strategies K-dramas employ to proliferate neoliberal rationalities that govern
the body.
This chapter begins with Kim Samsoon, the heroine of internationally popular
K-drama My Lovely Samsoon, being berated by the manager of a matchmaking
company for not undergoing plastic surgery to improve her chances on the dating
market. As noted in the introduction, women like Samsoon who do not engage insuch practices are often seen as unfulfilling their potential while women who do are
deemed protean go-getters. Interestingly, however, the sequence outlined in the
introduction is a dream, attesting to the ways in which neoliberal governmentality is amode of self-discipline through which women, having internalized such rationalities,
rehearse the stakes of such bodily measures.
The scene continues, however, and after she has her second interaction withthe manager, she awakes a second time on the bus and realizes that the entire
sequence was a dream—she had had a dream within a dream. She sees the ad on thebackseat of the chair ahead of her for the matchmaking company complete with apicture of the manager with whom she had had the two conversations. Presumably,
the ad had triggered the dream within a dream in the first place. After staring intently
at it, she says, “What? They want me to invest nearly $10 million Won (US $6,600) in
a species that is hopelessly immature? Yeah right, in your dreams.”55

55 My Lovely Samsoon (내 이름은 김삼순), “Episode 1,” My Lovely Samsoon instant stream, 57:43,

http://www.dramafever.com/drama/8/1/My_Lovely_Sam_Soon/

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This dream within a dream sequence opens itself up to be read in two
divergent ways. First, because Samsoon is considered overweight by contemporary
South Korean standards coupled with the fact that she is outspoken, women viewers
lauded her for being a female lead that is somewhat oppositional to standard
portrayals of demure and svelte heroines. As one blogger puts it: “Unlike a lot of
female protagonists in Korean dramas, she’s [Samsoon] very direct about whatbothers her and why. You won’t see her suffering in silence […] Her actions are
realistically flawed, but not to the point of disliking her.”56 The blogger’s description
exemplifies how women audiences see Samsoon as an alternative to the traditional
Korean female protagonist.
Such characterizations stem from the multiple ways in which Samsoon seems
to diverge from traditional expectations of South Korean femininity throughout thedrama. In this scene in particular, Samsoon not only scoffs at the idea of investing in“a species that is hopelessly immature” but by doing so, she also rejects the idea of
either cosmetic surgery or matchmaking services as viable options for her selfempowerment. Moreover, and just as importantly, she is on the bus going to a job
interview. In many ways, Samsoon embodies a strong and independent heroine inthis scene, attempting to secure her own economic advancement. Such actions,coupled with the fact that she flatly rejects cosmetic surgery and embraces her “looks,”
opens up a space for women viewers to construct their own narratives of resistanceto today’s standardized notions of femininity.
56 Beth, “My Lovely Sam Soon - K-drama Review,” Personal Blog, Alohamora!, March 31, 2012,
bethanish.wordpress.com.

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I argue, however, that such portrayals of female characters and My Lovely
Samsoon taken as a whole, actually serve to reify the neoliberal governmentalities that
regulate women’s bodies. K-dramas that feature such heroines have becomecommonplace since My Lovely Samsoon’s unparalleled popularity. More recent hits likeBoys Over Flowers, The First Shop of the Coffee Prince (2007), and Secret Garden (2011) also
revolve around female leads who are brazenly honest and unafraid to break gendernorms either through their occupation or through their actions. Boys Over Flowers, forexample, begins with the female lead bravely saving the life of a high school boy who
attempts suicide by jumping from a building. Coffee Prince’s heroine lives a double life
as a young man in order to secure a job at a coffee shop to support her mother andsister while Secret Garden features a female protagonist who is a stuntwoman for action
films. K-dramas with a strong female lead have become a genre unto themselves. I
argue that such narratives do not eliminate their opposition but rather, work throughthem by representing the counter-narrative in such a way that works on behalf ofhegemonic norms. In the end, in all three of the abovementioned K-dramas, theatypical heroine ultimately capitulates to the very typically heterosexually masculine
male lead.
Moreover, the real life actress who plays Samsoon, Kim Sun-ah, (as well as thefemale actresses in Boys Over Flowers, Coffee Prince, and Secret Garden) is reknown inSouth Korean popular culture for her beauty. While she indeed gained fifteen
pounds to shoot the drama, she quickly lost the weight and has appeared in several
dramas and films looking quite the opposite of her frame in My Lovely Samsoon. In her
148book, Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption, communications scholar Sun
Jung shows how Japanese fans of Bae Yong-Joon use multiple definitions ofmasculinity to construct a hybrid masculine identity for his character in WinterSonata.57 Her interviews with fans illuminate, however, that these character traits arealso imposed onto Bae Yong-Joon, the actor. The fans appreciate, for instance, Bae’s
character’s politeness throughout the drama. When asked what they like about Bae,
Jung finds that fans tend to collapse the two and characterize Bae in similar ways,
greying the lines between his actions in the drama and his actions in real life.
Similarly, while female protagonists may reject conventional ideals about beauty andfemininity on camera, their off-screen personas serve to erect such beauty standards
as attested to by Kim’s multiple cosmetic and fashion advertisements in South Korea.
This conflation of actor with character actually serves to shrink the spaces ofresistance opened up by such representations, if not undo them altogether, sincecelebrity, consumer and beauty culture are so intimately tied. Thus, cultural
productions such as My Lovely Samsoon contain a refractory counter claim that speaks
to the anxieties and problems of South Korea’s capitalist modernity and ultimately
serves to reaffirm, rather than dissolve, neoliberal mandates that champion the
consumer market.58

57 Jung, “Bae Yong-Joon," 51.
58 Jung points out that Bae Yong-Joon’s good looks have also been the subject of scrutiny bycosmetic surgeons: “Many South Korean plastic surgeons suggest that BYJ [Bae Yong-Joon] is able
to project a tender and mellow image because of his slim feminine face and small nose. These plastic
surgeons also suggest that his face shows the perfect mixture of both feminine and masculine side,which is commonly detected in Japanese pretty boy stars.”Jung, “Bae Yong-Joon,” 57.

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We see this same type of normalization through opposition at play in Boys Over
Flowers. As mentioned previously, Boys Over Flowers was a worldwide Hallyu hit in2009 and helped revive Hallyu’s waning popularity. Originally a Japanese manga
called Hana Yori Dango, the Korean version was the third drama adaptation after the
Taiwanese and Japanese versions. The drama tells the story of a working class girl,
Geum Jan-di, who after saving the life of a student at Sinhwa Academy, is allowed
admission to the elite high school. There, she encounters F4, a popular band ofwealthy boys whose leader, Gu Jun-pyo, falls in love with her. As the drama
progresses, viewers witness as the two overcome their class differences as well asother obstacles to true love.
In Episode 5, one such obstacle is none other than Jan-di’s best friend at
Shinhwa, Oh Min-ji, a beautiful and down-to-earth girl who is the only student tobefriend Jan-di. When Min-ji discovers their courtship, however, she attempts tosully Jan-di’s reputation. Once her plot is discovered, Min-ji reveals that Jun-pyo had
traumatized her when the two of them were children by rejecting her friendship andcalling her “an ugly pumpkin.”59 Devastated, Min-ji moves to Germany andundergoes plastic surgery once every two years. And although, as she recounts it, it
was very painful, it was not nearly as painful as what she experienced at the sting of
Jun-pyo’s words and the animosity in his eyes. Eventually the entire school comes tolearn of her surgeries and a particularly mean group of girls tell her: “Is that the face

59 Boys Over Flowers (꽃보다 남자), “Episode 5,” Boys Over Flowers instant stream,

http://www.dramafever.com/drama/26/5/Boys_Over_Flowers/?ap=1

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of a human? If I looked like that, I would’ve already committed suicide.”60 Jan-di,like Samsoon, is outspokenly righteous and although she is still angry with Min-ji, shecomes to her defense saying:“Your eyes. Your nose. Your cheekbones. You paid money for all of that,
didn’t you? If there’s something you want, you pay money and buy it. Can’t
the same be done with beauty? Hey, haven’t you all had plastic surgery? Then
why are you picking on Min Ji? If it’s ok for people who are already beautiful
to become more beautiful, why isn’t it ok for ugly people to want the samething? She didn’t do it without reason. She paid a tremendously painful price.
So what about it? So what? Can anybody say that it’s not Min Ji’s? If so, step
forward. Step forward and let me see!”61
Jan-di’s monologue to her wealthy classmates brings to light several aspects of plastic
surgery consumption. First, as was the case with Samsoon, this scene points out theubiquitous nature of plastic surgery as a neoliberal tool for self-management—asolution to social exclusion that can be bought with money. If, as Jan-di contends,“the beautiful” and wealthy can engage in such practices “to become more beautiful,”then democratically speaking, according to her logic, so can “the ugly.”
Next, Jan-di asserts that Min-ji’s new looks are not merely paid for withmoney but also with her pain and suffering through which she has earned the rights
to her body. In addition to having paid for it with money, Jan-di points out that Minji “paid a tremendously painful price” by enduring the physical agony of not one but
several operations. That Jan-di couples money with physical pain is significant in thatit points out the commodified nature of that pain. I suggest that Jan-di’s assertion
highlights a capitalist read of a traditionally Korean concept: the commodification of
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.

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han. As discussed in chapter two, han is best described as an inventory of historicalmemory that deals with Korean people’s collective trauma and suffering. Han
encompasses the legacy of suffering endured by Korean people as a whole and, at thesame time, is also present within individuals, marking individual suffering as part of alarger historical and collective suffering. Jan-di’s contentions, then, to her fellow
students about Min-ji’s transformation justify her friend’s acts because of suffering
she has purchased and endured alone, which give her rightful claim to her newfoundlooks. Such justifications attempt to elide consumer transactions by positing this kindof bodily suffering as noble—a commodified form of han. After Jan-di delivers her
speech, however, we see that she does not forgive Min-ji, which constitutes thebiggest lesson of them all: While plastic surgery may be a commonplace tool, newfound looks are meaningless without matching character and integrity. Thus, at thesame time that it normalizes plastic surgery, this scene and storyline from Boys Over
Flowers also regulates it, instructing viewers on “proper” modes of consumption.
As the previous two scenes exemplify, plastic surgery emerges in many, if not
most, K-dramas as the subject of side jokes, marginal storylines or major plots thatoffer pedagogical lessons about plastic surgery and set its moral limits.62 Before &After Plastic Surgery Clinic (B&A) is unique, however, in that the entire plot revolves
around plastic surgeons and staff such that every storyline engages the social anxieties
engendered by South Korea’s heightened levels of plastic surgery consumption and
62 In 2009, The Chosun Ilbo reported through informal research that nearly one in every two women

have had some kind of plastic surgery.
Jyeon Hyeonsuk, “One Out of Every Two People Have Had Facial Plastic Surgery (특별취재팀,“두명중 한명, 얼굴 고쳤다,”)” Chosun Ilbo, October 26, 2009.

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bodily transformation. While this chapter has so far offered examples of pedagogicalmoments concerning cosmetic surgery within two of the most domestically andinternationally popular dramas of the last decade (My Lovely Samsoon and Boys Over
Flowers), this chapter now turns to the only K-drama to deal exclusively with the issueof plastic surgery. If dramas are one epicenter where the cultural production of thecosmetic surgery patient begins, then B&A’s exclusivity in dealing with the topic
informs us as to what K-dramas teach and sell as well as how they shape potential
plastic surgery consumers.
Indeed, the main storylines and character tensions seem designed to workout some of plastic surgery’s central contradictions. Dr. Han Geon-su begins theseries as a stylish playboy who is bequeathed the Before and After Clinic and its debts
upon his father’s passing.63 With this turn of events, he bares the burden of keeping
the clinic successful while paying off his father’s loan shark. Because Dr. Han has
not picked up a scalpel since scarring the face of his first surgery patient, Dr. Choi
Young-woo, a reconstructive surgeon who we later learn was born disfigured andoperated on by Dr. Han’s father at B & A, joins the staff. As a patient at B & A, Dr.
Choi learns from Dr. Han’s father and develops a passion for helping others likehimself through reconstructive surgery. The anesthesiologist who drinks too much,an office manager who herself is a plastic surgery beauty, and a slapstick nurse aresupporting cast to the doctors whose character development takes center stage in
addition to that of Nurse Hong Gi-nam with whom the two doctors fall in love.
63 Before and After Plastic Surgery Clinic (비포&애프터 서형외과), MBC, Sundays 23:40 (11:40 Koreantime), 2008-Jan-06 to 2008-March-30.

153While much (perhaps too much) happens in the 12 episode arc including akidnapping, an attempted suicide, a hostage situation and an array of plastic surgery
procedures, B & A’s central tension revolves around Dr. Han and Dr. Choi who
represent two seemingly incommensurate poles in debates surrounding plastic surgery
and its ethics. It is through this tension, I argue, that B & A both regulates anxieties
about the moral limits of plastic surgery while illuminating surgery’s endlesspossibilities for transformation and success vis-à-vis the rhetoric of “the makeover.”As mentioned above, Dr. Han and Dr. Choi are presented as opposites. Dr. Hanunderstands the clinic as a business and needs to do so considering he has signed hisorgans away as collateral on his (father’s) debts.64 With a keen eye for aesthetics, anunderstanding of popular trends and a deep need for money, Dr. Han represents
plastic surgery as an industry that is subject to the ups and downs of trends and playson the insecurities of women and men. Dr. Choi, on the other hand, represents it asa medical field that is bound by a set of ethics and guided by service rather thanprofit. As such, he questions and even berates many of the patients who enter theclinic for cosmetic reasons. Technically skilled, Dr. Choi sees surgery as a means forcorrecting deformities, not for changing bodies that do not meet societal beauty
standards. By the end of the series, however, both doctors meet in the middle thespectrum. Dr. Han becomes more giving and ethical, performing surgeries for the
64 Because Dr. Han has signed his organs away as collateral for the clinic, organ trafficking emerges inthis drama as a major undercurrent. According to Thompson, “Medical tourism and medical
trafficking tend to be treated differently, masking connections that largely remain to be madebetween the two, of which the vacation destination is just one link.” Using B&A as a starting point,
future iterations of this work will examine these connections.
Charis Thompson, “Medical Migrations Afterword: Science as Vacation?,” Body & Society 17, no. 2 &
3 (2011): 209.

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needy and even dissuading some patients against “unnecessary” procedures while Dr.
Choi comes to see that socially constructed abnormalities can be just as
psychologically debilitating as those caused by physical illness or deformity. In sodoing, B & A attempts to negotiate these two sides of the plastic surgery coin whilesetting the limits for “good” and “bad” surgeries in addition to “good” and “bad”
reasons to elect them. According to Pitts-Taylor, shows such as B&A are “processes
by which we are deciding what kinds of surgeries, and which kinds of patients, we willsocially accept and promote” during a historical moment when such practices areexperiencing unprecedented expansion.65
In the U.S. and worldwide, Michael Jackson is perhaps the best-known
cautionary tale of crossing the moral boundaries of plastic surgery consumption.
Most people can easily identify not only his “before” appearance but also the point at
which they feel he “should have” stopped as well as when he “went too far.” Much
like the discourse surrounding an alcoholic that has too many drinks, plastic surgery,too, is regulated by a discourse of addiction and moderation. Unsurprisingly, then,Michael Jackson is mentioned throughout the series at least three times to threedifferent patients as an example of why the doctors will not perform the surgery theywant.66 As feminist scholar Jun Bo Gyung writes, such debates began in the Korean
public media in 2004 with singer Ok Joo-hyun representing the “good” plastic
surgery consumer who chooses plastic surgery to improve and better manage her life
65 Pitts-Taylor, Surgery Junkies, 5.
66 The episode that deals specifically with cosmetic surgery addiction, Chart 8: Plastic Surgery and the

Addict (성형과 중독), actually criminalizes it. The addict is a con artist who deceives men out of
their money and undergoes surgery to both escape and lure the next victim. To make matters worse,
she has also left a young daughter behind to pursue this lifestyle.

155and Han Hye-gyung, known as the “Fan Lady” (sŏnp‘ungi ajumma), representing the“bad” consumer or the plastic surgery addict.67 Ok Joo-hyun is a pop singer andmusical theater star who was in girl group Fin.K.L. until their break-up in 2002 when
she went solo. In addition to three solo albums, she has also starred in musicals suchas Aida and Chicago. Ok’s transformation through plastic surgery is common
knowledge and is largely hailed a success with multiple websites posting her “before”
photos as an awkward schoolgirl and her “after” photos as a pop star. Han, on theother hand, emerged in multiple news broadcasts and newspaper articles as an
example, not of how cosmetic surgery can positively transform but how excess candisfigure. A once famous and beautiful opera singer, Han earned the public moniker“Fan Lady” because of her big and round fan-shaped face, which came as a result of
having self-administered too many silicon injections. Amidst a growing industry withlittle formal regulation that is constantly pushing the boundaries of morality andethics, these figures represent the two ends of social acceptability. Ultimately, B & A
teaches us that while surgery for vanity’s sake—and too much of it at that—is wrong,surgery is a viable way of bettering oneself socially and economically by conforming
to society’s gendered norms as Ok exemplifies.68
Rather than critiquing these gendered norms, the series illustrates surgery’s
positive possibilities through the logic of “the makeover.” In twelve episodes, Dr.
67 Jun Bo Gyung (전보경), “A Genealogical Study on the Discourse of Cosmetic Surgery as

Technologies of the Body-Self in Korean Society (믐--자아 테크놀로지로서의 미용 셩형에대한
계보학적 담론 연구),” (Masters Thesis, Ewha Women’s University Graduate School, 2009).
68 B & A does feature one storyline that perhaps eschews normative gender when Drs. Han andChoi perform a sex change operation. The patient, however, is already an old man and receives thesurgery as his dying wish.

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Han and Dr. Choi successfully operate on nearly twenty-four patients, helping eachto achieve not only the “look” they originally aspired to but to become better
versions of themselves inside and out and ultimately, better people. In so doing, B &A features makeovers in every single episode not just once but multiple times given
the various subplots of each episode. According to gender studies scholar Brenda
Weber:
Makeovers teach a way of being, a care of the self (as manifested through the
body […]) that can be visually discerned and popularly celebrated. The
transformation, in turn, unblocks barriers that have led to dejection, sadness,and self-ridicule, instead allowing for the ‘free’ expression of happiness, selfesteem, confidence, and optimism.69
Here Weber refers to the makeover reality television craze that has overtaken
American television for some time now.70 The quote aptly describes B & A’s
portrayal of plastic surgery patients’ transformations, however, given the globality not
only of plastic surgery (as referenced in chapter one) but also of the neoliberal ethics
governing the logics of “the makeover.” Like Oprah’s particular brand of self-help,
which marries the therapeutic world to the consumer market in order to sell lifeimprovement products and services, “the makeover” also puts forth a pedagogicallesson in favor of bodily self-management as a necessary (if not only) avenue towards
self-esteem, humanity, and happiness. This lesson is directed not only at the
makeover subject but viewers who literally see her transform before their very eyes.
Vis-à-vis the logic of the makeover, then, K-dramas sell a neoliberal mandate for self69 Brenda Weber, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity, (Durham: Duke University Press,

2007) 29.
70 Reality television is also prevalent in South Korea including weight loss and plastic surgery shows.

157care that ultimately services the market. While not all television serials are perhaps as
obvious as B & A in their portrayals of “the makeover,” given the preponderance ofplastic surgery amongst Hallyu stars and their more recent penchant for openly
admitting to such procedures, Hallyu actors and actresses themselves embody “themakeover” attesting to the social and cultural capital plastic surgery offers as aneoliberal rationality.
Having described both the larger narrative plot of B & A as well as a generalcharacter analysis, this chapter now turns to a specific episode of B & A as an
example of how the series proffers the logic of “the makeover.” Each episode’s title
provides a societal diagnosis in regards to plastic surgery consumption, one that theepisode will attempt to remedy. Episode two, for example, entitled Chart 2: The Societythat Encourages Plastic Surgery (sŏnghyŏng kwŏnhanŭn sahoe), deals with a young student
who cannot get a job despite her outstanding marks at a vocational school. A job
interview scene in which the employer states, “I’d rather hire someone street smart
and pretty,” makes it clear that her looks coupled with her lack of confidence make it
difficult for her to pass the interview stage.71 Both doctors consult her when she
comes in and Dr. Han immediately recommends the double eyelid or ssangkkŏp‘ulprocedure to alleviate the “depressed look” of her “downward slanted eyes.”72 He
further tries to sell her the procedure by saying that in addition to technical skills,

71 “Chart 2: The Society that Encourages Plastic Surgery (성형 권하는 사회),” Before and After Plastic

Surgery Clinic (비포&애프터 서형외과), MBC, Sundays 23:40 (11:40 Korean time), 2008-Jan-06 to
2008-March-30.
72 Ibid.

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“outer appearance is also a skill.”73 Dr. Choi, on the other hand, refuses to do thesurgery saying that there is nothing physically wrong with the student. Dejected andin need of money, the student turns to prostitution when Dr. Choi happens to run
into her on the street about to go into a bar with her first customer. He saves her
and sees, through her act of desperation, just how much she “needs” the procedure.
The episode ends with a montage featuring the student receiving compliments on her
new look from her friends and later receiving a job offer after her new foundconfidence leads her to help an old man on the street after he has fallen.74
According to Weber, “the makeover” as a narrative form involves threecrucial components. First, the narrative employs the architecture of renovation andrejuvenation.75 The student is not only “renovated” vis-à-vis cosmetic surgery but
rejuvenated and made more confident as attested to by the penultimate scene of theepisode which shows her not only smiling and laughing with friends but gluing a new(and improved) photograph of herself to her resume. Second, upon realizing theirdeficiencies, makeover subjects not only celebrate their new state of being but also
espouse the values of those that made them over.76 B & A’s final episode shows thestudent sending a message to Dr. Han, asking him to reopen his clinic so he can help
more people as he did her. And lastly, makeovers require a “big reveal”—themoment in which the makeover subject’s new appearance is revealed to his/her loved

73 Ibid.
74 This storyline puts forth a clear moral message, however: Good looks alone are not enough tobring opportunities. One must also be kind and respectful as evidenced by the student’s helpful
nature post-surgery.
75 Weber, 29.
76 Ibid.

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ones.77 The student is never more triumphant than when she is sitting in a fast foodrestaurant with her friends who tell her how pretty she has become while admiring
her new resume photos.
Ultimately, cultural forms such as B & A (in addition to others such as My
Lovely Samsoon and Boys Over Flowers) serve to normalize plastic surgery, justifying
profit-driven medical practices in addition to advertising the logics of “the makeover”
that sell neoliberal mandates for self-management and care. At the end of episode 2,
Nurse Hong narrates the rift between Dr. Han and Dr. Choi saying, “There are twokinds of doctors—doctors with a sense of responsibility and doctors with ulterior
motives […] But now I know that those two doctors probably started out with thesame heart, the heart that wants to help others.”78 Said differently, medical services
for profit are justified so long as market rhetoric puts forth an ethic of medical
service and care. The following sections examine not only how these ethics operate
within South Korea’s medical tourism industry but also the ways in which Hallyu itself
propels South Korea’s burgeoning medical tourism industry.

MEDICAL TOURISM IN SOUTH KOREA
Hallyu’s popularity has spurned new markets in addition to cultural products
such as dramas, music and movies. In fact, K-dramas are so popular that they havespawned a love of all things Korean in many countries where Hallyu fans reside. For
77 Ibid.
78 “Chart 2: The Society that Encourages Plastic Surgery (성형 권하는 사회),” Before and After Plastic

Surgery Clinic (비포&애프터 서형외과), MBC, Sundays 23:40 (11:40 Korean time), 2008-Jan-06 to
2008-March-30.

160example, Korean language schools have emerged in the Philippines, Indonesia andEgypt. Most notably, however, Hallyu has spawned greater movement of people inaddition to goods vis-à-vis a growing tourism industry centered around K-drama
locations including Nami Island, the setting for Winter Sonata, Ch‘unch‘ŏn, where Bae
Yong-Joon’s character’s home is located and Cheju Island.79 According to sociologist
Yukie Hirata, for example, the number of Japanese tourists to South Korea increased
35.5 percent in 2004 compared to the previous year.80 Before then, Korea wasconsidered a “male space” wherein Japanese male tourists viewed Korea through animperial gaze with the first tour package to Korea taking place in 1906.81 The
purpose of such tourism was to evidence Japan’s superiority and for an othering lookat the Korea as a colonial space that was part of the Japanese empire. After Korea’s
independence from Japan in 1945, Japanese men’s gendered and imperial gaze of
Korea continued in the form of sex tourism since kisaeng (female entertainers akin to
Japanese geisha) tours were very popular amongst Japanese male tourists in the 1970s
and 1980s.82
The gendered nature of tourism to Korea from Japan began to change in thelate 1980s when the South Korean government made efforts to change its
79 Sun Jung, “Bae Yong-Joon, Soft Masculinity, and Japanese Fans: Our Past Is in Your Present
Body” 38.
K-dramas also increased tourism from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia andThailand. In fact, the number of Taiwanese who visited Korea in 2003 totaled 180,000, marking a 50
percent increase form the previous year.
Shim, “Waxing the Korean Wave,” 6 – 7.
80 Yukie Hirata, “Touring ‘Dramatic Korea’: Japanese Women as Viewers of Hanryu Dramas andTourists on Hanryu Tours” in East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave, ed. Chua Beng Huat etal. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008) 143.
81 Hirata, “Touring ‘Dramatic Korea,’” 145.
82 Ibid.

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international perception. Since then, Hallyu tours have played a major role in thefeminization of tourism in South Korea. In fact, The Official Site for Korean
Tourism includes a list of over sixty K-dramas. When visitors of the site click on adesired drama, they find not only a synopsis of the drama, character bios and photos
but also filming locations. For instance, a search for My Lovely Samsoon reveals twenty
locations including coffee shops, restaurants, and landmarks as well as maps, hours,
and photos of scenes in which the locations were featured in the drama.83 Quicklinks on the site allow site visitors to easily access brochures, E-books, interactive
maps as well as conveniently make flight, hotel and tour reservations.
Significantly, these changes in tourism interpellate Asian women tourists as
consumers. Women tourists are engaged largely through their ability to consume
cultural and beauty products and services. In addition to Hallyu tours, this is also thecase with beauty tours. According to anthropologist Laura Miller, estute or beauty
tours to Korea are especially popular amongst Japanese women and travel packages
include air travel, hotel rooms, salon treatments usually at the hotels, meals andspecial cosmetics infused with what Japanese tourists believe to be especially Korean
ingredients and/or medicinal herbs such as ginseng.84 Packages such as the “Becomea Beauty in Seoul” tour are attractive to young Japanese women because “Korea andKorean things are on the list of what is ‘cool’ and exotic, and it is less expensive than
83 “My Lovely Samsoon: The Official Site For Korean Tourism”, n.d.,

http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/CU/CU_EN_8_5_1_10.jsp.
84 According to Miller, the concept of “estute” in Japan is derived from the French “esthetique”
meaning aesthetics and was borrowed in the 1980s to catapult the four-hundred-trillion-yen beauty
industry there simply known as estute.
Laura Miller, Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2006) 14.

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Japan. For older Japanese women, a desire for the Korean experience may perhaps
hint at nostalgia for more traditional Asian lifestyle or values.”85 Interestingly, while
Hallyu fans in more developing countries such as China or the Philippines see South
Korea as the embodiment of modernity infused with tradition, Japanese women
understand Korea as a signification of a return to the past. Such nostalgia also stems
from Japan’s colonial relationship to Korea wherein Korea is always seen as
anachonristic in comparison to the progressive metropole. Thus, despite thegendered differences between colonial and kisaeng tours of the past, Japan’s colonial
relationship to Korea continues to inform feminized tourism and the ways in which
Japanese tourists understand and experience Korea.
With Hallyu and estute tourism to South Korea already in full force, the South
Korean government launched efforts to grow their medical tourism industry.
According to an economic report by Yoon Young Ho commissioned by the Seoul
Development Research Institute in order to assess the current state and future
directions of medical tourism in 2008, the South Korean government first identified
medical tourism as a feasible industry in 2006.86 At the time, standard definitions of“medical tourism” were rapidly changing. Until as recently as the 1990s, definitionsof medical tourism emphasized leisure and tourism in conjunction with medical care,health maintenance or improvement—medical tourism was largely thought of as aleisurely activity undertaken by wealthy individuals. By the 2000s, however, such

85 Miller, Beauty Up, 198.
86 Yoon Hyung Ho (윤형호), 서울시 의료관광 현황과 방, 서울시정개발연구원, (Seoul: Seoul

Development Research Institute, 2010) 24.

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definitions began to subtly change to highlight medical tourism as inexpensive
medical service and professional treatments in combination with tourism.87 In otherwords, medical tourism experts began to highlight medical tourism as an inexpensive
way for patients to purchase medical procedures such as heart surgery or orthopedic
treatment rather than, or more primarily than, to vacation or leisure. According to
medical anthropologists Elizabeth F.S. Roberts and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, suchcommodification of medical services is the hallmark of contemporary medical
migrations:
Medical tourism is based on a neoliberal paradigm of commercialized
medicine and individual choice that implies the ability of those who can doso to travel, often great distances, to purchase elsewhere what they cannot
buy or otherwise procure at home. Thus medical tourism and medical
commerce go hand in hand. 88
As Roberts and Scheper-Hughes cogently point out, medical tourism finds as its basis
the positioning of the ailing body, not as a patient in need of medical care but rather,as a savvy consumer willing to travel for the sake of efficiency and economy.
Yoon’s report echoes such sentiments by identifying three major areas where
South Korean medical tourism would appeal to international consumers. 89 First,
South Korean medical care is far less expensive than in other countries, especially the
U.S. where 45 – 60 million people do not have health insurance. Second, medicalcare for tourists is immediate unlike places like England or Canada where socialized
medical systems force patients to wait up to six months for specific surgeries or non87 Ibid.
88 Elizabeth F.S. Roberts and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Introduction: Medical Migrations” Body &Society 17:1(2011) 19.
89 Yoon, 서울시 의료관광 현황과 방, 24.

164emergency treatments. Lastly, and more poignantly for the purposes of this chapter,since cosmetic procedures such as plastic surgery, dental care or dermatology are notcovered by insurance, South Korea can offer competitive pricing in addition to newtechnologies. Accordingly, “medical tourism for plastic surgery” in addition to“reproductive technologies, experimental medical procedures, gender assignment,
liposuction, etc. […] is commercialized and commodified health care.”90 According
to Yoon, while such procedures used to be the domain of the wealthy, growing
expendable incomes coupled with “desires to become more beautiful” make middle
income groups the main target demographic for South Korea’s medical tourism
industry because “they are showing interest in that area.”91
Against this backdrop, the Bureau of Korean Tourism established medical
tourism as one of its main areas for growth and as a strategic product for South
Korea in 2007.92 South Korea’s medical tourism industry took as its models thealready existing industries in Singapore, Thailand, and India.93 Yoon’s report, forinstance, includes statistics for Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok, which served
434,071 foreign patients out of its total 1,056,566 patients in 2006, earning more thanhalf of its revenue from the foreign market. Parkway Healthcare Group in Singapore,
one of the ten largest hospitals in the world, admitted 154,000 foreign patients thatsame year with 40 percent of its revenue owing to medical tourism. In comparison tothese already established medical industries, Yoon suggests, South Korean hospitals
90 Elizabeth F.S. Roberts and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Introduction: Medical Migrations,” 19.
91 Yoon, 서울시 의료관광 현황과 방, 24.
92 Yoon, 서울시 의료관광 현황과 방, 25.
93 Yoon, 서울시 의료관광 현황과 방, 38.

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were well poised to enter the international market because of their higher levels of
medical techniques and technology, higher capacities for accommodating morepatients and greater number of specialty treatment centers. Moreover, Seoul’s higher
number of large hospitals and closer proximity to medical tourism markets in Russia,
Mongolia and Northeast China would give them a competitive advantage with suchconsumers over Southeast Asian cities such as Singapore and Bankok. Indeed,
Yoon’s report illustrates the type of international competition amongst healthcare
providers outlined by Roberts and Scheper-Hughes wherein “hospitals and healthcare corporations […] establish themselves as international medical institutions andcenters of excellence, […] all based on the [consumer’s] ability to pay.”94
In this international landscape, South Korean medical institutions began to
campaign their services to foreign patients in June 2008. The following year, theKorean Medical Act was amended so that hospitals could more aggressively (andlegally) promote themselves internationally as well as build hotels adjacent tohospitals.95 The Korean Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI) was also
created to oversee operations and receive applications from local hospitals in thehopes that “lifting restrictions that barred direct advertisement or receiving patients
through dedicated referral services [would] open new horizons for the medical service
industry as a whole” according to the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family

94 Roberts and Scheper-Hughes, “Introduction: Medical Migrations,” 19.
95 “South Korean Hospitals to Attract Foreign Patients from May,” AsiaPulse News, April 28, 2009
accessed July 11, 2009, General OneFile, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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Affairs.96 The KHIDI projected at least 80,000 foreign patients a year that would
significantly reduce the $48.1 million (65 billion W) deficit South Korea posts eachyear in the medical field. 500 clinics and 40 – 50 general hospitals were expected toapply to attract foreign patients. These medical institutions are not only located inSeoul but also in the outerlying regions of Pusan, Taegu and Cheju as local
governments also took part in the growing industry by marketing to foreigners
according to their strengths and medical specialties.97 In addition, the South Korean
government also established a medical tourism visa for foreigners seeking treatment.98
According to Yoon, in 2008 the average foreign patient at Samsung Seoul Hospital
spent 8 million W (US $5,280) in medical bills over five days and since most wereaccompanied by family members, the revenue was substantially more.
The Korea Tourism Bureau and the KHIDI in conjunction with theInternational Medical Service Association, which was also established by the Ministryof Health, Welfare and Family Affairs, began an international media campaign to put
South Korea on the medical tourism map.99 First, these organizations held a medical
tourism seminar in Los Angeles with twenty-seven representatives from participating
medical institutions, Korean travel agents, and government representatives in 2007.
Then foreign specialists were invited to Seoul for the Korea Medical Tourism Tourand Seminar later that same year. Twenty medical agents, insurance company
representatives, travel agents and reporters for beauty and health magazines from the
96 Ibid.
97 Yoon, 서울시 의료관광 현황과 방, 24.
98 Ibid.
99 Yoon, 서울시 의료관광 현황과 방, 24.

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U.S. Canada, Singapore, Vladivostok and Japan participated in touring twenty-nine
facilities during a 2 night/3 day “medical experience.” In November of 2008, theKorean Tourism Bureau had its third International Medical Travel Conference inSeoul with about thirty participating countries. With the amendment to the Korean
Medical Act, however, the KHIDI began aggressively marketing abroad by hosting
the first Global Healthcare and Medical Tourism Conference in Seoul in 2010 with
the Medical Tourism Association, an international organization.100 The conference
attracted 800 people from various segments of the healthcare industry from overtwenty-five countries. Due to its overwhelming success and that of Korea’s medical
tourism industry in its first few years of existence, the second annual conference took
place in April of 2011.
Notably, the KHIDI characterizes 2010 as the “year when Korean medical
tourism got its jumpstart with the U.S. market” because of the success of its Global
Healthcare Conference.101 Accordingly, on October 7, 2010 Fox New Los Angeles
aired a two-part segment called “Medical Tourism: Pros and Cons” explaining how
some U.S. corporations are now providing employees with the option to receive
medical care in South Korea and paying them cash incentives to do so.102 Christine
Devine, anchorwoman, begins the news story with two provocative questions: “Needan operation but can’t afford co-pays and deductibles? How about getting paid
100 Patricia K. Kummer, “KHIDI USA:: MEDIA - PRESS RELEASE - Korean Medical Tourism:
Spotlight on Seoul,” Korea Health Industry Development Institute, March 7, 2011,
http://www.khidiusa.org/?mid=media_press&document_srl=1496.
101 Ibid.
102 Tony Spearman, “Medical Tourism: Pros And Cons | FOX 11 News,” Fox News Los Angeles (LosAngeles: KTTV, October 7, 2010), http://www.myfoxla.com/dpp/health/medical-tourism20101007.

168$5,000 in cash to have surgery in South Korea?” The segment goes on to show atourism commercial advertisement for South Korea that features Korean b-boys(breakdancers), traditional drumming and beautiful landscapes while Devine narrates
that one can “see the sights and get medical care.” As the footage plays, a caption
runs along the bottom of the screen: “Courtesy of KIHDI.” Randy Trollop, who islobbying U.S. insurance companies to provide overseas medical coverage then states,“Bottom line is savings on your expenses.”103 The segment then jumps to b-roll of a
medical tourism meeting sponsored by the Korean government where Fox News
interviews James Bae, representative of the Korean Ministry of Health, Welfare andFamily Affairs who explains that “Korea’s healthcare prices are about 20 percent of
the cost in the United States” and that although Korean Americans are being targeted
first, the South Korean government plans to expand to the “entire U.S. people.”104
The news segment emphasizes that medical tourism to South Korea can belucrative not only for corporations but for individuals who would not only receive
better treatment but a vacation and a cash bonus. In fact, James Carter who is
described in the segment as working for the Korean government to “entice
Americans to go there for care,” characterizes the price differential in capitalist terms:“It’s labor costs. It’s the same reason why outsourcing works in manufacturing and it
works in high tech.”105 Significantly, Carter applies the same “bottom line” rhetoric
used by Trollop, illustrating how neoliberal logics and capitalist calculations justify

103 Ibid.
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid.

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transnational healthcare markets and transactions. Such justifications evidence theways in which “medical tourism does not conceive of health care as a right orentitlement of citizens […] but rather as a thing, a commodity, that can be bought andsold through global medical markets (emphasis in original).”106
The second part of Fox News’ coverage features two doctors who go on todebate the Pros and Cons of medical tourism.107 Dr. Brian Johnston, Medical
Director of White Memorial Medical Center represents a less enthusiastic view of
medical tourism while Dr. Mark Berman, President of the American Academy of
Cosmetic Surgery is far more optimistic about the positive possibilities oftransnational medical care. Dr. Johnston begins his position by stating his practicalconcerns about a patient’s ability to travel long distances after undergoing major
procedures such as heart surgery. Moreover, Dr. Johnston argues, a patient might
have complications when she is home and would then have to receive medical
aftercare from a physician who was not physically present during the her operation.
The segment ends with Dr. Johnston critiquing the $5,000 incentive system as acoercive measure that limits patients’ options for fear of termination. Rather thanbeing enticed or intimidated by their employers, Dr. Johnston believes that “People
should go where they want to go because they think they’ll get better care or they
think they can get the same care at a better price.”108 Despite his critique of employer
incentives, Dr. Johnston still applies market logics to his reasoning since people

106 Roberts and Scheper-Hughes, “Introduction: Medical Migrations,” 19.
107 Tony Spearman, “Medical Tourism: Pros And Cons | FOX 11 News.”
108 Ibid.

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should, in his estimation, be able to make clear consumer calculations as to whether
or not they will get “better care” or “the same care at a better price.” That is to say,healthcare should still be considered a product that consumers consider based on
price and quality control. As such, his critique falls short of laying out the
problematics of treating healthcare as a global industry and once again emphasizes“individual choice” as Roberts and Scheper-Hughes describe.
Dr. Berman, on the other hand, begins the discussion by responding to aquestion about safety stating, “I was just in Korea a couple of weeks ago and they
have tremendous facilities. I think it is safe for most elective procedures (emphasis
added).”109 While Dr. Johnston speaks only of non-elective procedures such as heartor orthopedic surgeries, Dr. Berman emphasizes that South Korea is a good place forelective procedures, which the viewer assumes to be cosmetic in nature given his
expertise. Indeed, that Dr. Berman is himself a plastic surgeon adds credibility to his
ability to speak to South Korea’s level of care and technology in the field of plastic
surgery, thus indirectly promoting this area of the market.
After South Korea recovered from its 1997 IMF Crisis, plastic surgery as anindustry experienced a boom since improved looks were seen as providing an
advantage in South Korea’s highly competitive society. In 2009, however, patient
visits went down as much as 40 percent with a number of clinics closing theirdoors.110 In addition, South Korea’s currency depreciated enough such that

109 Ibid.
110 Martin Fackler, “Economy Blunts South Korea’s Appetite for Plastic Surgery,” New York Times,
January1, 2009, accessed October 1, 2010,171

procedures were cheaper than in other currencies. At the same time, as outlined
above, medical tourism was identified as one way to bring demand to South Korea’s
oversupply of clinics.111 According to Samuel Koo, president and CEO of Korea’s
Tourism Board, 7.8 million tourists visited South Korea in 2009, 60,000 of who were
medical tourists seeking mostly cosmetic and dental procedures.112 This is a
staggering increase from the less than 20,000 foreign patients South Korea saw in2007.113 What’s more, estimates suggest that the number will rise to 100,000 patientsby 2012.114 In 2009, admitted foreign patients’ average medical expenses were 656
million W ($582,723 US) and of those, the main symptoms for people who paid 10
million W ($8,883 US) or more were congenitive heart conditions, heart attacks, andplastic surgery.115 Moreover, of the specialty clinics enrolled in the medical tourism
program in 2009, one-fourth were plastic surgery clinics and another fourth
specialized in dermatology.116 Indeed, medical tourism is proving not only to bring

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/business/worldbusiness/02plastic.html?_r=1&pagewanted=
all.
111 Medical tourism’s lucrative nature is also portrayed in episode 4 of B & A, Chart 4: Butterfly (나비).
Late on his payment to the loan shark, Dr. Han disappears and B & A is about to be handed over as
collateral for the loan. B & A’s office manager, who more than once saves the clinic throughout theseries, comes up with a plan to bring in Chinese medical tourists. When Dr. Han returns to the clinic
sure that he has lost it for good, he finds his waiting room filled with Chinese women wearing
facemasks, eagerly awaiting consultation.
“Chart 4: Butterfly (나비),” Before and After Plastic Surgery Clinic (비포&애프터 서형외과), MBC,
Sundays 23:40 (11:40 Korean time), 2008-Jan-06 to 2008-March-30.
112 Samuel Koo, “Korea in the Global Village and the Effort to Strengthen its Brand Power,” (lecture
presented at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea, May 20 2010).
113 Yoon, 서울시 의료관광 현황과 방, 25.
114 Yoon, 서울시 의료관광 현황과 방, 30.
115 Geum Reun Park, Medical Korea, 60,000 Foreign Patients Treated in ’09 (Seoul: Ministry of Health,Family and Welfare, April 27, 2010).
116 Ibid.

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demand to the oversupply of plastic surgery clinics in South Korea but to be lucrative
as well.
The thrust to bring consumers to South Korea’s plastic surgery market has led
to the promotion of beauty in conjunction with health and medical services or what I
refer to here as the “medicalization of beauty.” As mentioned earlier, estute tours
have been popular amongst Japanese women tourists since the 1990s. According to
Eun Mi Kim, a representative of the Seoul Tourism Organization’s Planning andMarketing Division, however, new efforts have been made by the Korean Tourism
Board to revamp such tours to include medical services in addition to standard beauty
treatments such as facials or spa experiences. In 2010, during the time of myinterview, Kim asserted that “Medical Estute” was becoming a popular tour amongst
Japanese women whose tour packages included skin assessments, cosmetic surgery
procedures, “well-being” food or meals consisting of organic health foods andshopping.117 Such packages were arranged in conjunction with a travel agency andhad so far attracted 800 tourists since their inception the year before.
According to a Donga Ilbo article entitled “100,000 International Patients willbring 900 billion W (US $594,019,000) to Korean Economy,” the Blue House (South
Korea’s equivalent of the White House) approved medical estute tours in 2009.
Written by Doctor Sang H. Kim, the article explains that private hospitals are teaming
up with the Korean Tourism Bureau to offer medical tour packages to attract
Japanese women tourists who will undergo plastic surgery procedures and117 Eun Mi Kim, personal interview, March 10, 2010.

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dermatological treatments. According to the article, South Koreans’ penchant forplastic surgery as well as their high levels of technical skill have been widely known in
Asia since the 1990s and are being used as marketing strategies to attract Asian
women medical tourists in particular. Such sentiments were echoed by Eun Mi Kim
who also stated that because Koreans use heavy metal chopsticks, Korean plastic
surgeons have more technical skill and dexterity in their hands compared to doctorsof other nationalities. That Korean doctors are more dexterous than non-Korean
doctors is widely believed in Korea and often cited as an example of why Korea’s
cosmetic surgery industry is thriving. When asked why foreigners are choosing tohave procedures done in Korea, Kim Byung-gun, director of BK Dongyang Clinic(the largest plastic surgery clinic in Seoul) told the Korea Times that “Koreans arequite good at handling small and delicate operations.”118
In addition to medical estute tours, KHIDI’s “Body and Seoul Sweepstakes”
also illustrates how the medicalization of beauty is being used as a promotional tactic
for South Korea’s medical tourism industry. Initially 2,500 entrants from throughout
the United States entered the internet sweepstakes and in October 2010, Katherine
DePasquale, a senior writer with The Ministers and Missionaries Benefit Board in
Manhattan and her guest, Rodolfo Chaparro, a biochemist, spent six nights and sevendays touring Seoul and its medical facilities.119 In addition to round-trip businessclass tickets on Korean Air, six nights at the JW Marriott Seoul, traditional Korean
118 Bae Ji-sook, 2010 January 27, “[KoreaToday] Cosmetic Surgery Emerges as Export Product.”
119 Patricia K. Kummer, “KHIDI USA:: MEDIA - PRESS RELEASE - Body and Seoul

Sweepstakes: And the Winner Is ...,” Korea Health Industry Development Institute, February 15, 2011,
http://www.khidiusa.org/?mid=media_press&document_srl=1417.

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meals and sightseeing to cultural and historical sites, the package included a day at
Konjiam Resort’s Spa, a VIP health check-up at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, a dental
exam and teeth whitening at Seoul National University Dental Hospital, traditional
Oriental medical treatments at East-West Neo Medical Center and skincare
treatments at Arumdaun Nara Beauty Clinic.120
The Official South Korea Medical YouTube channel features a seven minutepromotional video that captures DePasquale’s trip from start to finish including thecouple receiving medical treatments including an EKG, pulmonary tests, dental
bleaching, facial treatments, pulse analysis, music, and color and light therapy
amongst others.121 Given that YouTube is a visual medium, the video features very
little talking and instead offers a video montage of each day of the trip set tolighthearted music that highlights each facility’s state-of-the-art equipment such as
DePasquale and Chaparro’s RFID wristbands, which served as electronic keys that
got them from one exam to the next, and their electronic medical records, whichwere totally paperless. Understandably, since most people are not used to having
their medical tests and procedures videotaped, DePasquale and Chaparro seemslightly uncomfortable in many of the shots but ultimately act as good sports with
120 Ibid.
121 The couple’s full VIP check-up included: height and weight measurement, an EKG, urine test,
blood tests for tumor markers, arthritis, cholesterol levels, and liver function, eye examination,
hearing test, pulmonary function test, echocardiogram, abdominal ultrasound, a UBT Heliocobacter
test, a body mass index text, a breast ultrasound, a mammogram, a bone-density scan, athoracolumbar spine X-ray, a brain MRI, ultrasounds of carotid artery and thyroid, and a coronary
artery CT. Other treatments consisted of a two-hour dental exam and teeth whitening, a laser
procedure to brighten and even out facial skin tone, a Vitamin C facial treatment, music therapy,
analysis of pulse and blood flows, voice analysis, yoga, color and light therapy, and crystal bowl
therapy.
Ibid.

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DePasquale even showing her newly bleached pearly whites off to the camera. The
visual medium also provides a clear juxtaposition of medical technology with themore traditional and spiritual methods used in the “Oriental Medicine” portion of thecouple’s trip. While the pair are attached to machines and blowing into gadgets
during the early portion of the video, the later portion finds them beating on
traditional Korean drums and then meditating to the sounds of a therapist “playing” acrystal bowl. Such fusion of techniques typically categorized separately as “Eastern”
and “Western” medicines is purposeful. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family
Affairs announced plans in Winter of 2011 to globalize its ancient and oriental
medicines industry by expanding the Korean market to ten trillion Won (US $8.9
billion) by 2015.122 The government will not only track ingredients from production
to distribution in order to prevent unacceptable levels of toxins and insecticides but
also intends to ease regulations on other possibly toxic ingredients such as heavy
metals. The video, as the sweepstakes itself, thus illustrates how several industries areenmeshed within efforts to promote the medical tourism industry.
The video ends with the couple’s thoughts about their experiences. Both ofthem emphasize how impressed they were with the medical technology, especially in
conjunction with more traditional forms of medicine. DePasquale states that, “We
don’t usually see that level of technology so that was quite impressive.”123 Chaparroacknowledges that although a language barrier existed, he felt as though people were
122

“Korean Oriental Medicine as Big Business”, Winter 2011,
http://www.asianplasticsurgeryguide.com/koreatrends/1105_korean-oriental-medicine.html.
123 Medicalkorea’s Channel - YouTube, n.d.,
http://www.youtube.com/user/medicalkorea#p/c/1/zgt5KtDdl_I.

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trying to communicate to make them feel comfortable. The video’s visual more thanaural nature perhaps emphasizes this point and ironically, there are several
grammatical errors not only in the English subtitles that accompany their soundbites
but also in their editing.
In comparison to the video, KHIDI’s press release covering the sweepstakes
trip offers a much more detailed version of the DePasquale and Chaparro’s
experience. In addition to providing an endless list of all of the medical tests the twounderwent, it also provides an exhaustive summary of the cultural and historicalsights they visited as well as every single Korean meal. Most notably, when the pair
go to have their dermatological beauty treatments at Arumdaun Nara, a dermatology
and plastic surgery clinic, their treatments—a laser procedure and a Vitamin C
facial—are characterized as “health and medical treatments.” That is to say, rather
than relegated to the realm of beauty, the treatments are described as both necessarily
related to good health and medical, not aesthetic, in nature. Furthermore, as thepress release reveals, the clinic bestows upon them a goodie bag as a parting gift filledwith the clinic’s own brand of facial products and DePasquale’s assessments afterusing them are included in the release. As the “Body and Seoul Sweepstakes”
medical tour shows, the medicalization of beauty asserts that beauty, like healthcare in
the form of surgeries and lifesaving treatments, can be bought and sold on the global
healthcare market through treatments, procedures, surgeries and products. Moreover,by placing medical procedures in relation with holistic and beauty treatments, beauty
itself is medicalized and deemed a necessary part of health and bodily management.
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Furthermore, by experiencing traditional healing techniques with cutting edge
technology, South Korea is constructed as a space wherein both the modern and the
traditional coexist. Such portrayals of South Korea—where tradition and modernity
meet—and how they operate within Hallyu’s economies of desire and desperation, arethe topic of the following section.

HALLYU AND THE (NOSTALGIC) KOREAN DREAM
Having provided a sense of both Hallyu and South Korea’s medical tourism
industry, I now return to how these strategic industries intersect, not only for theSouth Korean government but also within the everyday lives of Asian women. I
argue that Hallyu, first through its K-dramas and to a lesser extent films and more
recently K-pop, performs affective labor for the medical tourism industry. Because
Hallyu functions as a “technology of subjectivity” with transnational trajectories,
Hallyu actors and actresses, storylines, fashion and scenery animate Hallyu fans’desires in opportune ways for the medical tourism industry. Ahiwa Ong suggests that“technologies of subjectivity rely on an array of knowledge and expert systems to
induce self-animation and self-government so that citizens can optimize choices,
efficiency, and competitiveness in turbulent market conditions.”124 Accordingly, Kdramas normalize ethics of self-management including cosmetic surgery in addition
to ironing out the cosmetic surgery’s moral tensions as we have seen in B&A.
Hallyu’s narrative strategies “induce self-animation” by creating what sociologist
124 Aihwa Ong, neoliberalism as exception: mutations in citizenship and sovereignty, (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006) 6.

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Charis Thompson calls a “fungibility between the affective and the economic.”125
She explains that “often otherwise non-fungible economic activity is rendered
fungible only because of the affective economies in question.”126 In other words,
cosmetic surgery, and traveling to South Korea to undergo it, becomes a rational
economic investment in part because of how it is affectively tied to Hallyu’s popular
culture representations. Hallyu’s effects are not uniform, however, but constitutedifferent meanings depending on the transnational connectivities it travels and thecontexts within which it is received. Thus, I argue that Hallyu constructs a fantasy
space for its viewers that either resurrects nostalgic dreams of the past or erects
aspirational dreams—a “Korean Dream.” In both cases, emulating South Korean
beauty, because of Hallyu’s enmeshed nature with South Korea’s cosmetic surgery(and other beauty) industries, is coded as one avenue of embodying such dreams.
Indeed, South Korea’s growing numbers of medical tourists suggest asynergistic coupling between the two industries. According to the International
Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery’s (ISAPS) Biennial Global Survey conducted in
2009, South Korea ranked seventh amongst the top ten nations that performed themost plastic surgery procedures (the United States was first).127 Given its population
size, however, South Korea boasts the highest rates of plastic surgery per capita.
Significantly, Chinese cosmetic surgery patients compose 30 percent of all cosmetic
patients. Of medical tourists, Japanese patients are the second largest group with
125

Thompson, “Medical Migrations: Afterword,” 210.

126 Ibid.
127 “Worldwide Plastic Surgery Statistics Available for the First Time -- NEW YORK, Aug. 9/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --”, n.d., http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/worldwideplastic-surgery-statistics-available-for-the-first-time-100248404.html.

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Singaporean and Indonesian numbers not far behind.128 Eun Mi Kim stated that theRussian population is also quickly growing and being targeted by the Korean Tourism
Board.129 Moreover, according to Kim, it is difficult to get a true sense of just how
many American medical tourists come to Korea each year since many are Korean
Americans who already have a grasp of the language and stay with family rather thanbooking packages tours.130
The number of Chinese patients is growing so rapidly, in fact, that the Foreign
Ministry of China issued a warning in 2010 against going abroad, and more
specifically, to South Korea for cosmetic surgery procedures.131 The Chinese Foreign
Ministry stated that many patients have returned from their surgeries not having
received sufficient information about their procedures and/or disliking the outcome
because they were not able to fully communicate with the surgeons. Although many
Chinese women are heading to Korea, China’s cosmetic surgery industry is also
growing and the Ministry’s warnings may also be in an effort to grow their industry
domestically. Despite their admonitions, however, Chinese patients continue totravel to South Korea for surgery. A New York Times article interviews a 23-year-oldbank employee who underwent a US $15,000 cheekbones and jaw reshaping surgery.

128 Bae Ji-sook, 2010 January 27, “[KoreaToday] Cosmetic Surgery Emerges as Export Product.”
129 Eun Mi Kim, personal interview, March 10, 2010.
130 Thompson characterizes the medical migrant as “often utilizing kin and diasporic networks, travel

and treatment may well be financed with borrowed money, and made possible by public and private
prior connections.” My book manuscript will further explore how diasporic circuits intersect with
Hallyu and the medical tourism industry.
Thompson, “Medical Migrations: Afterword,” 207.
131 “Chinese Government Warns Of Plastic Surgery Overseas”, 2010 March 23,
http://www.ukmedix.com/surgery/eyelidsurgery/chinese_government_warns_of_plastic_surgery_overseas5333.cfm.

180She deliberated between the procedures and opening a Starbucks with her savings
and ultimately chose the former because she “was curious to see what [she] would
look like.”132 The interviewee’s choices—between opening a Starbucks andundergoing surgery—illustrate how cosmetic surgery is often understood as aninvestment in one’s future, one in line with a lucrative business venture such as
opening a Starbucks.
While there are multiple reasons for medical tourists’ visits to Korea including
less reputable and regulated care in their home countries (as is the case with China) or
lower costs, Hallyu’s influence on Asian consumers in particular, is also a prominent
factor. According to the International Medical Travel Journal:
Cosmetic surgery among Asians reflects the “Korean Wave.” Cost is not an
issue, as they are willing to pay up to three times more for surgery in Korea.
Asian women from China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore and Hong Kong areflocking to Korea for facial bone contouring and cosmetic surgery on theireyes and noses. Asians from other territories want to look more like popular
Korean actors and musicians. And they are willing to travel and pay up to
three times more than they would in China.133
Such reasoning is verified in the sentiments of Wen Lin Lin, a 26-year-old Chinese
woman who underwent rhinoplasty (nose job) in Korea in 2010. Lin Lin admits that“Song Hye-gyo is my favorite actress. When I decided to alter my face to look likeher, there was no other choice than to visit Korean doctors.”134 Statements such as

132 Sharon LaFraniere, “Chinese Turn to Plastic Surgery in Growing Numbers - NYTimes.com”(Asia Pacific, April 23, 2011),
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/world/asia/24beijing.html?pagewanted=all.
133 “Seoul to Dominate South Korean Medical Tourism Industry”, 2010 January 20,
http://www.asianplasticsurgeryguide.com/news10/012010_seoul-korean-plastic-surgery.html.
134 Sharon LaFraniere, “Chinese Turn to Plastic Surgery in Growing Numbers - NYTimes.com.”

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Lin Lin’s distinctly reveal the connection between Hallyu’s affective power and the
medical tourism industry’s neoliberal pull.
Hallyu’s influence on fans and potential consumers is not limited to cosmetic
surgery consumption, however. According to Shim, Hallyu consumption has
spawned new consumer lifestyles for Asian fans abroad that have had “a big impact”
on consumer culture “including food, fashion, make-up trends, and even plastic
surgery” such that Asian youth are adorned in Hallyu fan gear and “in the streets ofHanoi and Beijing, it is common to find young members of the ‘Korea Tribe’, orKoreanophiles, sporting multiple earrings, baggy hip hop pants, and the square-toedshoes of Seoul fashion.”135 South Korean companies, capitalizing on Hallyu’s success,have targeted consumer markets abroad. Corporations such as Samsung and LG
have cashed in by featuring Hallyu stars in local commercials in various parts of Asiaand even paying for K-dramas to air on local television networks.136 For many Hallyu
fans, K-dramas and the lifestyles they portray symbolize Asian capitalist modernity.
As such, the right computer or gadget accessorizes a modern life while neoliberal
rationales codify the body as a site for commodification as well.
Notably, the affective power of Hallyu is not uniform but rather, travels
through historical and geopolitical circuits that largely affect how Hallyu consumers
interact with it. According to Korean popular culture specialist Mark Russell,
In Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Bangkok, Seoul seemed modern and hip, and theprotagonists of the shows had lives that young audiences could aspire to. But
Japan is much richer than Korea, its technology generally more advanced.
135
136

Shim, “Waxing the Wave,” 7.
Ibid.

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Korean television in Japan did not take off because it represented the future;
it represented the past.137
Accordingly, Japanese Hallyu fans have generally been older than those in other Asian
countries. These middle-aged women, like the women embarking on Korean estute
tours because they evoke “nostalgia for more traditional Asian lifestyle or values,”
interact with Korean cultural products through their own repositories of personal andnational memories. Importantly, these national memories are colored by Japan’scolonial and postcolonial relationship with South Korea and as Jung asserts, “thedesires of Japanese fans for South Korean popular culture must be distinguishedfrom the desires of other Asian consumers.”138
We see this evocation of the past at play in Jung’s analysis of Japanese fans of
Bae Yong-Joon. Jung contends that:...the difference in the progression of the phases of modernization inSouth Korea and Japan created a significant temporal lag. The twocountries occupy a ‘different now and then.’ This asynchronous temporalexperience is the main reason for the counter-coeval gaze of Japanese fansat BYJ’s soft masculinity. […] Japanese audiences find their lost virtues
from BYJ’s soft masculine body. […] In the case of BYJ’s polite image,
Japanese fans find their ‘past’ and ‘memory’ in BYJ’s ‘present’ body. BYJ’spolite body exemplifies the nostalgia of the fans where counter-coevality isevident.139
As Jung explains, Bae Yong-Joon fans’ counter-coeval gaze is made apparent, forexample, in how they understand his body. While fans appreciate his momjjang

137 Mark Russell, Pop Goes Korea: Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music, and Internet Culture (Berkeley:

Stone Bridge Press, 2008) 120.
138
Jung, “Bae Yong-Joon, Soft Masculinity," 41.
139
Jung, “Bae Yong-Joon, Soft Masculinity," 64.

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(perfectly toned) body, a postmodern ideal, they articulate such appreciation byfiltering it through the traditional ideal of wen (controlled, sensitive and noble)
masculinity, something they lament has been lost in contemporary Japanese men andsociety at large.140 In other words, Japanese fandom is necessarily mediated throughJapan’s postcolonial relationship to South Korea so that fans see their past in South
Korea’s present, thus resurrecting nostalgic dreams.
The medical tourism industry’s marketing strategies play on these nostalgic
dreams in their construction of South Korea as both a modern and traditional space.
As outlined in the previous section, the medical tourism industry has made significant
efforts to combine medical services with their estute tours since they are alreadypopular amongst Japanese women. Estute tours emphasize traditional Korean beauty
treatments, foods and medicines and medical estute tours fold skin assessments,
cosmetic surgery procedures, “well-being” foods and shopping into this pre-existing(and successful) marketing strategy. Similarly, marketing ploys like the Body andSeoul Sweepstakes YouTube video take careful pains to emphasize oriental healing
techniques and medicines, such as Korean drumming and crystal light therapy, as
effective healing tools alongside South Korea’s technologically advanced medical
facilities. Thus, Hallyu activates nostalgic dreams on the part of Japanese fans and the
medical tourism industry asserts itself a way of experiencing that nostalgia while
receiving technologically advanced, modern procedures.

140

Jung, “Bae Yong-Joon, Soft Masculinity," 70.

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In China and Southeast Asian countries, however, Korea evokes “the future”
and Hallyu fans tend to be much younger than those in Japan. While Russell’s use of
the linear temporal terms “future” and “past” evokes a false teleology, he does
capture the differing ways in which fans in these regions might relate to South Korea
given their distinct historical and economic relationships. As we have discussed, forviewers in developing nations such as China and Taiwan, Shim asserts, Korean
dramas have offered “better terms for negotiation” by providing high-quality
entertainment coupled with Asian values and stories that balance traditional
sentiments with modern cityscapes and lifestyles. This is perhaps best captured in anarticle written by deputy editor of Asia News Network, Yasmin Lee G. Arpon, about
Philippine fandom of “Koreanovelas,” as K-dramas are known in the Philippines.
Chronicling the experiences of Paola, a journalism student who studied industrial
management in South Korea simply to have a chance to go there, Arpon describes
Paola’s meeting her favorite Hallyu stars as “the perfect way to cap her Korean dream(emphasis added).”141
In chapter two, I use the concept of the “American Dream” to refer to thework that empire does in establishing aspirational desire within those outside of thephysical borders of the U.S. but inside the reach of U.S. empire. Surgery, in thisframe, operates as an intervention in identity rather than appearance, and becomes ameans through which a better life is secured, one that is symbolized by whitenessitself. Similarly, I argue that Hallyu activates a “Korean Dream” for Paola and other141

Yasmin Lee G. Arpon, “‘Koreanovelas’ Fever Is Sweeping the Philippines’,” in Korean Wave, ed.
The Korea Herald, vol. 5, Insight into Korea Series (Seoul: Jimoodang Publishers, 2008), 32.

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Southeast Asian and Chinese fans. In the same vein, bodily alterations and excessive
participation in the marketplace are inroads through which these women aspire tosecure the fantastic South Korean lifestyles that are mediated through Hallyu’s
cultural productions. In this case, cosmetic surgery is not about whiteness so muchas it is about South Korean looks and Asian capitalist modernity.
There is no end in sight in the near future for Hallyu or for medical tourism.
To be sure, critics of Korea’s medical tourism industry have come forth now that theburgeoning industry is in its fifth year. These critics contend that South Korea
cannot afford to use its doctors for foreigner care given its rapidly aging
population.142 Others echo the Chinese government’s warnings regarding language
and the inability to properly communicate with healthcare providers. Still others, likeFox News Los Angeles’ Doctor Johnston, are concerned with patient aftercare. In
spite of these critiques, medical tourism’s profit—US $60 million per year—continues
to grow as do the numbers of medical tourists who are expected to reach 140,000 by
2015.143 What’s more, plans for expansion continue and a cosmetic surgery/casino isunder construction during the writing of this chapter.144 As Hallyu’s reach in Asia
continues to expand, so too does South Korea’s medical tourism industry.

142 Robert J. Fouser, “Rethinking Medical Tourism,” 2011 April 25, The Korea Times.
143 “Seoul to Dominate South Korean Medical Tourism Industry.”
144 Lee Hyo-sik, “Seven Luck to Boost Ties with Clinics,” The Korea Times, October 7, 2010, sec.
National, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/10/117_74181.html.

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CONCLUSION
This chapter is about dreams. As is the case for our heroine, Samsoon,
corporeal issues and the neoliberal rationales that govern them, are a part of Asian
women’s quotidian lives and can operate in and through the ephemeral, aspirationaland very personal space of dreams. For Japanese Hallyu fans, such dreams take on a
nostalgic resonance given Japan’s postcolonial relationship with South Korea.
Chinese and Southeast Asian fans, however, construct “Korean Dreams” thatintersect with aspirations to Asian capitalist modernity and economic development.
Both types of dreams are mediated through Hallyu’s fantastical representations ofSouth Korean capitalist modernity and for many Asian women, South Korea’s
medical tourism industry is one way of achieving such dreams. As feminist scholars
have shown, geopolitical disparities affect women’s bodies in multiple ways.145 For
example, the 2009 film Google Baby profoundly “explores the business of outsourcing
babies,” by following the lives of surrogates in India along with the Western couples
who contract them. The documentary aptly illuminates the demarcation between
who contracts such labor and who performs it.146 Plastic surgery consumption andmedical tourism pose a similar but unique dilemma particularly for Asian feminism:
On the one hand, Asian women have differing access to technologies of the self suchas plastic surgery. On the other, women globally are subject to transnational market
flows and ideologies that posit neoliberal forms of self-management as critical to145 The 12th International Women’s Film Festival in Seoul Conference in 2010, for example, covered

the topic “The Political Economy of Maternity in the Glocal Era” (지구지역시대 모성의정치경제학).
146 http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/google-baby/index.html, accessed July 1 2011.

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success and constitute them as liberal subjects. Hallyu’s cultural hegemony
throughout Asia poses new formations of power that disrupt the binary of “the Westand the rest.” Such developments necessitate a new language amongst Asian
feminists that goes beyond the critique of the individual patient and her psyche andinterrogates instead the structures of economy, cultural forms and ideologies thatpush Asian women into the consumer market. Accordingly, an examination ofYŏsŏng Minuhoe, a feminist non-profit organization based in Seoul, South Korea, andtheir “Love Your Body” campaign is the subject of the following chapter.

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CHAPTER FOUR
“LOVE YOUR BODY”: LOOKISM,
FEMINIST ORGANIZING, AND DANGEROUS CORPORATIONS
We can no longer simply blame these problems on each individual woman’sawareness. We have to establish a solution to minimize the influence of capital
investment and commercial public culture on women’s bodies, which has become anew market.1-- Kim Sang-hŭi, Executive Director of Korean Womenlink
During an interview with So Sŭng-jin, a thirty-five year old who works longhours at an overseas investment firm and an English student of mine, Sŭng-jin
described a massage shop she frequents called Yakson Myŏngga in Kwanghwamun, abustling professional district in Seoul.2 Sŭng-jin frequents the shop to receive
massages to relieve the asymmetry of her face. She told me that because of thelocation, most of the customers are like her, early to mid-30s working single womenwith disposable income. Believing that one side of her face protrudes farther out
than the other and that in general her face is too wide, Sŭng-jin purchased the deluxe
facial package for facial symmetry, which provides the customer with eight massages.
Unsure of whether the treatments would yield results, she opted out of the mostexpensive package of sixteen massages for the equivalent of $2000 US.
1 Kim Sang-hŭi , “Society Incites Cosmetic Surgery,” Joong Ang Ilbo (Seoul, South Korea, n.d.),sec.Minority Voices.
2 So Sŭng-jin, “Interview with Sŭng-jin Soh,” In Person, March 16, 2010.
All interviewees’ names have been changed except those in official public positions.

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When she took me to the shop to receive a free consultation for my research,Sŭng-jin was also going to have her second to last massage. She told me that she
thought she could see results but that she could not be sure if they could be
attributed to the massages or the fact that she had been making a conscientious effort
to chew with only one side of her mouth.3 I asked Sŭng-jin whether she had evergone to a doctor and while she had not, her friend had. The doctor suggested, she
told me, a cosmetic surgery procedure that would cost $6,000 US. Sŭng-jin reasoned
that the eight massages were a much better deal. The masseurs, on the other hand,
had told her that the problem was a result of chewing her food on only one side anduneven hip alignment. In order to correct this, the whole body had to be massaged
for two and a half hours at a time. When I suggested that I experience one, Sŭng-jin
said it would be too painful (she repeated this several times underscoring just how
painful the massages are), not to mention expensive.
Once in the shop, I perused the services menu. While Sŭng-jin had
mentioned that the massages also had therapeutic effects such as relieving shoulder
and back pain, I noticed no mention of these benefits and that all the services weregrouped by body regions: “Face Management” (ŏlgul kwalli) and “Body Management(mom kwalli).” During my consultation, the consultant asked me what I was interested
in. When I asked about the weight loss and face shrinking massages, she qualified

3

In a subsequent meeting, Sŭng-jin told me that the massages had worked. The shop had taken amold of her face on her first visit and her last. When she compared the two molds, she could see avisible difference in the shape of her face. She had signed the original molding so she knew it was
the same one they had made the first day. The difference between the two molds was, she reasoned,
indisputable evidence of the efficacy of the eight painful massages she had invested in.

190their efficacy by saying that they would not be as effective for someone who has
always had weight problems compared to someone who has recently gained weight.
She also commented that there was not enough definition between my chin and jaw
and that I’d be prettier if there were. When I told her I was from the U.S. and that
I’d never seen anything like this before, she mentioned that the shop was looking to
expand to the U.S. in either Los Angeles or New York and that they had recently
opened shops in the Philippines and Japan. I thanked her for her time, said I would
think about it and left the shop in a hurry before the consultant could sense myanxiety. Sŭng-jin was absolutely right, I could not afford even the most inexpensive
massage on my researcher’s budget. What’s more, her assessment of my looks leftme questioning the contours of my face and the shape of my body.
I had been living in Seoul nearly a year by then and during that time wassubject to the same kinds of scrutiny, advertisements and media images that inform
South Korean women’s everyday lives. Waiting for the subway, I would daily see
commercials playing on flat screen televisions at the platform advertising soju (Korea’s
national liquor, akin to Japanese sake) or the like that featured scantily clad and slim
actresses dancing around, shot glass in hand. Once on the subway train, I was
bombarded with ads for cosmetic surgery clinics featuring “before and after” photosof “successfully” transformed women. At family gatherings, my cousins and aunts
either reprimanded me for gaining weight or lauded me for losing some. Indeed,
what I had felt that day in the massage shop was not new but rather, a reminder of191the daily anxieties that had been mounting even as I tried to observe such things froma researcher’s distance.
Sŭng-jin’s experiences—and my own—underscore the myriad bodymanagement techniques and services, media images and advertisements throughwhich South Korean women must navigate. These various types of “body work” area result of new identifications with the body. As feminist scholar Cho Joo-hyuncogently argues, “the source of self-empowerment is no longer based on the womanly
virtues of traditional ethics, but on measurable and quantifiable factors such asheight, weight, and BMI index.”4 In order to achieve this self-empowerment, then,South Korean women are thus increasingly seeking self-improvement throughvarious forms of body work that include cosmetic surgery, dieting, skin and body care
as well as innovative—and expensive—new treatments, like Sŭng-jin’s, to secure andsignify their identities where smarter clothes or a more original hairstyle would havesufficed in the past.
It is precisely such multifarious forms of body work that South Korean
feminist non-profit organization, Yŏsŏng Minuhoe ($&), known inEnglish as Korean Womenlink (heretofore Womenlink), sought to address in their
2003 “Love Your Body” campaign.5 Officially called “Women’s bodies are beautiful
4 Cho Joo-Hyun, “Neoliberal Governmentality at Work: Post-IMF Korean Society and theConstruction of Neoliberal Women,” Korea Journal 49, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 15 – 43.
5 The campaign had several names/slogans during its months-long run depending on the context. It
was also called the “No Diet, No Cosmetic Surgery” campaign, the “Revitalize Your Body”
campaign, and the “I am the Owner of My Body” campaign.
Korean Womenlink, “여성의 몸 있는 그대로가 아름답다 외모지상주의 인식개선산업”,2003, Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.

192

as they are: The Lookism Perception Reform Project,” the campaign lasted from
April through the end of the year and sought to not only educate women about thehealth of their bodies but to strike at the heart of “lookism,” which is largely definedas “prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of appearance.”6 Womenlink
identifies lookism as a major social concern for women that has material
consequences vis-à-vis the job and marriage markets. Through a multi-pronged
approach, the organization outreached to women and girls, held rallies, filed legal
complaints against cosmetic surgery clinics and diet food companies, conductedsurveys, monitored media programming and even produced a half hour
mockumentary. In these ways, Womenlink’s campaign embodied one of theorganization’s major tenets—that the personal is political.
This chapter argues that the “Love Your Body” campaign offers a criticalcounterpoint to Western discourses on South Korean cosmetic surgery consumptionthat overdetermine the salience of race. As we have seen in chapter one, Western
discourses map U.S. notions of race onto the South Korean context in ways that
obscure the geopolitical realities shaping the South Korean context. Given South
Korea’s homogeneous demographic population, however, race is less salient(although not absent) in discourses and critiques concerning cosmetic surgery.7

6

As quoted from John Ayto’s 20th Century Words in William Safire, “The Way We Live Now: 8-27-00:
On Language; Lookism - New York Times,” The New York Times, August 27, 2000, sec. Magazine,
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/27/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-8-27-00-on-languagelookism.html.
7 South Korea’s demographics are, however, rapidly changing. A 2007 report prepared by theCommittee of Policy on Foreigners predicts that the number of migrants living in Korea will rise to 4
million, roughly 10% of the total population, by 2020. Accordingly, efforts have been and are being
made by state and non-state actors to see Korea as a multiracial and multicultural society in the193Accordingly, Womenlink’s campaign constructs women’s excessive consumption of
cosmetic surgery as a multi-dimensional problem that not only affects women’s
health but is the result of a social problem with material consequences: lookism. This
chapter argues that, by organizing around the politics of the everyday, Womenlink
levels a powerful and provocative critique against the cosmetic surgery industry byindicting its predatory marketing practices and locating the construction andperpetuation of lookism where the interests of the media and cosmetic surgery clinics
converge. In so doing, I contend, Womenlink exemplifies geopolitically situatedfeminist organizing around issues of the body that cease to focus on the individual(and whether or not her choices are rational) and instead, interrogates the predatory
capitalist practices of the industries productive of those choices.
Accordingly, this chapter first offers a brief genealogy of South Korean
feminism and of Womenlink itself. Then, this chapter uses Womenlink’s educationaland satirical video, Knifestyle, as a prism through which to examine the “Love Your
Body” campaign in order to interrogate its distinct organizing logics. I argue that,when it comes to issues of embodiment, Womenlink’s campaign offers criticallessons in feminist organizing that move beyond race and patriarchy and instead,demands justice for the ways in which women’s bodies are increasingly interpellated
as sites of capitalist consumption.

making. For an ethnographic study on how NGOs are translating the discourse of migrants’ rights
to difference into practices and new ethics of normativity and tolerance, see:
EuyRyung Jun, “Virtuous Citizens and Sentimental Society: Ethics and Politics in Neoliberal South
Korea,” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011).

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KOREAN WOMENLINK AND FEMINISM IN SOUTH KOREA
Womenlink’s broader goals translate into feminist practices that seek totransform the fabric of women’s everyday lives. Indeed, Womenlink takes quite
seriously the adage that “The Personal is Political” and seeks, through their
movements “to change personal matters into political issues.”8 According to KimKyŏng-hŭi, this slogan not only directly connects politics and daily life but also
expands the agenda of the women’s movement by creating a link between women’s
personal desires and social change.9 In so doing, Womenlink breaks throughideological barriers between pubic and private affairs that understand everyday
choices as removed from the realm of politics. As we shall see in the brief genealogyof South Korean feminism, it is this very commitment—to enacting change both
institutionally as well as in the realm of the everyday—that sets Womenlink apartfrom other South Korean feminist organizations.
South Korean feminism, like the rest of the country’s historical, political andeconomic trajectories, has been unduly affected by the nation’s triangulated colonial
relationships to Japan and the U.S. The first women’s movement formed during
8

Kim Kyŏng-hŭi, “ #  ”in    , (Seoul, South Korea: Korean Womenlink, 2008) 41 – 190.
9Ibid.
The feminist mantra “The personal is political” originates out of the U.S. Women’s Liberation
Movement and more specifically a paper entitled, The Personal is Political written by Carol Hanisch in1970, the slogan (in its original sense) meant to impart that women’s concerns regarding sex,
appearance, abortion and division of labor (to name a few) were not “personal” as they had been
deemed by larger radical movements but were in and of themselves political. In other words, while
women shared concerns with the men they organized with, they also had issues that were not only
particular to them, often having to do with their bodies, but from which their male compatriots
actually benefitted.
Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political: The Original Feminist Theory Paper at the Author’s Web
Site”, n.d., http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html.

195

Japanese protectorship (1905 – 1910) and its primary goal was to raise funds to pay
the debt owed Japan by Korea in the hopes of ending protectorship status.10
Feminism was enmeshed with nationalism and Korean women were at the forefrontof the March First, 1919 demonstrations for independence from Japan.
In the years immediately following the March First demonstrations, the short
lived New Women’s Movement emphasized the exploration of women’s sexuality
and liberation from patriarchal households and mandates.11 An outcome of educatedand upper-class women who had traveled to and had been educated in Japan and thus
exposed to European liberalism, the New Women’s Movement unsurprisingly met
with hostility from the national liberation movement and was soon replaced by the
Christian church-based nationalist women’s movement and the socialist women’s
movement.12 The socialist women’s movement and the women’s labor movement inparticular, reached its peak in the late 1920s and 1930s continuing into the Korean
War. By the early 1950s, however, national partition and Cold War ideology justified
the violent suppression of socialism and the Left, leaving a feminist vacuum in South
Korea until the 1970s.
Military dictator, Park Chung-hee, drove economic growth throughindustrialization throughout the 1970s and brought in foreign capital investment
through cheap, female labor. As a result, an inordinate number of underage girls
were exploited as factory workers and subjected to extremely harsh working

10 Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi, “Introduction,” 2.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.

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conditions for very little wages. Under these conditions, the Women Factory
Workers Movement began to take shape and focused on improving their working
conditions by emphasizing human rights to life. This movement joined with themore middle-class college-educated women’s movement, which opposed Park
Chung-hee’s authoritarian rule and became the foundation for the progressive
women’s movement.13
In the 1980s, Korean women started forming new progressive organizations
including the Female Christian Scholars Association (Yŏsinhakcha Hyobuihoe 1980), theKorean Women’s Equal Friends (Yŏsŏng P‘yŏnuhoe), Women’s Hotline (Yŏsŏngwi
Chŏnhwa 1983), Another culture (Tto Hanaŭi Munhwa 1984) and Christian Women’s
Friends (Kidok Yŏminuhoe 1986).14 These organizations were formed mostly by welleducated women and focused mainly on what they saw as women’s rights in theforms of domestic violence and labor issues such as companies’ unwritten policies toretire women workers by the age of twenty-five. Other organizations, however,sought to focus on national politics in addition to, or with more urgency, than
women’s rights.
In order to rectify this political divide, the Korea United Women’s
Organization (Han’guk Yŏsŏng Tanch‘eyŏnhap /KUWO), an umbrella organization thathouses twenty-one other feminist groups, was established in 1987 by three key
13

Kim Ki Sŏnmi, “ 4  ‘" ’ ” in  . The Current Historyof Korean Women 4, (Seoul, South Korea: Hanul Books, 2004), 346 - 370.
14 Yi Migyŏng, “!%  ” in     , (Seoul, South Korea: Dongduk Women’s University Women’s
Research Center, 1998) 15 – 46.

197

groups: the Women Factory Workers’ Movement, who organized labor efforts forbetter working conditions, the well-educated women’s movement composed ofwomen who had participated in the democratic movements during their college years,
and the Christian Women’s Group whose goals centered on sex workers’ andprisoners’ human rights.15 These three movements coalesced around the same
objective to democratize Korean society through the goal of women’s liberation,
which, they theorized, would serve the democratization of society as a whole. YiChŏng-u, the first chairwoman of KUWO, articulated KUWO’s mission in the firstissue of Democratic Women in July of 1987 as such: “The goal of the women’s
movement […] should seek to change the infrastructure of society in order to reduce
discrimination and suppression. To make this change, we should fight for democracy
and equal rights along with human rights to be free from political suppression andforeign influence.”16 In this way, Womenlink’s contemporaries, while organizing
around gender inequality, largely focused on structural and institutional change.
Womenlink was established the same year as KUWO on September 12, largely
by women who were student movement activists in the 1970s and 1980s and office
workers who were members of the Women’s Labor Center.17 Two years later, in
1989, they established their Life Cooperative, which takes as its mission theprotection of human life and the environment and continues to be actively engaged
in environmental issues and consumer campaigns. Between 1992 and 2001,

15

Ibid.
Ibid.
17
Park Hye Gyong, Personal Communication, March 30, 2012.
16

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Womenlink opened eleven branches in various parts of South Korea including
Koyang, Chinju, Kwangju and Inch‘ŏn.18 During that time, the organization also
opened its Media Movement Headquarters, Equal Employment Headquarters andestablished their Family and Sexuality Counseling Center, which allowed them togrow their influence by offering their services regarding family and sexual violenceissues in addition to labor issues.19
Today, Womenlink is the largest, most active and visible feminist organization
in South Korea. In fact, according to feminist scholar Park Hye Gyong, former
members have gone on to positions within the Ministry of Gender Equality and to
become congress members, thus lending their support to Womenlink’s campaigns.
As a result, Womenlink is able to garner a wide-range of media coverage for theircampaigns and events.20 With a membership of 9,000, Womenlink employs twentythree full-time staff to execute, research and fundraise for their incredibly wide arrayof campaigns and projects.21 According to staff members Jŏng Eŭnji and Ju Gai,
their membership reflect a diversity of women in their twenties to their fifties frommultiple regions and many of their staff are graduates of Ewha Women’s University’s
Woman’s Studies Masters Program.22 Indeed, Womenlink is deeply connected to the
University and their Women’s studies program, which is known to be radically18

Korean Womenlink, “단쳬소개서-한국여성민우회”, 2003, Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South
Korea.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
21
Korean Womenlink, “단쳬소개서-한국여성민우회”, 2003, Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South
Korea.
22Jŏng Eŭnji and Ju Gai, “Interview with Jŏng Eŭnji and Ju Gai,” In person, April 5, 2010.
Park Hye Gyong, Personal Communication, March 30, 2012.

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feminist, since many of the organization’s critical members are graduates including
Han Myŏngsuk, head of the current largest oppositional party in South Korea.23
Since its inception, Womenlink has casted a wide net and has initiatedactivities towards the broad aims of building an independent, democratic society;founding a national, independent economy; equal rights and opportunities for
women; securing just labor rights for women; lobbying for women’s participation inall social arenas; and eliminating domestic violence and sexual discrimination.24
According to an application they submitted to the Ministry of Gender Equality forfunds for their “Love Your Body” Campaign, the organization’s current mission is“to abolish gender discrimination and make sure that society guarantees women’s
rights. Furthermore, our mission is to organize towards a society in which nature andhumans are in harmony.”25
Womenlink’s understands the everyday realm as part and parcel to nurturing
such “harmony.” According to their website, their “Movement starts from daily life.
We strive to eliminate alienation and discrimination against women in the workplace,the home and local communities.”26 As such, their commitment to “daily life” and“home” is evident in several of their campaigns apart from the “Love Your Body”
campaign. The year before the “Love Your Body” campaign took place, theylaunched the “Smile, Holiday” campaign, which sought to “raise awareness and start
23

Park Hye Gyong, Personal Communication, March 30, 2012.
$ & in     (Seoul, South Korea:
Dongduk Women’s University Women’s Research Center, 1998), 342 – 344.
25 Korean Womenlink, “단쳬소개서-한국여성민우회”, 2003, Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South
Korea.
26“Korean Womenlink -- About Us”, n.d., womenlink.or.kr.
24200

discussions about sex discrimination in regards to labor on holidays” especially thosepertaining to memorial customs.27 On major holidays, according to prescribed
gender roles within Korean society, it is commonplace to find women preparing andserving elaborate meals for their in-laws while men relax with one another, usually
enjoying drinks and playing games. Preparing meals for family members to eat aswell as to offer those that have passed during memorial services is also the sole
responsibility of women. As such, women typically dread major holidays as a time ofincreased labor within the house rather than a time of rest or relaxation.
Womenlink’s “Smile, Holiday” Campaign sought to reform such gendered practices
and they organized a street campaign, published a brochure on the topic, established
an Equal Holiday Practices Declaration Movement as well as an on-line campaign.28
The “Smile, Holiday” Campaign speaks to how Womenlink seeks to transform theeveryday lives of women inside their very homes and during even the most intimateof occasions by working towards the goal of women smiling (rather than dreading
and thus, frowning) on holidays.
Womenlink’s focus on the everyday does not, however, preclude them fromenacting campaigns to reform political institutions. In 2003, the organization ran
eighteen campaigns in addition to “Love Your Body” and “Smile, Holiday.”29

27 Korean Womenlink, “한국여성민우회 2003 년 여성부 고동협력사업 신청서”, 2003 February
21, Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
28
Ibid.
29
These campaigns included: “Making Schools Violence Free,” fact finding on women laborers,
securing mothers’ rights and reviewing legal effectiveness of home and work dual support, analyzing
local governments’ women policies and budgets, enforcing women’s green co-op movement, sanitarynapkin project, reducing caesarean section campaign, responding to life engineering (in vitro fertility
practices), improving school cafeteria food, sexual violence prevention, responding to sexual201

Another core project of the year was to “make schools violence free” by fact finding
and initiating school reform to end sexual violence in high schools. Their othermajor projects sought to link women’s low birthrates to their working environmentsby reviewing women’s labor laws in order to determine problems with execution andmisinterpretations. On a local level, the organization also set out to review local
government’s policies on women and their budgets for this arena. Such reviews
would allow Womenlink to enforce gender related policies.
By utilizing an organizing approach that addresses both the everyday realm aswell as structural violence and neglect, Womenlink is able to affect change on
multiple fronts. For their “Love Your Body” campaign, this approach allows
Womenlink to disrupt cosmetic surgery and dieting practices on the level oftechnologies of the self that operate through the neoliberal rationalities that inform
women’s daily lives. Through their diverse set of activities, events and programs
included in the “Love Your Body” campaign, Womenlink hoped to reach thefollowing goals:
1) Increase social attention and discussion about women’s health2) Emphasize the “life cycle” health model for women through educational
programs
3) Help women to have independence in regards to their health andappearance management so that they can create positive self-images andthrough this, recover their health by themselves4) Establish social common ground about the standards and shapes of various
beauty ideals
harassment at work, developing a program for sexual perpetrators, single parent support networks,
gender equal media programming campaign, quality improvement of television program, campaign toestablish children’s TV law, and various education programs including domestic violence counselor
training, sex education lecturer training, women’s environment education, media education, folk
music education, donation culture raising workshop and organic food cultivation.

2025) Educate society about the problem of lookism as proliferated by the media
and6) Utilize media to educate society about various ways of being beautiful andhealthy.30
To these ends, Womenlink sponsored health-oriented outreach programs, launched amonitoring campaign of television shows, women’s magazines and daily newspapers
for which they received national press coverage, issued legal complaints against
cosmetic surgery clinics and diet food companies and produced a satiric,mockumentary style educational video called Knifestyle, which encapsulates the central
organizing themes of the “Love Your Body” campaign.31 The following sections
closely read the educational video as a framework through which to interrogate
Womenlink’s organizing methods and the logics driving the campaign.

“KNIFESTYLE, NOT LIFESTYLE.”
Of the myriad forms of body work bombarding South Korean women today,
Womenlink’s half hour mockumentary film, Knifestyle, takes cosmetic surgery as its
focal point. Produced in conjunction with WOMB, a women’s film foundation,
Knifestyle is a farcical account of a representative of the fictional Paradise Advertising
Agency coaching cosmetic surgeons on marketing strategies to maximize patients andthus, profit. In so doing, Knifestyle uses the mockumentary and infotainment genres
to extract the codes and conventions of both news programs and marketing seminars

30 Korean Womenlink, “여성건강[여성의 몸, 그대로가 아름답다(가칭)회의”, 2003 March 4,

Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
31 Korean Womenlink, “2003 년도 공동협력사업 추진실적 보고서”, 2003 December 31, Korean
Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.

203in order to tap into the viewers’ privileging of such programs’ authoritative voice.
Queer theorist Judith Butler writes about the protagonists of documentary film, Parisis Burning, whose drag performances similarly attempt to subvert hegemonicallygendered norms:
This is not an appropriation of dominant culture in order to remain
subordinated by its terms, but an appropriation that seeks to make over
the terms of domination, a making over which is itself a kind of agency,
a power in and as discourse, in and as performance, which repeats inorder to remake—and sometimes succeeds.32
In a similar vein, Knifestyle appropriates the news media form of official knowledge
and its repertoire of strategies to offer a counter narrative that calls into question not
only the very medium itself but how its interests converge with those of the cosmetic
surgery industry. Knifestyle’s satirical mimicking provides the viewer with a direct gaze
into the cosmetic surgery industry and its marketing strategies with much more
efficacy than a documentary that exacts the same content. In the young women andadult education classes where the video was screened, women were often confused
about whether it was an actual marketing video or a satire. Indeed, it is in that spaceof confusion—between reality and satire—where Knifestyle is most effective. Thisefficacy was brought to a much wider audience when it aired on KBS on September
11, 2003.33

32 Judith Butler, “‘Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion’,” in Feminist Film

Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 348.
33
Korean Womenlink, “2003 년도 공동협력사업 추진실적 보고서”, 2003 December 31, Korean
Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.

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Knifestyle begins with the advertising representative dressed in a dark suit andburgundy tie sitting in an all black studio. The bespectacled representative, andannouncer for the program, appears to be in his 30s, decent looking but not
extremely handsome. There is a small table next to him with a Barbie doll perchedon it. The same Barbie is featured on a flat screen television on the other side of thetable. The Barbie is dressed in a pink and silver sparkly gown and wears a tiara—sheresembles a beauty contestant. In place of a scepter, however, she holds a scalpel andthe words “Marketing Strategies for Cosmetic Surgery” run on the top right of thescreen while the words “Knife Style” are captioned at the bottom.34
The announcer, speaking in a news anchor cadence throughout, begins thevideo by welcoming the hypothetical audience of cosmetic surgeons and introducing
himself as part of Paradise Advertising Agency who specializes in cosmetic surgery
clinics’ advertising market. The camera zooms in for a medium close up as he asks,“Ladies and gentlemen, have you ever heard of modern life’s neologism,‘knifestyle’?”35 Simultaneously, as he speaks the word “knifestyle,” the word also
appears on the screen beneath him. He goes on to clarify, “Not lifestyle,” at which
point the word “knifestyle” is replaced with “lifestyle” only to be crossed out by big,
red X’s as a buzzing sound, the kind heard on game shows when contestants make a
misstep, indicates its incorrect usage. “Many of you are probably hearing this for the
first time,” he says and then holds up a scalpel.36 “Knife, makes you think of a

34 Korean Womenlink and WOMB, Knifestyle, Video (Seoul, South Korea, 2003).
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.

205

scalpel, doesn’t it? Knifestyle comes from the scalpel’s symbolism that, if you want,
we can make you beautiful.”37 As he speaks, he waves the scalpel around beating it to
the rhythm of his words and thus emphasizing the fact that it is indeed the scalpelthat makes one beautiful. Through such details of acting and a mix of audio andvisual effects, Knifestyle humorously engages violent content in a satirical tone thatpokes fun at the industry it seeks to portray and thus, subvert.
Significantly, Womenlink describes Knifestyle as a “satire of lookism” thatsheds light on the realities of cosmetic surgery including the ways in which theindustry itself has a vested interest in perpetuating lookism.38 I argue that theconcept of lookism allows Womenlink to organize a geopolitically situated feminist
campaign that not only addresses the material consequences of women’s everyday
concerns but also centralizes capitalist marketing practices (and the profits theyengender) as a point of their critique. Thus, I offer here a brief synopsis of theorigins of and debates surrounding the concept.39 Although Womenlink attributes theterm lookism to The New York Times Magazine columnist William Safire and his
August 27, 2000 column “On Language; Lookism,” he actually traces the word to a
The Washington Post Magazine article in 1978 when it was used by the Fat Acceptance
Movement to describe both what their members experience and what they oppose.40

37

Ibid.
Korean Womenlink, “2003 년도 공동협력사업 추진실적 보고서”, 2003 December 31,
Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
39Ibid.
40 Korean Womenlink, “여성건강[여성의 몸, 그대로가 아름답다(가칭)회의”, 2003 March 11,
Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
William Safire, “The Way We Live Now: 8-27-00: On Language; Lookism - New York Times.”
38

206

Today, in the U.S., lookism is associated with Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at
Massachusetts General Hospital and faculty member at Harvard Medical School
whose book Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty argues that human propensity tofavor beauty is biological and a product of human evolution.41 Her book brings
together numerous scientific studies including one she conducted in conjunction withother Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts
Institute of Technology researchers that used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
technology to analyze men’s brain activity as they viewed photos of beautiful
women.42 The researchers found that the images triggered the same parts of thebrain that alcohol triggers for alcoholics, food triggers for hungry people and thatmoney triggers for gamblers. In other words, beauty elicits the same chemical
reactions in the brain as addiction. Because humans are hardwired towards beauty,
Etcoff reasons, insistence that beauty is socially constructed is counterproductive andactually serves to further entrench the beauty hierarchy. Many critics understand her

That William Safire coined lookism seems to be a widely held belief in South Korea, appearing on
multiple blogs and internet videos on the topic. Whether this can be attributed to Womenlink’s
educational campaigns cannot be ascertained although they seem to have solely raised awarenessaround the idea. Safire’s weekly column, “On Language,” where “On Language; Lookism” appeared,
focused on linguistics and grammar in playful and insightful ways. Thus, his column on lookism
actually traces the origins of the word and its usage while satirizing the concept by likening it to other“politically correct” terminology. Womenlink’s citation of Safire’s article may very well point to thepolitics of (mis)translation and their need to ground their concept in a Western “-ism” akin to racism
and sexism. Another possibility, however, is that Womenlink aligns themselves to Safire precisely
because of his satiric use of the term. As discussed in the last section of this chapter, Womenlink
produced a mockumentary called Knifestyle, through which they satirically critique the cosmetic
surgery industry.
41
Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (New York: Anchor Books, 2000).
42 John Stossel, “The Ugly Truth About Beauty - ABC News,” ABC News,
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123853&page=1#.T17lhsxitVc.

207

book as a direct response to feminists such as Naomi Wolf who argue that beauty is
not only socially constructed but also premised on misogyny.43
While lookism in and of itself is not a major concern for feminists in the U.S.,
it was a topic of concern within the mainstream media around the time that Etcoff
published her book and Safire published his column. ABC News, for example,
conducted experiments for which they hired actors, “some great looking, some not,”and compared them in various situations such as applying for jobs, soliciting forcharitable donations and asking for help alongside the road.44 In all of thesesituations, the better looking actors were treated more favorably compared to theiraverage looking counterparts—they got the job, made more in donations and got
more help. The report ends with the suggestion that “We should add the bias of‘lookism’ to sexism and racism. It’s just as bad but we don’t need a federal
program.”45
While there is no mention of cosmetic surgery in relation to lookism in the
ABC News feature, a Hartford Courant article entitled, “Our ‘Lookist’ Society,” makes
the connection between the two revealing that more and more baby boomers arelooking towards cosmetic surgery as a means of competing with younger people on

43 Karen Lehrman, “The Beautiful People,” The New York Times, March 21, 1999, sec. Books,

http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/21/reviews/990321.21lehrmat.html?_r=2.
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (London: Vintage Press,
1991).
44 John Stossel, “The Ugly Truth About Beauty - ABC News.”
45 Ibid.

208

the job market.46 The article notes that there had been a 153 percent increase incosmetic procedures between 1992 and 2000 when the article was published. It goeson to say that cosmetic surgery is no longer for the vain or the rich evidenced by thefact that 65 percent of those who had an aesthetic procedure in 1994 had family
incomes of $50,000 US or less. Thus, the article drives home the point that anincreasing number of baby boomers are seeking more youthful appearances because
it is “economically sound,” as one interviewee stated.
Womenlink’s use of the concept “lookism” derives from the U.S. context but
also significantly departs from it. As mentioned above, the organization attributes theconcept to William Safire, The New York Times Magazine columnist, and identifies it as“one of the causes of unequal relations in human history along with race, religion, sex
and ideology.”47 While Etcoff would certainly agree with this definition,
Womenlink’s similarities with Etcoff in their use of the term end there. While noneof their materials indicate whether or not Womenlink members believe the propensity
towards beauty is biologically driven, this seems to fall outside their major concern.
Similarly, while Womenlink’s understanding of lookism might fall closer to the Wolf
camp wherein beauty is socially constructed, the sole indictment of patriarchy as an
oppressive force is not their major concern either. Rather, in addition to a patriarchal
46

Diane Weaver Dunne, “Our `Lookist’ Society - Hartford Courant,” Hartford Courant, April 4, 2000,
sec. Youth Culture, http://articles.courant.com/2000-04-04/features/0004041634_1_cosmeticprocedures-youth-culture-nancy-etcoff.
47 Korean Womenlink, “여성건강[여성의 몸, 그대로가 아름답다(가칭)회의”, 2003 March 11,
Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
Although Womenlink uses the Korean term for lookism, oemochisangjuŭi (외모지상주의),interchangeably with the English word, in most of their campaign materials, they use the term
“lookism.”209

analysis, Womenlink understands beauty through a capitalist framework that gets tothe heart of not only the material consequences of lookism but who benefits from it
as well. In other words, Womenlink brings a more complex analysis to the feminist
milieu in the U.S. by asserting that South Korean women are increasingly seeking
body work because lookism effects their job and marriage prospects and that the
beauty industry sustains these social circumstances to its benefit.
This indictment of the beauty industry and the cosmetic industry in particular
is made evident in the following scene from Knifestyle. The announcer begins theinformation session by showing his audience why advertisements are so crucial to thecosmetic surgery industry. He points out that cosmetic surgery is but one part of thebeauty industry that is comprised of “cosmetics, which are essential to women, dietfoods that everyone has tried at least once, and health clubs that are very popular in
the summer time,” all of which comprise a 7 trillion W (over $6 billion US) a year
industry.48 “Isn’t that alluring?” he asks, referring to the amount of money the beauty
industry generates.49 As he asks this rhetorical question, the shot transitions into
crowds of people that fill the screen indicating the endless possibilities forprofitability. Although cosmetic surgery is a latecomer compared to the othermainstays of beauty, he shares, the industry is booming simply because it makes
money. “Because of the specifics of cosmetic surgery, medical insurance doesn’tcover it. So all the expenses for surgery, which cost millions of won, will become

48 Korean Womenlink and WOMB, Knifestyle.
49 Ibid.

210

your net income.”50 As the announcer speaks these words, b-roll of Korean won
fanned out and being counted fills the screen. Because of this fact, however, thecosmetic surgery industry is already oversupplied. “Since there are more clinics thatyou need to compete with, you need strategies to bring customers in and an
advertising war is essential for you to win those patients.”51 Indeed, the number ofcosmetic surgery clinics increased from twenty-two in 1975 to 164 in 1985 to 567 in
1995 and then 926 in 2000.52 What’s more, 48.7 percent of South Korea’s cosmetic
surgery clinics are located in Seoul and 64 percent of those are located in the
Kangnam area, making competition amongst these surgeons fiercer.53
Despite the oversaturated market and fierce competition, the cosmetic surgery
industry in South Korea thrives and Knifestyle points out that the industry flourishes
because it is specifically gendered taking as its potential customers, “half of theworld’s population.”54 The announcer’s statement is strengthened by his news
reporter cadence and tone, which has come to signify the objective and sagacious
voice of journalistic ethics. As he speaks, the crowds of people, busily walking
through a plaza or shopping area, appear once again in aerial view and the camera

50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Korean Womenlink, “여성건강[여성의 몸, 그대로가 아름답다(가칭)회의”, 2003 March 11,

Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
53 Ibid.
54 Korean Womenlink and WOMB, Knifestyle.
Womenlink notes that in 2000, 143,676 cosmetic procedures were performed in the U.S., which
accounts for 37.72 percent of the world’s total that year.
Korean Womenlink, “여성건강[여성의 몸, 그대로가 아름답다(가칭)회의”, 2003 March 11,
Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.

211

scans the crowd going over multiple faces until it focuses in on a woman who isstanding near a table or booth. While people pass her on both sides, the camera
steadily zooms in until it holds still to reveal a pretty, young woman dressed in a redtank top and sunglasses unknowing that she is being watched. The camera is wobbly,
evidencing the fact that it is handheld and all the more underscoring the fact thatsomeone is targeting, if not stalking the woman. In belying the anonymity ofcamerawork through the slight wobble of the held shot, the scene alludes toculpability and accountability. Rather than an invisible force, there are responsible
parties outside of the individual herself that interpellate her as a consumer in her
everyday life, as she walks through a crowd or stands near an outdoor booth.
Through similar shots and sequences, Knifestyle deems South Korea’s beauty industry’s
marketing tactics as predatory. The following section examines how neoliberalimperatives for “self-investment” are part and parcel to such tactics.

“TODAY, YOUR LOOKS ARE YOUR RESUME.”
In documentary and news report fashion, Knifestyle takes to the streets andinterviews several vocational school students who are about to enter the job market.
These high school seniors are dressed in school uniforms, no make-up on their faces
with straight, shoulder-length hair. The camera lights are unforgiving and several of
their faces are riddled with pimples, a testament to their youth. Each of the girls
confess to wanting to undergo several cosmetic procedures with one of them havingplans to actually do so over the coming vacation. They all contextualize their desires212as necessary for their job security. As Yu Hŭi puts it, “When we are applying forjobs, they see men’s ability but for women, they see appearance first.”55 Suchstatements are echoed by a college student who says “I heard that some companies
have a checklist for appearances—best, average, poor. Even though they say thatyour ability is the priority, blah, blah, blah, I still believe that this society privileges
appearance more than ability.”56 The announcer chimes back in summing up thestudents’ thoughts by saying, “Today, your appearance is your resume.”57 This scene
illustrates the ways in which young women increasingly internalize neoliberalmandates for self-management as imperative to their economic success. The
following section outlines how Womenlink contextualizes and organizes theircampaign around these mandates. Although they do not specifically call it as such, I
argue that rather than focusing on race, Womenlink organizes around what bolsters
lookism—neoliberal governmentalities.
As discussed in chapter 1, neoliberal governmentality operates in such a waythat individuals are controlled through their freedom and the myriad choices they
make towards their personal success, which are coded as the results of their selfentrepreneurship. This manifests, for example, in parents spending limitless amountsof money so their children can amass skills and experiences to give them anadvantageous edge over their peers—private tutors to excel in college entrance
exams, trips abroad to study English, and even cosmetic surgery to enhance their

55 Korean Womenlink and WOMB, Knifestyle.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.

213

appearances (as briefly discussed in chapter two). In South Korea’s neoliberal regime,“the most successful self-entrepreneurs […] will be those who faithfully internalize
the neoliberal logic, subjugating themselves to the techniques of biopower with nointention of activating their own critiques or initiating their own forms ofsubjection.”58 Thus, “body work,” and the success it represents, displaces
motherhood as a priority for women and the “naïve neoliberal logic requiring
competitiveness, self-responsibility, and rationality […] necessarily exclude[s] thepower of motherhood that is based on caring and communal interests.”59
Such changes are the consequences of new gender norms and shifting social
realities in post-IMF, neoliberal South Korean society. While marriage has been
considered most important to women’s success, in the last decade job security has
begun to displace marriage in its salience with marriage becoming optional. At thesame time, divorce rates have increased and on average, women stay unmarried forfar longer than women in the past. Moreover, rapidly decreasing birthrates havecaused a crisis of the middle class, leading the South Korean government to enact
numerous policies such as improving maternity leave, as incentives for childbearing.
These social changes signal significant ruptures in a culture where motherhood has
traditionally been the ideal role of women; while neoliberal imperatives push women

58 Cho, “Neoliberal Governmentality at Work,” 37.
59 Cho, “Neoliberal Governmentality at Work,” 39.

Cho takes this critique further and argues that the displacement of motherhood in South Korea
weakens family system, which will eventually threaten the sustainability of biopower operations andneoliberal systems.

214towards methods of self-care, these rationalities are at odds with traditional notionsof motherhood.
Significantly, Womenlink puts neoliberal imperatives for self-management at
the forefront of their campaign by contextualizing it within the shifting social realities
that have transformed identifications with the body. Their campaign proposal
describes the current situation as such:
As women’s participation in society has increased, women’s bodies haveincreasingly been seen as objects. In the past, women’s bodies were focusedon a mother’s role of having, then raising children. Now, however, the body
is a site for raising one’s self-value and is a symbol of one’s position or
lifestyle. As such, a well-maintained appearance is not only a marker of her
self-satisfaction but is an avenue to attaining social status. Thus, many womenare aggressively managing their bodies.60
While identification with motherhood has waned, the body has become a site for“raising one’s self-value and has become a symbol of one’s position or lifestyle.” As aresult, the neoliberal rationale of investing in one’s own body becomes all the moreimperative since one’s body is an “avenue to attaining social success.” That is to say,because of the body’s increasing social importance and visibility, women’s choices tomanage their bodies are all the more constrained even as they are narrated asliberatory. In this way, Womenlink sees neoliberal governmentalities as part andparcel to gender oppression in contemporary South Korean society.
Womenlink’s reference to the ways in which Korean women identified with
their bodies, as mothers, does not celebrate or romanticize the past but rather, points

60

Korean Womenlink, “여성건강[여성의 몸, 그대로가 아름답다(가칭)회의”, 2003 March 4,
Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.

215

out that new gendered mechanisms for control are in place. According to Kim Sanghŭi , Executive Director of Womenlink, in a self-written editorial for Joongang Ilbo, “Intraditional society, a woman’s body was completely controlled by male-centeredsociety, especially because of the ideology of staying a virgin, which was a strict
controlling tool of women’s bodies. But now, lookism has replaced that ideology.”61
Here, Kim points out that lookism is a mechanism of control that, like chaste
ideologies in centuries prior, discipline women’s behaviors and relationships to theirown bodies. Moreover, lookism is powerful precisely because there are negative
consequences for not participating in addition to perceived benefits for doing so: “Ina lookist society, it is not just about self-maintenance, it’s that unbeautiful women areseen as lazy and as incapable. Lookism discrimination is pervasive in job hunting andmarriage and such discrimination based on ‘looks’ is deemed ok by this society.”62
Like the main character of My Lovely Samsoon discussed in chapter three who was
berated by the dating service’s manager for not having had cosmetic surgery, women
who choose not to invest in themselves are seen as unfulfilling their potential. As
such, beauty ads for cosmetic surgery, dieting, skin and body care (like the menu at
Yakson Myŏngga), use the terms “self-management” and “self-development” todescribe their products, goods and services.
In this context, buttressed by gendered neoliberal imperatives that demand
self-management from women of all ages, the beauty industry in South Korea grossed
7 trillion W (over $6 billion U.S.) in 2002. Given this, Kim asserts that such issues
61 Kim Sang-hŭi, “Society Incites Cosmetic Surgery.”62 Ibid.

216

cannot be merely addressed on an individual level: “So, we can no longer simply
blame these problems on each individual woman’s awareness. We have to establish asolution to minimize the influence of capital investment and commercial public
culture on women’s bodies, which as become a new market.”63 Here, Kim makes
clear Womenlink’s intent to disrupt corporate interests and the neoliberal rationalities
upon which they rely. It is precisely this focus on industries rather than theindividual, I argue, that makes Womenlink’s campaign such a significant departurefrom discourses and campaigns surrounding issues of beauty and body in the U.S.
Knifestyle exposes corporate interests by exposing the predatory marketing
practices of cosmetic surgery clinics to the viewer. The first marketing strategy theannouncer presents is to “Spread appearance complex.”64 These words are in text on
the screen, juxtaposed against a surgical light. This scene then transitions into a black
and white aerial view of another crowd of people. This time, a target, the kind one
looks through when shooting a gun, overlays the people, searching their backs until itzooms in on one woman, and then a pair of women, and then another pair and so on.
Each time the target pauses, a gun shot rings out—the women have been tagged as inneed of surgery. This likening of a marketing strategy with the violent nature of
stalking, taking aim and then shooting at individual and pairs of women animates the
predatory nature of capitalist advertising as enacted by the cosmetic surgery industry.
While neoliberal mandates promote self-management and investment as liberatory

63 Ibid.
64 Korean Womenlink and WOMB, Knifestyle.

217

acts of choice, Knifestyle posits that such actions are already constrained since they
have been engineered to target women all along.
Accordingly, Knifestyle illustrates how in women’s daily life, these predatory
violences take the shape of advertisements that stalk women through their ubiquity
while targeting them through their illegal advertising strategies. The following sectionof the video shows a specific beauty “problem” and its corresponding “solution.”“Small, sleepy eyes” transform into “vivid and fresh eyes.” A “strong and impressive
hook nose” turns into a “natural-looking nose.” A “square, masculine jaw and bigface” magically changes into a “slender face.” A still shot of a forlorn or serious
looking woman that highlights these features accompany the text and when the“solution” appears on the screen, the photo shows the same woman smiling andsatisfied. The announcer notes, “Actually, since cosmetic surgery is a medical activity,
before and after photos are illegal. But it doesn’t matter. Everyone is openly doing it
anyway but I just wanted you to know, for your reference.”65 Knifestyle’s sleight ofhand is critical here and reveals the mockumentary format’s ability to bring thecosmetic surgery industry’s contradictions to the fore. While the announcer is
supposedly educating imaginary cosmetic surgeons, in reality he educates the many
women who are privy to this video. In this way, Womenlink outreaches to womenthat such advertisements are not only illegal but also dangerous.
As discussed in the section above, Womenlink enacts feminist organizing thatseeks institutional change as well as the betterment of women’s everyday lives. Thus,

65 Ibid.

218

in addition to exposing such illegalities through educational outreach, Womenlink
also took legal action against such predatory practices. From July to August,
Womenlink monitored women’s magazines and daily newspapers and found that of
109 diet food advertisements, fifty-six violated either Food Safety Law or Fair
Labeling and Advertisement Law or a combination of both.66 These laws prohibitlabeling that conflates food with medicine or exaggerates or minimizes its effects.
Womenlink found that a significant portion of diet food labeling asserted claims forwhich there was little or no evidence or made exaggerated claims.
In the case of cosmetic surgery, Womenlink’s ad monitoring showed that of
143 ads from forty-one clinics, 138 ads from thirty-seven clinics broke some form of
medical law.67 Article 46 and 47 of Medical Law prohibit clinics or medical doctors
from advertising their treatment methods, their resume, experience or effectiveness.68
Moreover, advertisements are not allowed to use before and after photos or sketches
to illustrate treatment effectiveness or customer satisfaction. On the other hand,
Article 33 of Medical Law permits medical advertisements to include the following
only: name, gender and license of medical professional; specialty; contact informationof clinic including name, address, and telephone number; business days and hours;
appointment information; night and holiday availability and parking.69 Womenlink

66 Korean Womenlink, “다이어트 제품 및 서형수술 광고의 문제점과 피해사례”, 2003 March,

Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
As noted in chapter 3, the Medical Law was amended to suit the burgeoning medical tourism
industry’s need to advertise its facilities. Whether these changes impacted how medical professionals
advertise domestically is not clear to the researcher.
69 Ibid.

219

found that myriad clinics show before and after photos, provide intricate details of
their procedures and list their resume while claiming effectiveness.
Because consumer complaints to the Consumer Protection Agency have seen
an annual 30 percent increase with patients receiving little or no compensation forbotched surgeries for which they were misinformed through advertising, Womenlink
filed thirty complaints with Seoul’s District Attorney and then fourteen more.70 Not
only are liability complaints on the rise, but accurate information about surgeries’ side
effects is unavailable with positive claims exaggerated in advertising instead. As aresult of their legal actions, the Kangnam Police Department began an investigation
and according to their final campaign report, the number of illegal advertisements
decreased dramatically thereafter.71 To be sure, Womenlink’s legal actions were notan effort to merely expose minor details either overlooked or purposely added byindividual clinics. Their actions illuminate how these clinics’ illegal actions are partand parcel to the ways in which, as legal scholar Angela P. Harris describes it,“corporate capital […] sell(s) us the dream that we can individually transcend
oppressive systems.”72 Although Harris writes specifically about the oppressive
system of racism, her quote aptly describes the ways in which the cosmetic surgery
market is tethered to and reliant upon the oppressive system of lookism.

70 Ibid.
71 Korean Womenlink, “2003 년도 공동협력사업 추진실적 보고서”, 2003 December 31, Korean

Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
72 Angela P. Harris, “Introduction: Economies of Color,” in Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color
Matters, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 2.

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Womenlink paired their legal action with a “No Diet, No Cosmetic Surgery”
rally to raise public awareness. The rally took place on July 2 in Myŏngdong, one ofSeoul’s main shopping and tourism districts, and was the follow up to the very first
rally on May 6 to commemorate International No Diet Day (INDD).73 INDD wascreated by Mary Evans Young, the director of the British group, “Diet Breakers,” in1992 and has spread worldwide with INDDs taking place in the U.S., Germany,
Russia and Norway.74 Young personally suffered from anorexia and instituted the
day as a means of promoting self-acceptance. Womenlink’s INDD was the first to beheld in Asia and received much press coverage as such. Through INDD, Womenlink
hoped to help women “positively evaluate our bodies and build self-respect” as wellas educate women about the dangers of excessive diets and cosmetic surgery. The
INDD rally featured a performance by the performance group Sun about a woman
dying from complications from cosmetic surgery. They also introduced ten pledges,
which they encouraged women passersby to commit to including: Accept and love
your body as is; Diet and cosmetic surgery cannot change your life; and Appearance
is not ability, it’s only difference.
While INDD focused on self-acceptance, the “No Diet, No Cosmetic
Surgery” rally sought to educate women about illegal advertising practices by passing

73

Korean Womenlink, “2003 년도 공동협력사업 추진실적 보고서”, 2003 December 31, Korean
Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
74
Korean Womenlink, “여성건강[여성의 몸, 그대로가 아름답다(가칭)회의”, 2003 March 11,
Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.

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out informational materials and talking with passersby.75 The rally also featured amask performance about a woman victimized by cosmetic surgery and dieting and
Womenlink members collected complaints from passersby about illegal cosmetic
surgery ads. The last “No Diet, No Cosmetic Surgery” rally targeted youth and took
place in Ilsan, just north of Seoul.76 This rally featured a folk music performance by
the Koyang Womenlink branch, a youth bicycle publicity campaign, an exhibition of
the dangers of dieting and cosmetic surgery and gave youth the opportunity to write
letters to their bodies as well as other positive expressions about their bodies. In
addition to these three main rallies, Womenlink branches in other parts of South
Korea also held concurrent rallies in Taegu, Inch‘ŏn and Ch‘uch‘ŏn.77“JUST A LITTLE MORE, A LITTLE BIT MORE.”
Knifestyle’s second marketing strategy is to “Present the perfect beauty.”78 The
camera once again provides a wide shot of the studio with the announcer in his seatand the Barbie on the flat screen to his right. Rather than perched on the table,
however, the announcer is holding the actual Barbie doll, looking at it as he speaks:“It is a great pleasure to see a beautiful woman’s body. In ancient times, a perfectwoman’s body was a symbol of beauty and in modern times, it is the crystallized formof sexiness.”79 As he finishes these words, he raises the Barbie and looks into the75

Korean Womenlink, “2003 년도 공동협력사업 추진실적 보고서”, 2003 December 31, Korean
Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
76
Ibid.
77 Ibid.
78 Korean Womenlink and WOMB, Knifestyle.
79 Ibid.

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camera and says, “Just like this Barbie doll.”80 That the announcer holds a Barbie
Doll clearly alludes to the idea that in South Korea, as in the U.S., white women are
considered an ideal standard. Although this is the only time in the video he refers to
the Barbie Doll in an overt manner, his words and actions indicate that Barbie—andthus white women—represents that “crystallized form of sexiness.” Moreover, thejuxtaposition between “ancient times” and “modern times” alludes to a shift in waysof thinking about women’s bodies. Although women’s bodies have always signified
beauty, the announcer suggests that sexiness is a modern construct in Korea thatcoincides with Euro-American beauty standards. As discussed in chapter one, U.S.
discourses on South Korean women and cosmetic surgery largely attribute theirconsumption to the desire to “not want to look Asian,” as Oprah described. Thissection parses out Womenlink’s critique of Western hegemonic beauty ideals arguingthat while their critique acknowledges the imperial origins of Western standards they
contextualize such standards within the consumer market, making their critique more
relevant to South Korean women.
The planning meeting notes for the “Love Your Body” campaign state that
“There is a problem with Westernized, or more specifically, Caucasian lookism.”81
The notes go on to explain that the average face length of a traditional Korean
woman is 182 to 186 mm while the width is 129 to 136 mm yielding a ratio between
1.3 and 1.4 cm. Current beauty standards, however, extol slim and narrow faces with
80 Ibid.
81 “서구적, 더구체적으로는 백인적 외모지상주의라는 문제가 있음.”Korean Womenlink, “여성건강[여성의 몸, 그대로가 아름답다(가칭)회의”, 2003 March 11,
Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.

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a ratio closer to 1 cm. This measurement, the document clarifies, is more akin to
those of Western faces. While the description essentializes Korean women’s
physiology and makes a sweeping generalization about Western women’s anatomy aswell, it illuminates the fact that Womenlink organizers, like U.S. critics of cosmetic
surgery, identify Western hegemony as having shaped South Korean beauty
standards.
Contextualizing Western hegemonic beauty ideals within South Korean
history brings to light, however, the power dynamics that have informed this beauty
ideal. As discussed in chapter two, racialized cosmetic surgery in the form of thessangkkŏp‘ul procedure is widely understood to have been popularized in South
Korea by the U.S. military who during U.S. occupation of South Korea performed
reconstructive surgery on war victims in addition to handing out chocolate, clothes
and other necessities and niceties. According to cultural anthropologist Eugenia
Kaw, Dr. Willard first performed the ssangkkŏp‘ul procedure there to remedy the“sleepy” look of the “Oriental eye.”82 Although more cosmetic than reconstructive
in nature, doctors like Willard imagined themselves as heroes performing a great
service for Koreans by alleviating them of facial features that by Western standards
made them seem not only less attractive but less trustworthy. East Asian studies
scholar Chungmoo Choi argues that such gifts constituted a “gift economy” thatsymbolically structured the U.S.’s (neo)colonial relationship with South Korea andinterpellated Koreans as (neo)colonial subjects whereby “the investment or display of
82 Eugenia Kaw, “Medicalization of Racial Features: Asian American Women and Cosmetic Surgery,”
Medical Anthropology Quarterly 7, no. 1 (March 1993): 74 – 89.

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material power anticipates obligatory reciprocation from the recipients, which often
allows the gift-giver’s political and economic domination.”83 In other words, these“gifts,” whether chocolate or surgery, brought (neo)colonial realities to the everyday
realm and structured power relationships between individuals as well as within theSouth Korean imaginary. Choi emphasizes that the gift economy carries into thesexual economy, creating a gendered and sexualized relationship between thecolonizer and colonized not only metaphorically but corporeally as exemplified in therelationship between Eun Ok and her U.S. military boyfriend, James. I suggest that
Barbie symbolizes this gift economy and Womenlink thus implicitly nods to thehistory outlined above. Like Dr. Willard and by extension, the U.S. military as awhole, who popularized racially marked procedures in South Korea, or James who
was able to secure reconstructive surgery for Eun Ok, Barbie in the context ofKnifestyle presents the scalpel that “can make you beautiful.” Pairing Barbie and thescalpel this way reveals a more complicated analysis that makes whiteness andperhaps implicitly the U.S. the central focus of analysis rather than the pathologizedSouth Korean consumer.
Importantly, Womenlink contextualizes their critique within the changing
trends of South Korean society today, thus linking Western hegemonic ideals back to
corporate practices. Unlike the myriad critiques of Western beauty standards thathave to do with the racialized “Asian eye,” Womenlink’s critique focuses instead on
face shape. The ssangkkŏp‘ul procedure has become so normalized in Korea that it is
83 Chungmoo Choi, “Nationalism and Construction of Gender in Korea,” in Dangerous Women: Genderand Korean Nationalism, ed. Chungmoo Choi and Elaine H. Kim (New York: Routledge, 1998), 12.

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often described as kibonjŏk (기본적), a given, a standard. In fact, most people nolonger consider the procedure surgery at all but akin to an advanced beauty
treatment.84 What’s more, Womenlink’s focus on face shape points to South Korea’s
quickly changing beauty trends.85 The ideal of a slim face, referred to popularly as“V-line,” is ubiquitous in Korean popular culture, television ads and on the streets ofSeoul. As one walks along, a person sees a plethora of beauty shops selling various
facials and products to help achieve the “V-line” look wherein a woman’s face is so
slender it resembles a “V” with the chin at the bottom point. Accordingly, facial
contouring surgery, which shaves a person’s jaw and removes fat from the cheeks, isin high demand. Indeed, these trends are driven by corporate interests that benefit
from the never-ending succession of beauty treatments and traits that women mustsecure.
In my interview with Ju and Jŏng regarding the “Love Your Body” campaign,neither mentioned westernized beauty standards until I asked about it first. In
response, they conceded that Asian women have suffered from “American influence”
in regards to standards of beauty. What’s more, they did not know of the history
cited above and neither was it of central importance. They instead focused on thegoals of their campaign, which they articulated as helping women to “build selfconfidence in other ways” besides dieting and cosmetic surgery. Similarly, although

84

A Women’s News article entitled, “Filing a Complaint Against the Fantasy of Cosmetic Surgery,”laments that “These days, celebrity cosmetic surgery is a given and ssangkkŏp‘ul isn’t even consideredsurgery.”
85 In addition to the “V-line,” other popular trends include “S-line” “Innocent Glamor,” “Flower
Man,” “Honey Thighs” and “Babyface.”

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Womenlink identifies “Caucasian lookism” as “a problem,” Euro-American beauty
standards are not mentioned again in the notes or in any other archival documents
thereafter. That is, “Caucasian lookism” is not a point around which Womenlink
overtly organizes or educates. Instead, Womenlink’s planning meeting notes ask:
“What bolsters lookism? Mass media such as TV and movies boost the idea that asmall and pretty face is a virtue in addition to beauty contests and clinics that are
seeking profits.”86 In other words, while they acknowledge U.S. hegemony hashistorically shaped contemporary beauty standards, this acknowledgement is but ameans to the end of identifying and holding accountable the institutions thatperpetuate lookism’s “unequal relations” today.87 Significantly, they identify these
institutions as the media and the clinics themselves in their collusion to seek profits.
According to Knifestyle, one way that cosmetic surgery clinics bolster theirprofits is not only to standardize beauty but to proliferate a standard of beauty foreach part of the body. Breaking the body up into discreet parts allows surgeons todevelop myriad new procedures to continue to increase demand, like new products.
Womenlink’s planning meeting notes lists the variety of procedures available to86 Korean Womenlink, “여성건강[여성의 몸, 그대로가 아름답다(가칭)회의”, 2003 February 14,

Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
87 South Korean feminists have protested the Miss Korea pageant since 1999, calling it the Anti-Miss
Korea Festival. The movement, called IF (If you want to become a real Feminist), successfully got
the pageant off of television broadcasts in 2002 and has addressed multiple women’s concerns
including adultery laws and workplace discrimination. The festival also has a lighthearted side andcelebrates women through performances such as the group of 50-something women who performeda dance there to Abba’s Waterloo in 2009.
“South Korean Activists to Stage Anti-Miss Korea Festival | News.com.au,” News.com.au, April 24,
2009, sec. News, http://www.news.com.au/miss-korea-killjoys-to-stage-own-pageant/story-01225703165921.
“Anti-Miss Korea Festival Celebrates Women’s Lives @ HanCinema!:: The Korean Movie andDrama Database, Discover the South Korean Cinema and Drama Diversity,” Han Cinema Daily, April
22, 2009, http://www.hancinema.net/anti-miss-korea-festival-celebrates-women-s-lives-19063.html.

227

Korean women: ssangkkŏp‘ul (1.2 – 2 million W); rhinoplasty (1.5 – 2 million W);arm, thigh, or stomach liposuction (2 – 5 million W); Botox; skin thinning; breast
augmentation (5 - 7 million W) face contouring (5 – 6 million W); lip enlargement (2million W); dimple construction; and belly button reshaping.88 As this incomplete list
illustrates, new procedures are constantly being developed as new technologies
emerge. At the same time, cosmetic surgery clinics’ aggressive marketing techniques
have also increased. From 1980 – 1989, there were 0.5 cosmetic surgery
advertisements in women’s magazines per issue per month. That number increased
to 1.7 between 1990 and 1994, to 7 in 1997 and then jumped to 26.5 in 2000.89 As
these figures indicate, there has been a dramatic increase in marketing in the cosmetic
surgery since 1995 when the GNP per person exceeded 10,000.
Knifestyle reminds its audience of cosmetic surgeons that “since the whole bodyis operable, emphasize that they [potential patients] can come close to being theperfect beauty through surgery. That will bring even already beautiful women to theclinic.”90 As he speaks the camera returns to a wide shot with the announcer
standing. The Barbie is visible, laying on the table next to him and again, the Barbie
on the flat screen is in full view. This time, however, the flat screen and thus, Barbie,
takes up more of the shot than the announcer who stands off to the side. Moreover,since he is wearing a dark suit that blends into the black background and the Barbie isin pink and sparkles, she remains foregrounded in the shot. Then, the camera zooms
88

Korean Womenlink, “여성건강[여성의 몸, 그대로가 아름답다(가칭)회의”, 2003 March 11,
Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
89 Ibid.
90 Korean Womenlink and WOMB, Knifestyle.

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back to him in a medium close-up as he says, referring to women’s desire to be theperfect beauty, “Just a little more, a little bit more” and holds up his fingers to makethe corresponding gesture.91 Barbie’s centrality to this shot coupled with theannouncer’s words—“Just a little more, a little bit more”—and hand gestures,
illuminate how Euro-American standards of beauty work in conjunction with theproliferation of such standards to segment the body into discreet areas that require an
endless array of body work. Hence, the desire to be the perfect beauty can never befully fulfilled. The following section addresses how this proliferation is enacted
through the media to the benefit of cosmetic surgery clinics while highlighting
Womenlink’s organizing strategies against capital interest.

“LIKE AN INTIMATE FRIEND, WHISPERING IN THEIR EAR...”
In order to build the desire for “the perfect beauty,” Knifestyle suggests using
the media to “build trust to eliminate fear or hesitation” since cosmetic surgery is“still surgery.”92 The announcer explains to surgeons that if you “approach a reporter
with a topic that piques their interest, the broadcast will welcome you. Since they
heard it on TV, and on the news at that, the average citizen will give you 100 percentof their trust.”93 This statement is followed with five clips of real news anchors
reporting on the popularity of and/or new types of cosmetic surgery procedures—“Operating without a scalpel is now possible,” one of the reporters say and “People

91 Ibid.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid.

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are increasingly open about their cosmetic surgery procedures.” What’s even better,
the announcer adds, is to appear on a news show directly since “the media needs
professionals’ opinions and doctors need to advertise their clinics,” which amounts toa “win-win situation.”94 Accordingly, Knifestyle weaves together multiple clips of
medical doctors in white coats giving their professional advice on news broadcasts.
For maximum effect, he continues, either include the clip on your homepage or link
your site to a television network’s. He explains that some networks perform suchservices and shows photos of doctors holding plaques engraved with the Seoul
Broadcasting System (SBS) insignia. These efforts are effective precisely because themedia is “Like an intimate friend, whispering in their [potential patient’s] ear.”95
Here, Knifestyle not only renders visible the collusion between the media and cosmetic
surgery industries but also calls attention to the ways in which cosmetic surgery isnormalized through news reports and network endorsements. Such media
representations (akin to mainstream films like 200 Pounds Beauty) do the work of
eliding the surgical and therefore dangerous aspects of cosmetic surgery. Because
media representations inform women’s lives on the level of the everyday—throughtelevision and other forms of print and digital media—Womenlink enacted several
outreach programs to counteract the media’s normalizing messages. While thesewere localized actions compared to the scale of mass media, I highlight the fact thatthese forms of counter-conduct privilege local women’s knowledges and their abilities
to inform one another in public, group and one-on-one settings.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid.

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Through educational programs, outreach, flyering and open forums, the“Love Your Body” campaign sought to counteract media representations byproviding the lesser-known facts about cosmetic surgery and lookism. For example,
the entire campaign began on April 30, 2003 with a discussion and open forum on
women’s health called “Demanding Choice, Problems and Answers to ‘Lookism’” atthe Democratic Movement Commemoration Hall in T‘aep‘yŏngno in Seoul. This
open forum featured women scholars, medical professionals, advertising specialists,
fashion consultants and media representatives and was designed to “seek the right
way to keep women healthy throughout their lives under these circumstances [oflookism].”96 The event opened with Executive Director Kim Sang-hŭi outlining theevening’s goals: “Challenging lookism is like hitting a stone with an egg but we must
start now and hopefully, we can find new solutions for lookism through this
discussion.”97 Accordingly, the featured speakers not only discussed lookism but
offered solutions as well.
The first speaker in the panel of discussants was Kim Kyŏng-ae, a women’sstudies professor at Dongduk Women’s University.98 According to Kim, women
discipline and manage their bodies because they are immersed in capitalist ways ofthinking. Many of Kim’s suggestions mirrored what Womenlink’s campaign would
do in the coming months: surveill media and re-educate people not to judge people
based on “looks.” In everyday life, she suggested people avoid mentioning
96 Korean Womenlink, “한국여성민우회 2003 년 여성부 고동협력사업 신청서”, 2003 February

21, Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
97 “I Am the Owner of My Body, No Diet, No Cosmetic Surgery",” Minjushinmun, May 11, 2003.
98 Ibid.

231appearances. The second panel speaker, Myŏng Jin-suk, general manager of
Womenlink’s Women’s Environment Center, presented a survey about women,dieting and cosmetic surgery.99 Womenlink had conducted the survey the monthprior with 566 high school girls and 467 college students as respondents and foundthat 80 percent were not satisfied with their own body weight and 83.5 percent were
not satisfied even though their body weight was normal. She suggested that women
be educated about healthy lifestyles as well as effective punishment for entities
engaging in or perpetuating excessive dieting or cosmetic surgery. The third speaker,
Im Ok-hŭi, editor of a feminist theory magazine (Yŏsŏng Iron), asserted that the real
danger of lookism is its standardization of beauty into specific measurements, addingthat Korean society is becoming more Americanized.100
The last speaker, Kim Hye-sŏn, Director of Women’s Policy in the Ministry of
Health, Welfare and Family Affairs, illustrates the extent to which lookism isperceived as a national concern.101 She spoke about a survey that the Ministry
conducted regarding appearance perception of youth just the month prior. Theirsurvey found that 38.7 percent of underweight girls see themselves as normal or
overweight and 43.6 percent of normal weight girls see themselves as overweight.
Because society upholds slim body types as an ideal, she concluded, young people’s
perceptions are distorted. She then went on to say that the Ministry plans to promote
more campaigns like “Love Your Body,” support educational programs that teach99 Ibid.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.

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children about gender equality both in the home and within society and use masscommunications to educate people about the dangers of excessive dieting. Kim’s
presentation illuminates that the government sanctions lookism’s negative effects on
women’s bodies as a national problem. Indeed, Womenlink received nearly threefourths of its budget for the campaign from the Ministry itself.102
While the open forum sought to encourage debate and dialogue amongst alarge group of women, Womenlink’s “Mimimi” overnight camp allowed mothers anddaughters to learn about these issues in an intimate, one-on-one setting. The camp
took place on August 1 for one night and two days and every aspect of the camp,
including the name, was carefully crafted to cultivate inner-beauty and physicalacceptance. “Mimimi” refers to three homonyms that mean “me,” “beautiful,” and“taste.” Once at the camp, the mother and daughter pairs participated in various
activities and lectures including writing stories about their bodies, making dolls
without prejudice, running in the moonlight to encourage joyful playing and walking
meditation. A Korean NGO article describes the camp as an opportunity for mothersand daughters to have their “feminine bodies as their common denominator” and“experiment and practice new ways to be truly beautiful, fun and tasteful.”103
The educational health component of the campaign also featured healthprograms by age group (from teens to 50s) in which groups of women held
discussions, learned about health issues and watched educational videos including
102 Korean Womenlink, “국비보조금 교부신청서”, 2003 February 11, Korean Womenlink, Seoul,

South Korea.
103 Ryu Kyŏng-mi, “Womenlink Opens Me, Beauty, Taste (Mimimi) Camp,” Korean NGO (South
Korea, July 21, 2003).

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Knifestyle.104 Womenlink also sponsored an “I love my body” poster contest for
women in their teens to their 30s to promote positive images of women’s bodies. In
order to provide a safe space and utilize the internet, Womenlink created an “I love
my body” homepage where women could share their stories, post positive comments
about their bodies, and share healthy body management tips with one another.105 In
these ways, the “Love Your Body” campaign counteracted the media’s normalizing
messages and promoted health and self-acceptance as alternatives to commodified
forms of body work. More importantly, their efforts posed other women as viable
sources of knowledge, information, self-esteem, and validation. The following
section outlines Womenlink’s actions against gender-biased media programming
itself.

“IN MODERN SOCIETY, KNIFESTYLE IS LIFESTYLE.”
Finally, Knifestyle offers one last strategy to ensure an onslaught of clientele:“Instill in them that investing time and money to achieve the perfect appearance, as
opposed to living the way they are, is the best choice for confident women in the 21st
century.”106 As the viewer hears the announcer’s authoritative delivery, visually one
has the perspective from the driver’s seat of a car that is traveling down a long, darktunnel. The viewer speeds down the tunnel as surgical images, a knife cutting into a

104 Korean Womenlink, “2003 년도 공동협력사업 추진실적 보고서”, 2003 December 31,

Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
105 Ibid.
106
Korean Womenlink and WOMB, Knifestyle.

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nose and then cutting into eyes, overlay the still visible tunnel signifying that suchinvestments are not only long but painful journeys. Soon, however, the proverbial“light at the end of the tunnel” appears and once the car and the viewer insidereaches it, it is overlaid once again but this time with the image of two smiling
women. When the tunnel then fades to white, the shot returns to a close-up of
Barbie’s torso, the end of the scalpel highly visible in her hand. We hear theannouncer’s voice as the shot centers on his close-up: “In modern society, knifestyleis lifestyle.”107 Simultaneously, the words “Knife Style” appear at the bottom of thescreen in red and next to it, “is Life Style” in white. Through the intricacies of thissequence, Knifestyle animates the metaphorically long and literally painful roads
women must travel in order to chase the perfect beauty standard represented by analmost sinister looking Barbie holding her scalpel.
As we have seen in chapter three, however, women are encouraged downthese roads of investment and management through the media and more specifically,
through celebrities whose own lifestyles are dependent on the knife. As increasingly
open consumers of cosmetic surgery, celebrities are not only endorsing individual
clinics but are walking advertisements for cosmetic surgery and the standardized
beauties it generates, creating a climate in which “the average woman feels that it isabsolutely necessary for her self-management and investment, too.”108 As theannouncer speaks these words, Knifestyle cuts to video clips of real celebrities
congratulating or thanking surgeons. In one clip, an actress says, “Since you’ve
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid.

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opened your clinic, please make many more beautiful and healthy people!”109 Hallyu
can be understood as a “technology of subjectivity” that proliferates neoliberalmandates for self-management through its affective narrative strategies (as we haveseen in the previous chapter). In this section, I argue that Womenlink attempts to
disrupt these travels of form through its media monitoring campaign, which publicly
exposed the media’s gendered dynamics by demanding gender reform.
Notions of self-entrepreneurship that emphasize the words “investment” and“self-management” have coalesced with neoliberal feminist ideals regarding work,
family, sexuality and individuality. Under the auspices of neoliberalism, liberation or
freedom is often equated with choices, even when those choices are limited to theconsumer market. Womenlink challenges this notion, however, by asserting thatsuch choices are engineered by profit-driven industries:
Media is largely responsible for this [women’s aggressive body management].
TV and magazines show underweight, young women who are in their teens
and twenty so people think that they represent success and beauty. […]Under these circumstances, Korea’s beauty and cosmetic surgery market size
is exceeding 7 trillion W. […] Lookism is used as a societal method so bad dietmethods and cosmetic surgery continually comes up. Thus, women’s desires
to have slim bodies are threatening women’s health through cosmetic surgery
addiction and diet fever.110
Rather than understanding neoliberal governmentality as an amorphous or intangible
force, then, Womenlink views these governmentalities as operating through two
identifiable industries: mass media and the beauty industry. Womenlink contends

109 Ibid.
110 Korean Womenlink, “여성건강[여성의 몸, 그대로가 아름답다(가칭)회의”, 2003 February

14, Korean Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.

236

that trends along with unattainable beauty standards are proliferated throughtelevision, music and film and then maximized for profit by clinics and dietcompanies. In other words, Womenlink sees lookism as critical to the tetheredinterests of mass media and the cosmetic surgery industry. Because of media’s farreaching tentacles, lookism is an issue for women of all ages. Unlike the Hartford
Courant article, which focuses on how lookism is driving older people to undergocosmetic surgery procedures to compete with younger people on the job market,
Womenlink emphasizes that lookism creates physical, psychological and emotional
problems for women of all ages from their teens onward as evidenced by their multiage education programs.111
In order to track just how detrimental the media is to women’s self-image,
Womenlink monitored gender representation on television programming and released
a report on June 24.112 Their monitoring project reviewed eighty-two different
programs during 240 hours of broadcasting from May 12 to 25 during prime time
(weekdays 7 – 11pm/weekends from 6 – 11pm) on three major networks. They
counted 7,427 actors accounting for 69.6 percent of television representation and2,262 actresses accounting for 30.2 percent for a gender ratio of 7 to 3. Of women,
42.3 percent were below the average body mass index (BMI), 49.2 percent wereaverage BMI. For men, 73.1 percent were average compared to 14.8 percent who
were below average. Men with above average BMI accounted for 12 percent whereas
111 Significantly, however, the article features a quote from an interviewee who describes her choices

to manage her body through cosmetic surgery as “economically sound.” Such wording alludes to thefact that neoliberal imperatives also govern bodies in the U.S. as citizens are pushed further andfurther into the consumer market to find solutions to social and economic problems.
112 Hong Jesŏng, “TV Programs Are Boosting ‘Lookism’,” Seoul Yeon Hap News (South Korea, n.d.).

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women were only 8 percent. What’s more, the report finds that the standard
amongst leading women or anchors include small faces, big eyes with ssangkkŏp‘ul,
and large, red lips.113
In addition to gender balance and body type, the report breaks down its
findings by genre and reports that dramas feature beautiful women almost
exclusively. The more capable the character these beautiful women portrayed, themore impressive and expensive clothing they wore. News programs or shows with
political content fared even worse. According to the report, female anchors or
emcees on news and political shows are younger, prettier and skinnier than their malecounterparts, a fact represented through our Knifestyle announcer and marketing
representative whose specialty is beauty marketing despite his own average looks.
Womenlink points out that many of these broadcasts criticize excessive cosmetic
surgery “fever” and dieting amongst Korean women but are perpetuating and evenbolstering lookism themselves through the appearances of their female journalists.
The report shows that the same holds true for documentaries and reality-based
shows.
Based on their findings, Womenlink concluded that not only are men
represented more than women but that female talents, unlike men, are selected basedon appearance, body shape and age. This is especially pernicious in news andinformational programming because as Yi Chin-yŏng, a representative of
Womenlink’s Media Movement Headquarters puts it, “The trend is that age is getting

113 Kathy Cho, “TV Likes Pretty Women, Even in News,” Donga Ilbo (South Korea, June 26, 2003).

238

younger for both genders. The results clearly show, however, that women’s
appearances are a decisive factor in the kinds of roles they get as opposed to men.
Therefore, audiences are subconsciously affected by these representations of genderand beauty as they see it on TV.”114 Media’s lookist bias cultivates society’s
propensity to judge people based on their looks or clothes rather than their abilities.
In light of these findings, Womenlink offered myriad suggestions to media
broadcasters including: diversifying the look and body shape of their talents in orderto undermine the societal effects and perpetuation of lookism and balancing out thegender imbalance of men to women on prime time television. While it is unclear
what kind of impact their suggestions had on the major networks, Womenlink’s
media monitoring efforts received national press coverage from a multitude ofperiodicals. In so doing, Womenlink was able to educate the public about television’s
lookist biases and their effects whether or not primetime television itself waschanged. In this public way, Womenlink rendered visible the mutually constitutive
relationship between the media and its specificities—celebrity, news, dramas—andthe cosmetic surgery industry.
In the final scene of Knifestyle, the announcer closes the marketing session withreassuring words: “Let go of your preconceived notions and open up your mind to
new horizons. Customers are always nearby.”115 He looks to the flat screen as thecamera follows his gaze, zooming in on Barbie once more. She fades out,transitioning to a wide shot of five young children, about four years of age, playing in
114 Yi Sŏn-min, “TV’s Boosting Up ‘Lookism’,” Media Today (South Korea, n.d.).
115 Korean Womenlink and WOMB, Knifestyle.

239

the sand and laughing with their arms around each other. The shot then cuts to aclose up of little girl in pigtails making something in the sand, then a boy giving thepeace sign, then another girl doing the same. Finally, the shot cuts left and transitions
to a group shot of the children waving and excitedly saying good-bye as the credits
roll on the right side of the screen.
As this chapter has shown, Knifestyle’s camera work and visual effects intimate
the predatory nature of cosmetic surgery markets and that these tactics are not only
intentional but immediately beneficial to the surgeons, clinics, hospitals—theindustry—that wield them. By ending the film in the series of shots described above,
Knifestyle not only reiterates this critique but reveals that it is not only women who are
the targets of such tactics given media and advertising’s pervasive nature. While therest of the video largely focuses on women, the closing sequence shows that
predatory marketing tactics are designed to instill the neoliberal ethics of theindustry—self-management, investment and development—through the codes of
insecurity, complexes and unreachable standards of beauty, early in the developmentof young children in order to make them potential customers in the future. In otherwords, because no one is safe from the predatory marketing strategies of the beauty
industry, lifestyles in South Korea are unduly yoked to the knife.

CONCLUSION
According to Asian American studies scholar Elaine Kim and East Asianstudies scholar Chungmoo Choi, because nationalism tends to construct women as
240

desexualized, chaste objects who represent the nation, women who fall outside of thiscategory, sex workers or feminist activists for example, “are at once endangered byand dangerous to the integrity of the masculinist discourse of nationalism.”116 In asimilar vein, anthropologist Laura Nelson shows how domestic and international
discourses in the 1990s constructed South Korean women consumers as“endangering the nation” through their excessive spending habits.117 Such discourses
pinpoint women’s consumptive practices as potentially contributing to the nation’s
economic vulnerability while simultaneously obscuring men’s consumption, theculpability of large corporations (chaebol), and corrupt government practices. By
pointing out the ways in which the cosmetic surgery industry creates new markets forthe body, however, Womenlink reveals that it is neither excessive consumers, sex
workers or feminists that are dangerous to the well-being of the nation but thecapitalist industries underpinning “lookism” and thus, cosmetic surgery consumption.
One of Womenlink’s central goals in the “Love Your Body” campaign was touse the media to educate about lookism even as they critiqued and monitored mass
media as well. Owing Knifestyle’s high production value in addition to its satiricalcontent, Womenlink was able to subvert mass media and the cosmetic surgery
industry through their very own mediums enacting “a making over which is itself akind of agency, a power in and as discourse, in and as performance.” As this chapter
has addressed, Womenlink’s campaign is critical to feminist organizing around issues

116 Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi, “Introduction.”
117 Laura C. Nelson, Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000) 139 - 70.

241

of the body as they pertain to the politics of the everyday. While Asian American
feminists, scholars and mainstream outlets focus on the salience of race in
Asian/American cosmetic surgery consumption and other U.S. feminists largely focus
on patriarchy, Womenlink’s campaign exemplifies how feminist organizing can, andshould, address the intersections of these organizing logics with capitalism as adriving and many times, predatory force. By focusing their campaign on the perhaps
particularly South Korea concern of lookism, Womenlink centers the specificgeopolitical concerns of contemporary South Korean women. In so doing, the“Love Your Body” campaign ceases to focus on the individual and her capacity tomake rational or moderate choices and instead interrogates the predatory practices ofthe beauty industry itself.

242

EPILOGUE
When asked about the effectiveness of the “Love Your Body” campaign,
Womenlink representative, Pak Chŏng-suk, demarcated potential success into two
spheres.1 Success on a policy level is difficult to assess, she said, since Womenlink’s
ability to enact gender policy transformation is largely dependent on the politicalleanings of the governmental administration in office, leading to an ebb and flow ofpolitical gains. On the other hand, although there is no concrete way of measuring
effectiveness in the realm of women’s everyday lives, she felt the campaign had beensuccessful since the slogan and its many iterations—“No Diet, No Cosmetic Surgery”
and “I am the Owner of my Body”—have come into common parlance since 2003
through Womenlink’s sustained efforts. Indeed, the “Love Your Body” campaign
did not end in 2003 but was re-launched in 2006. The project, officially called“Seeing Lookism Through the Eyes of Teens,” sought to empower teenage girls bygiving them the opportunity to use media on their own terms.2 The result was a
DVD featuring four short films that interrogate the issue of lookism from the girls’
perspectives. Having already produced Knifestyle and screened it in women’s
education health classes throughout South Korea as well as on the national television
network KBS, Womenlink took a different approach to media organizing that1

Pak Chŏng-suk, “Womenlink’s Effectiveness”, April 2, 2012.
Korean Womenlink, “10 대들의 눈으로 보는 외모지상주의 영상제작”, 2006, Korean
Womenlink, Seoul, South Korea.
2240continued to prioritize women’s everyday lives but this time from the perspective of
the consumers most targeted for self-management through the economic necessity ofplastic surgery.
Pak added that, while she cannot be sure of statistics, dieting and cosmetic
surgery consumption has probably increased and that Womenlink’s efforts to control
the media have been difficult since the media’s influence is so far-reaching. To be
sure, Pak’s comments suggest the difficulty of organizing around the politics of theeveryday. Womenlink’s multipronged war of position approach in the “Love Your
Body” 2003 campaign sought to educate women to create concrete change on a dailylevel while also attempting to enact institutional reform through their media
monitoring and legal actions. Both, as Pak outlines, present distinct challenges thatelude straightforward measures of success. Moreover, her conjecture, that dietingand cosmetic surgery is on the rise rather than having waned, attests to the continued
proliferation and influence of neoliberal governmentalities that push South Korean
women (and other consumers outside of South Korea) into the consumer market.
This dissertation has argued that these governmentalities are powerful
precisely because they operate through and within culture, an ideological dialectic
between “health” and commercial enterprises. Circulated and set to public memory
as entertainment narratives, these cultural advertisements operate while hidden inplain sight, underpinned by a logic of neoliberalism that is tied to medical, tourism
and concomitant industries that desire to be publicly imagined as not one in the same.
By examining several cultural productions from a variety of genres and vantage
241points, I have asserted that beauty is mediated through variously structured fields ofpower specific to the geopolitical context. As such, women’s everyday practices ofbeauty are embedded within deep histories of (neo)colonialism and produced bytransnational and local trajectories of global capital and competing discourses therein.
In the South Korean context, as I have attempted to show, consumptive practices are
informed by a genealogy of imperial racial formation that continues to constitute the
Korean beauty aesthetic and South Korean women’s consumptive practices in theform of “body work.” Since its (neo)colonial origins, however, cosmetic surgery inSouth Korea has taken on new meanings that while possessing its refractory aesthetic,
has grown distinct from its (neo)colonial origins. South Korea’s neoliberal era has
ushered in mandates for self-empowerment through bodily self-management andthese neoliberal ethics travel transnationally vis-à-vis Hallyu’s unsurpassed popularity
and the transnational connectivities it engenders. In this way, Hallyu has a mutually
beneficial relationship with South Korea’s medical tourism industry thus opening up
new international and transnational markets. Accordingly, U.S. discourses that map
U.S. notions of race onto the South Korean context elides the very geopoliticalspecificities that shape women’s quotidian and corporeal choices. By mapping out
the organizing logics of Womenlink’s “Love Your Body” campaign, I have attempted
to show instead how feminists are addressing such location specific concerns.
Ultimately, I hope this dissertation has illuminated the various linkages that connect
South Korean, Asian and Asian American women while situating these linkages
within the distinct discursive formations that shape their everyday lives.
242

In future iterations, this project will contribute to the burgeoning field of New
Digital Media studies by examining the ways in which beauty culture intersects withinformation technology. In addition to being the plastic surgery “mecca” of Asia,
Seoul is also known as the “bandwith capital of the world.” With the highest number
of DSL connections per head worldwide, patients not only rate physicians on-line but
post “before and after” as well as post-operative photos, creating communities ofshared experiences in what South Koreans call cyber “cafés.” Just as Hallyu fandom
has created shared (and imagined) communities between Asian women, cyber space
also enacts similar affective bonds—both facilitated by the internet. Yet, cyber spaceis also a potent medium for advertising as attested to by South Korea’s medical
tourism YouTube channel. In the book manuscript, I will theorize how thesetechnologies—cosmetic surgery and digital media—have developed alongside one
another as a result of Korea’s rapid industrialization and more importantly, theirmutual impact on consumer culture and identity-making.
Secondly, my manuscript will delve deeper into Transnational and Diasporicstudies. According to Cold War scholar Jodi Kim, Asian American cultural
productions can be understood as “Cold War compositions” that “trace, uncover,and interrogate U.S. Cold War imperialism.”3 In recent years, Asian/American
plastic surgery consumption has been the subject of multiple Asian American
documentaries, performance art pieces/shows, magazines and blogs. My bookproject will examine these Cold War compositions in order to excavate not only the3

Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War, (Minneapolis, Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 12.

243

ways in which Korean beauty culture travels to and through the Korean diaspora but
how it is understood by Asian Americans within the context of the U.S.’s imperial
legacy. By coupling my existing research on the Korean context with more in-depth
theorization of the Asian American one, my book will provide a critical space for the
lived and imagined experiences of Korean/American embodiment in different
diasporic registers.

244

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