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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
147864
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the gendered and sexualized contours of North Korean experiences in South Korea at a time when nearly 70% of the North Korean emigrants are women. South Korean television shows – e.g. reality programs – and marriage matchmaking organizations seek to portray North Korean women in a ‘positive’ way to the South Korean public, although, as this article will illustrate, these representations are of a very particular, sexualized kind. These representations are sometimes negative, and there is stigma attached to North Korean women, in which South Koreans assume, for example, that they are victims of human trafficking or that they have had relations with Chinese men during their migration. Furthermore, poor nutrition and other forms of structural violence in North Korea have molded North Korean bodies; there are often physical disparities between North and South Koreans. In South Korean society where short height is viewed as undesirable and where idealized, surgical notions of beauty dominate, the violence of gendered phenotypical normalization mark North Korean bodies as smaller, foreign, and strange. Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this article argues that these gendered contours of North Korean migration amount to a different sort of structural violence in South Korea.
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| 2 |
ID:
192941
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| Summary/Abstract |
Embodied goods like cosmetic surgery comprise a unique and growing consumer industry, most of all in the Asia-Pacific, yet the rationalisation processes motivating their purchase are less understood. Addressing this lacuna, this article builds upon open-ended surveys and semi-structured interviews of consumers in Seoul, South Korea to articulate a relational approach to examine the rationalisation of purchases of cosmetic surgery as an embodied good. Theorised through the conceptual lens of Bourdieusian capital, participant accounts point to macro-level economic anxieties that inform a micro-level cognitive logic of competition through which consumers rationalise the purchase of embodied goods as a form of aesthetic capital. When performed, this capital is believed to offer actors social distinction that provides workplace and social networking advantages by impressing gatekeepers and alters. Participants are shown to reconceptualise their bodies in a means-end orientation for upward mobility but stress their resignation and powerlessness in being forced to adopt this instrumental reconceptualisation as a response to intensifying economic hardships in contemporary capitalist South Korea.
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| 3 |
ID:
154524
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper addresses the growing phenomenon of cosmetic surgery tourism through a focus on the development of this industry in South Korea. Unlike many discussions of this topic, the paper decentres dominant narratives based on west-goes-east or north-goes-south journeys. Instead, we look at regional flows by exploring the experiences of Chinese patients travelling to South Korea in search of facial cosmetic surgery – procedures often referred to as the ‘Korean Look’ and associated with exported Korean popular culture. We focus on the contested understandings of the motives for and outcomes of this surgery between Korean surgeons and Chinese patients, documenting one example of the cultural investments and (mis)understandings that can impact on the experiences of medical tourists as they travel across national borders in search of treatment. We situate the development of cosmetic surgery tourism in Korea in the context of a discourse we call ‘medical nationalism’, showing how surgeons in particular reproduce this discourse in terms of pride in their contribution to the economic and reputational success of South Korea on a world stage. However, we demonstrate finally that, as a privatised, feminised and trivialised form of medicine, cosmetic surgery will always fail to deliver in this respect.
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