Cultural globalization and young Korean women’s acculturative labor: K-beauty as hegemonic hybridity

Cultural globalization, Asian modernity, and K-pop

Although the field of cultural globalization has largely focused on how Western cultural products are adopted, resisted, and hybridized in other foreign regions and countries, there is a growing recognition that modern transcultural flows are becoming ever more regionalized (Cayla and Eckhardt, 2008; Ger, 1999; Iwabuchi, 2002). That is, under the development of influential economic, social, and political institutions in different parts of the world, intra-regional exchanges contribute to the making of localized versions of global modernity (Ger, 1999; Iwabuchi, 2002). As Shim (2006: 27) notes, “Paradoxically, globalization encourages local people to rediscover the ‘local’ [or regional] that they have neglected or forgotten in their drive towards Western-imposed modernization during the past decades.”

Asian modernity represents a quintessential case of this regionalized process of globalization. It is both conceptually and historically grounded in postcolonial critiques, which conceive multiple versions of (non-Western) global modernity (Iwabuchi, 2002; Kobayashi et al., 2019; Shim, 2006). The proponents of this view recognize the universal significance of Western-originated modernizing processes, such as urbanization and internationalization (Parsons, 1971); however, they deny that such processes occur through direct replication of Western development models. Instead, global modernization is conceived to be embedded within unique sociocultural structures and practices that produce multiple localized versions of modernity. In the context of cultural globalization, this view particularly alludes to the importance of regional cultural exchanges – moving us beyond the East–West dichotomy that frames the West as a global center and the East as a local periphery (Iwabuchi, 2002; Kobayashi et al., 2019).

It is important to note, however, that the formulation of multiple modernities does not refute the importance of Western influences. Rather, this position asserts that any cultural influences, including Western ones, cannot simply be moved from one place to another, because they are continually re-negotiated, re-embodied, and re-politicized by local agents in situ – a process known as glocalization (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2007; Robertson, 1995). The cultural formation of Asian modernity, in particular, is historically traced to the appropriation of Western popular culture post-World War II, when regional cultural producers endeavored to imitate Western conventions and styles (e.g. music, cinema, and fashion) (Robertson, 1995; Shim, 2006). However, instead of reproducing Western cultural imagery, these appropriations cultivated the emergence of ‘local-global’ cultural products (e.g. Japanese manga, Cantonese pop music, and K-pop). These products conform neither to Western nor traditional Asian cultural models, because they are characterized by distinctive configurations of cultural hybridity (Oh, 2014). Over the years, these hybrid cultural products of modern Asia have gained prominence in the region, partially, because “they reflect lifestyles that Asian viewers can emulate, in contrast to the exotic and inaccessible ways of life shown in Western media forms” (Cayla and Eckhardt, 2008: 218). In short, Asian modernity is reflected within the processes of regionalized cultural hybridization (Shim, 2006), where local centers of global cultural production are de-centering Western cultural hegemony.

Over the last two decades, Korea has emerged as a new cultural mecca of Asian modernity. This process started in the late 1990s, when Korean television dramas (K-dramas) became popular in China and in other neighboring countries during the period that was later dubbed the first Korean Wave (Hallyu or Hanryu in Korean) (Shim, 2006). When this initial wave reached its peak in 2004, inbound visitors from neighboring China and Japan increased by over 40% (Kim et al., 2007). Following the regional success of K-dramas, the second and more recent Korean Wave (Hallyu 2.0) is associated with the global export of Korean popular music culture (K-pop). A distinctive characteristic of this transcultural flow is that it focuses exclusively on youth consumers (Siriyuvasak and Shin, 2007). Thus, K-pop does not represent all music originating from South Korea. Instead, it denotes a specific music genre that is produced and exported by large Korean entertainment companies, in order to purposively appeal to global youth segments (Shin and Kim, 2013). Some scholars argue that it is mainly these companies’ strategic and commercially oriented efforts to successfully translate Western popular culture to regional Asian tastes that allowed K-pop to establish its cultural pervasiveness in Asia, and then expand beyond the region (Chua and Jung, 2014; Shin and Kim, 2013).

The pervasiveness of K-pop and close ties between the music industry and other cultural institutions (e.g. TV, films, the arts) in Korea have extended the cultural influence of K-pop into many consumption practices. Most notably, as we discussed in the introduction, the highly distinctive and standardized beauty ideals of K-pop celebrities (K-beauty) are gaining cult-like followings among youth consumers in Korea, Asia, and beyond the region (Chua and Jung, 2014; Kim, 2011; Oh, 2014). Given that Asian modernity offers a postcolonial critique that legitimizes other, non-Western forms of modernity, the popularity of K-pop has been often interpreted as a celebratory re-insertion of East Asian values into the politics of global popular culture, which is dominated by Western cultural hegemony (Chua and Iwabuchi, 2008; Kim and Ryoo, 2007; Shim, 2006). In this endeavor, previous research has largely queried how K-pop is assimilated within neighboring Asian countries (e.g. Huang, 2011) and, more recently, beyond the region (e.g. Jin and Yoon, 2016), offering a strong case that K-pop has emerged as the latest and, arguably, one of the most influential iterations of Asian modernity.

Ironically, this means that one perspective that is particularly lacking is how the cultural globalization of K-pop is shaping social structures and cultural meanings, such as gendered beauty ideals, within its exporting country, itself. Against this backdrop, K-beauty has emerged as a dominant source of beauty standards for local Koreans. This is because, given the increasing global popularity of K-pop, its cultural production inside Korea does not merely involve the strategic activities of K-pop entertainment companies (Shin and Kim, 2013). Instead, K-pop encompasses a broad range of local agents, which include media and art intermediaries (e.g. broadcasting companies), education providers (e.g. universities), various commercial organizations (e.g. advertising agencies), and even the Korean government, itself, which equates the globalization of K-pop with national interests (Lee, 2008). Accordingly, in the same way that local residents in Las Vegas have accepted the coexistence of casino gambling with other spheres of their lives due to its institutional legitimacy (Humphreys, 2010), Korean consumers can neither escape nor ignore the global export of K-pop and the associated imagery of K-beauty.

While the studies of glocal beauty have focused on how local consumers read, respond to, and appropriate the meanings of imported popular cultural products (e.g. Hung et al., 2007; Kim, 2005; Lin and Tong, 2008), we know less about how local consumers respond to the changing beauty norms when their local products, themselves, are transformed to become global. Yet, such a process can disrupt the local resonance of a popular cultural product, interrupting the “recognition of the self in the media icon” (Hung et al., 2007: 1037). Difference and disjuncture can become particularly salient in the context of cultural globalization from non-Western centers, where we have a sense of a culture reaching up and out, rather than reaching below, and in the process, transforming into something other-than-itself. This localized perspective is thus important for developing broader understandings about the gendered implications of contemporary regionalized globalization, such as Asian modernity, and particularly the impact that these processes have on how young women read beauty in emerging centers of globalization.

K-beauty: intersections of gender imagery and cultural hybridization

K-beauty offers a cultural site to understand the intersection of gender imagery and the hybridization of cultural meanings. In the first instance, beauty ideals and depictions in popular culture, as exemplified by K-beauty, offer a window into underpinning gender regimes. That is, the ideals of femininity – and its relationship to masculinity – are visually encoded in popular media, fashion, and beauty consumption practices. Through popular cultural texts and the discourses which they evoke, the meanings of femininity ideals are reproduced, reinforced, and rendered not only visible, but also natural (Butler, 1990; Törrönen and Rolando, 2017). The power of gendered beauty consumption often lies in their taken-for-granted, normalized, character (Butler, 1988; 1990). Popular cultural articulations and reiterations of feminine beauty, while open to reflexive reinterpretation, have regulative effects – they are “powerful performative[s]” (Törrönen and Rolando, 2017: 819), which offer “mode[s] of self-presentation against (or within) which every female has to position herself” (Cook and Kaiser, 2004: 222). Even as women actively appropriate, negotiate, oppose, resist, and even subvert the changing meanings of gendered beauty, the ideals of beauty stand as hegemonic referents – impossible to ignore, requiring mandatory negotiation.

Further, feminine beauty is neither universal nor abstracted. The ideals of beauty are socio-historically situated, because they emerge and evolve through the shared performances of social practices (Entwistle, 2002). As Butler (1988, 1990) contends, gendered identities and norms are neither fixed nor stable; rather, they are repeatedly performed and can undergo renegotiation and change over time. Through its continual evolution, the field of beauty encapsulates, distils, and articulates the changing ideals of femininity and gender norms. For instance, Balogun (2012) contextualizes the emerging discourses surrounding beauty pageants in Nigeria within conflicting national pursuits to revitalize and modernize its emerging nationhood in the global cultural economy. In a similar way, the beauty ideals within K-beauty, at least in part, offer a mirror into what it means to do femininity in modern Korean society, and how such meanings are changing. Importantly, in this instance of feminine ideals, the gender imagery of K-beauty is not purely local – as discussed earlier, it is subject to the socio-historical processes of cultural globalization, Asian modernity, and the global cultural export of K-pop aggressively pursued by Korean entertainment companies.

Several studies note that beauty ideals in Korea are situated at the nexus of neo-Confucian gender binaries and modern Asian femininities. Even though traditional neo-Confucianism subjugates women to the status of subject-less bodies that engage in domestic practices of family and body reproduction (Holliday and Elfving-Hwang, 2012; Kim, 2003; Lee, 2013), in a rapidly modernizing Korean society, women are constructed as increasingly visible consuming subjects (Kim, 2003; Kim, 2011). The cultural texts of K-pop reflect this key animating tension within K-beauty: between, on the one hand, asserting traditional patriarchal gender relations which relegate women to passive, submissive, and traditionally invisible roles (Kim, 2003; Lee, 2013); and, on the other hand, celebrating new inscriptions of modern femininity (e.g. Kim, 2011) that subvert these traditional inscriptions of woman-hood within domestic and private spheres. For example, in K-pop music videos, in contrast to the traditional Korean ideals of innocent, demure, passive, coy and cute performances of girlish hyper-femininity, the independent, strong, and overtly sexualized performances which more closely align with Western popular culture constitute a jarring juxtaposition (Oh, 2014). These simultaneous and countervailing forces are giving rise to the changing ideals about what constitutes being a proper yet modern Korean woman – which play out in how women interpret K-beauty.

In sum, K-beauty is not to be read as simply Korean expression of femininity, but as a culturally hybridized femininity, in which countervailing ideals are continually negotiated. This gender imagery is infused by transnational image-scapes, cultural globalization, and Western hegemony (Appadurai, 1990; Oh, 2014). Yet, at the same time, the Korean traditional cultural models (Kim, 2003; Lee, 2013) and regional politics of Asian modernity (Cayla and Eckhardt, 2008; Chua and Iwabuchi, 2008) are also at play. Because K-pop is a hybridized expression of multiple cultural referents, K-beauty can be conceived to be located at the intersection of global and local beauty ideals.

Method

Discursive interpretations of K-beauty are important because they are a microcosm, a specific site upon which the complex negotiation of Korean feminine beauty in the context of cultural globalization can be observed. Such an approach takes individual accounts not as a privileged view into the reality of lived experience, but as expressions, social norms, and perspectives that are evident in the given cultural locale (Gimlin, 2013). The discursive interpretations of K-beauty that we present in this study have emerged from a two-stage integrative process that involved interviews with young Korean women. During the first stage, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 women participants, aged 19–24, and who attended a highly reputable private university in Seoul. This university is a competitive-entry institution that tends to attract students from affluent upper middle-class families, and has an established record of producing some of Korea’s most prominent leaders in the fields of business, literature and arts, and politics. While this sample of participants may not be representative of all young Korean women, their perceptions of beauty are theoretically interesting because their investment in elite upward social mobility makes them especially exposed to globalization of consumption trends. Further, this sample of affluent, cosmopolitan, and elite young women represents the main target audience for K-beauty ideals (Siriyuvasak and Shin, 2007). A sampling criterion was that they considered themselves familiar with K-pop trends and were willing to talk about them. The semi-structured interviews involved broad guidance questions to facilitate an open discussion about K-pop consumption in Korea (e.g. What can you tell me about K-pop and its role in Korea? What role does K-pop play in your life?). Each interview lasted approximately 60 to 90 minutes. It was during these interviews that we noticed that the beauty ideals of K-pop celebrities (i.e. the ‘look’) and what these celebrities do in order to maintain this look prominently featured within these women’s narratives; and how their associated discourses reflected the paradoxes of being manufactured yet emphasizing naturalness, perceived as hyper-sexualized yet infantilized, and imposing the ‘harmonious kaleidoscope’ of beauty ideals. All interviewees have been anonymized

In order to gain a more in-depth understanding of these emerging paradoxes, we conducted the second stage of data collection. We recruited an additional sample of 11 young Korean women from the same university to participate in a focus-group interview. One week prior to the focus-group interview, we asked participants to collect six to seven images of what K-beauty meant for them, and we used these images to facilitate conversations about the role of beauty ideals as embodied by K-pop celebrities in Korean society (Coulter, 2006). We also specifically discussed the paradoxes that were identified in the earlier stage. Our approach is consistent with Lunt and Livingstone’s (1996) view that focus-group discussions, in generating social talk about media representations, provides a good way to understand the audiences’ discursive sense-making. As Click et al. (2015: 408) note:

focus groups, and the group discussions they elicit, give researchers a way of observing these important everyday interactions. Because focus groups generate discussion, they can simulate everyday conversations about television, offering a better sense of participants’ perspectives on the discussion topics and how they debate these topics with others.

In addition, one of the authors periodically visited Korea for a total duration of nine months as a visiting professor at the aforementioned university, enabling a first-hand view of everyday practices of K-beauty (e.g. a legitimized local practice of women performing extended make-up regimes on the train or in cafes). This included conducting observations of the K-beauty phenomenon, such as attending K-pop events (e.g. music concerts) and observing how K-pop idols’ beauty ideals are mirrored by their fans, visiting commercial centers of K-beauty products (e.g. cosmetics shops), and engaging in multiple conversations with local Koreans regarding their perceptions of K-beauty.

Following a hermeneutic approach, and reinforcing Jensen’s (2019) perspective that audience research always involves a fusion of horizons between scholarly analysis and audience views, encompassing the reinterpretation of audience interpretations, our insights about what K-beauty ideals represent are derived through a dialectical integration between extant literature and participant narratives. The data was thematically coded and abstracted to the findings presented for each theme of K-beauty paradoxes. This analysis involved an iterative process between the source texts and the emerging categories, whereby we developed provisional categories and conceptual connections that aided our subsequent induction of the broader underlying themes about how young Korean women perceive K-beauty. All participants reported in this study are identified only by their pseudonyms and age.

Discursive readings of K-beauty

For young Korean women, the accelerated cultural export of K-pop since late 2000s (Hallyu 2.0) has resulted in changing ideals of feminine beauty that are paradoxical and contradictory, yet powerful and regulative. Participants’ discursive interpretations of K-beauty foregrounded three paradoxes of K-beauty: manufactured naturalness, hyper-sexualized cuteness, and the ‘harmonious kaleidoscope’. These ambiguous, glocalized, images of K-beauty provoke unsettlement and ambivalence among young Korean women, and bring to surface the acculturative labors of concealment, selective resistance, and compliance that characterize the discursive readings of K-beauty. Through this new dimension of women’s work, the paradoxes in beauty are re-domesticated, the globalizing Western dictates are brought into alignment with neo-Confucian cultural ideology, and a new hybridized hegemonic beauty regime becomes established.

Conclusion

Driven by the global export of K-pop, alongside its co-optation as a platform for South Korea’s national identity and soft power (Nye and Kim, 2013), the past decade has witnessed a significant shift in the ideals of K-beauty. K-beauty, we argue, represents a fruitful site for understanding how articulations of feminine beauty are changing at the intersection of global and local cultural forces, and how local consumers negotiate these changes. These increasingly globally commodified performances and discourses of beauty, in combination with locally embedded beauty norms, on the surface, speak to an increasingly hybridized sensibility which permeates the gendered beauty expressions in alternative centers of globalization. However, if the global export of K-pop in Asian modernity aligns K-pop female idols’ bodies with the demands of the global culture industries, then this cultural reorientation also introduces another dimension to the gendered negotiations enacted by young Korean women. In light of the hybridized cultural meanings which result from the “mutual articulation of local and global nexus” (Ryoo, 2009: 143) in K-pop, Korean women confront the export of local regimes of feminine beauty. This process of global export is managed through acculturative labor, where the meanings of feminine beauty in K-pop are reclaimed and re-domesticated.

The analysis of young Korean women’s discursive interpretations reveals that this work is directed at pacifying the threat of the global. In re-domesticating K-beauty, young Korean women pacify the danger of the global through the prism of local cultural values: the threat of manufactured expressions of beauty is tempered through the concealment of hard work; the threat of the hyper-sexualized feminine is tempered through selective (de-)problematization of cuteness; and the threat of kaleidoscopic individuality is tempered through compliance with a uniform aesthetic.

Even though these culturally inflected processes of beauty negotiation pacify the threat of the global, this is an insidious pacification. It localizes, and arguably normalizes and renders more palatable problematic ideals of the manufactured yet natural, hypersexual yet infantilized, superficially various yet collectively conforming feminine. While scholars of Asian modernity often adopt a celebratory tone – in one sense, extolling the transformative virtues of a sense of mutual adaptation and reassertion of the local that comes with cultural hybridity (Ryoo, 2009; Shim, 2006), and in another sense, foregrounding the appropriative agency of local consumers (Hung et al., 2007; Lin and Tong, 2008) – as Slater and Miller (2007: 18) caution, local appropriation does not automatically equate to local agency: “the fact that people have assimilated something does not make it alright.” Our analysis of the intersection between cultural globalization and discourses of female beauty draws attention to how glocalization imposes new hybrid hegemonies on young Korean women’s interpretations of K-beauty.

This is because the glocalization of beauty involves a reorientation toward globalized standards of feminine beauty, without a reprieve from the established localized standards. Further embedding this hegemonic hybridity are the intersections of gender and nationalism in K-beauty, where K-pop’s prevailing status as a source of South Korean national identity and global cultural influence (Joo, 2011) means that women are expected to represent the nation in highly specific ways to non-Koreans, thus precluding women from critiquing these contradictory ideals. Taken together, the management of these cultural paradoxes does not appear to challenge or subvert the pervasive scrutiny to which women’s bodies and appearances are subjected (Törrönen and Rolando, 2017). Instead, the pacification and incorporation of the global into the local imposes further layers of expectation, further layers of demand, and, ultimately, further layers of labor on young women. The glocalization of beauty, for young Korean women, means having to negotiate prescriptive regimes of beauty from global and local consumer cultures, and having to navigate and reconcile these contradictory forces. Thus, we contend that K-beauty can be characterized as hegemonic hybridity, one that fixes, imposes, and narrows possibilities for the gendered performance of beauty.

Hybridity in cultural globalization has been used to refer to the mixture of cultural forms, characterized by fluidity rather than fixedness, in-betweenness rather than purity, and opening a transcendent or expansive space of cultural interpenetration (Bhabha, 1994; Kraidy, 2002; Wang and Yeh, 2005). Yet hybridity is not uniformly transgressive. Even as hybridity contains the potential for resistance and emancipation from dominant structures, it is socio-historically embedded within, and can be co-opted into projects of power, which result in the assimilation of seemingly divergent perspectives into dominant ideologies (Balaram, 2018; Bhatia, 2017; Kraidy, 2002). In relation to K-beauty, the turn to hybrid beauty ideals is aligned with the Korean cultural industries’ globalizing stance, along with the government’s investment in Hallyu as a means to soft power (Nye and Kim, 2013) and nationalism (Joo, 2011; Kim, 2011). The cultural hybridization of global and local forms, in this case, is not read as an articulation of diversity but a convergence of powerful interests. Illustrating the complex intersections of gender, nationalism, and globalization, we find that these changing ideals shape young Korean women’s understandings of these ideals in ambivalent and highly patterned ways.

In conclusion, the globalization of K-beauty heightens contradictions within the ideals of Korean feminine beauty, while enrolling local women into the discursive work of navigating these contradictions. Korean women perform the labor of not only negotiating what it means to do feminine beauty, but also the labor of acculturating to narrowing and contradictory standards imposed by K-pop’s cultural globalization. Young Korean women now must perform additional work in pacifying the tensions between the global and the local. Hence, while we might conclude that the glocalization of K-beauty is an empowering reassertion of East Asian values and their re-insertion into popular cultural discourses of beauty, this pacification, which might be seen as a cultural victory on the global–local axis, also constitutes a retreat on the axis of gender performativity. Specifically, while in the context of Asia and global consumer culture, K-beauty can be seen as a champion of de-hegemony by offering alternative non-Western gender imagery (Lin and Tong, 2008) and even empowering queer subjectivities (Kang-Nguyen, 2019), the same beauty ideal imposes and normalizes a new hegemonic regime inside South Korea.

While this article has focused on young Korean women’s discursive readings of K-beauty, it raises further questions about the practical dynamics and embodied lived experiences of this acculturative labor, and the perspectives of multiple social agents (e.g. young Korean men, families, creative industries, and regulators), opening promising avenues for further research. In particular, given the juxtaposing interpretations of what K-beauty means for Korean women, how is K-beauty embedded within the daily lives of Korean women? Do they passively comply and routinize the unrealistic ideals of K-beauty or do they use such ideals as counter-references to foster alternative gendered practices? Future research is warranted to explore the lived experiences of K-beauty beyond discursive readings presented in this article. In addition, our study focused on young upper middle-class women, who are particularly susceptible to the hegemonic ideals of K-beauty. Future research, however, could endeavor to compare how the discursive interpretations of K-beauty ideals might be different among different generations of Korean women. Finally, within our participants’ interpretations of K-beauty, the problems of the local have been overshadowed by the dangers of the global. Yet, as mentioned in the introduction, it is largely due to the strategic activities of ‘local’ Korean entertainment companies that K-pop has been transformed into a global commodity (Shin and Kim, 2013). Thus, future research could explore how different social agents of Korean society, including women, perceive the role of Korean entertainment companies in the context of gender performativity.

Overall, our article underscores the invisible gendered acculturative labor at play: doing beauty in global modernity requires hard work.