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

Abstract

This article aims to understand how young Korean women respond to the changing ideals of K-beauty, a form of gender imagery embodied by Korean pop celebrities, when such ideals become exported as global cultural products. The findings reveal that K-beauty is characterized by three paradoxical themes: manufactured naturalness, hyper-sexualized cuteness, and the ‘harmonious kaleidoscope’. When we unravel these paradoxes further, we observe that they provoke unsettlement and ambivalence among young Korean women, who shed light on the acculturative labors of concealment, selective resistance, and compliance that permeate the field of K-beauty. We argue that through these new layers 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 regime of feminine beauty becomes established.

Keywords

beauty cultural globalization gender hegemony hybridity K-pop

Feminine beauty is a complex and contested site, molded and iterated through popular culture imagery, implicated in feminist, anti-feminist, and post-feminist debates, and evolving with the ebbs and flows of globalization (Elias et al., 2017). Above all, the changing expressions of beauty in popular culture are socially significant because they inform the gendered experiences of young women (Russell and Tyler, 2002). For instance, children’s fairy tales that emphasize women’s passivity and beauty have been criticized for operating as cultural scripts that routinize hegemonic masculinity and dominant gender regimes (Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz, 2003). This article investigates how K-beauty, which refers to beauty ideals embodied and practiced by the celebrities of Korean popular culture (K-pop), is interpreted by young Korean women.

K-beauty represents a noteworthy gendered phenomenon because it embodies changing ideals of feminine beauty at the confluence of contemporary cultural flows of globalization and Asian modernity (Shim, 2006). K-beauty’s hybridizing imagery is situated within the broader dynamics of K-pop, also referred to as Hallyu or Korean Wave (Huang, 2011; Jung and Shim, 2014; Shin and Kim, 2013), which has been dubbed by Time Magazine as ‘South Korea’s greatest export’ (Mahr, 2012). This phenomenon refers to the wide reception that modern cultural products (e.g. K-pop music, TV dramas, and fashion) produced and exported by large Korean entertainment companies have received in Asia and other countries since the early 1990s. To put K-pop into perspective, a record-setting 2016 Korean drama, Descendants of the Sun, has received over 2.4 billion views and generated over US $37 million in advertising revenues in China alone (Zhen, 2016). The strategic and commercially oriented efforts by Korean companies to popularize K-pop in Asia and beyond have cultivated a fondness not only for Korean media products, but also of all other ‘K-pop’ things (Huang, 2011), most notably for K-beauty. The recent surging exports of beauty and cosmetic products from Korea have been largely attributed to the pervasiveness of K-pop (Liu, 2018; Zhen, 2016).

K-beauty imagery as a gendered phenomenon of globalization can be explored from at least two discrete, yet interrelated, perspectives. The first perspective involves studying how K-beauty is perceived within importing cultures (e.g. Chan and Wang, 2011; Lin and Tong, 2008). That is, how does K-beauty, with its alternative meanings to other cultural models (e.g. Western beauty standards in Hollywood), ripple through gender regimes within foreign countries (i.e. outside Korea) where K-pop is consumed? Some insights into this perspective can be gained from a research stream on Asian modernity (Chua and Iwabuchi, 2008; Ryoo, 2009; Shim, 2006). In particular, Shim (2006) interprets the uptake of K-pop’s culture – including K-beauty – as a hybridized Asian alternative to the dominant Western globalization of popular culture, whereby the Korean Wave offers a more palatable ‘vision of [Asian] modernization’. Consistent with this view, Lin and Tong (2008) discuss how watching Korean (i.e. non-Western) media has enabled women in Hong Kong and Singapore to mobilize cultural resources in constructing their distinctive version of modern Asian femininity, whereas Kang-Nguyen (2019) describes K-pop as an important symbolic resource for forming and empowering regional queer subjectivities. From this perspective, the meanings of K-beauty are often framed as a celebratory alternative to Western cultural hegemony.

The second, less explored, perspective involves understanding how K-beauty is perceived within its exporting country. That is, what changes within the idealized perceptions of modern feminine beauty does the global export of K-beauty foster in Korea? Our study focuses on this alternative nexus between globalization and gender imagery, in order to uncover how the K-pop industry’s pursuit to become a global cultural exporter shapes young Korean women’s interpretations of beauty ideals.

Our research uses data from in-depth interviews and focus-group discussions with young Korean women. The findings reveal that K-beauty – in the pursuit of becoming a globalized cultural product – has engendered ambiguity and complex juxtapositions within the idealized perceptions of modern beauty in Korea. Specifically, hybridized K-beauty ideals are characterized by three paradoxical themes: manufactured naturalness, hyper-sexualized cuteness, and the ‘harmonious kaleidoscope’. Notably, we found that young Korean women’s active sense-making of these paradoxes unveils the acculturative labors of concealment, selective resistance, and compliance that permeate the field of K-beauty. Taken together, the paradoxes of K-beauty and their associated acculturative labors performed to make sense of these paradoxes point us toward the reading of this gender imagery as hegemonic hybridity that localizes, and arguably normalizes, the problematic ideals of manufactured yet natural, hypersexual yet infantilized, superficially kaleidoscopic yet ultimately standardized, regimes of feminine beauty.

In the following sections, we first situate the evolution of K-beauty within the intra-regional cultural dynamics of Asian modernity and the global export of K-pop, which we understand as a hybridized and hybridizing confluence of global and local flows of cultural meanings. We then unpack beauty ideals as a site of gender performativity and, finally, explain how beauty ideals intersect with cultural globalization to demand active sense-making on the part of young Korean women.

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.

Manufactured naturalness: the labor of concealment

While feminine beauty in Korea has traditionally emphasized the ideals of naturalness, purity, and innocence, influencing a minimalist approach to make-up and fashion as embodied by K-pop celebrities in earlier years, the standard appearance of female K-pop celebrities has undergone a palpable shift since. This hyper-produced aesthetic, coinciding with the increasing turn toward the globalization of K-pop (Jung, 2013; Unger, 2015), reflects a growing institutional alignment of the aesthetic and performance styles of K-pop idols with Westernized, Hollywood-style female celebrity ideals.

Young Korean women’s narratives reflect a sophisticated recognition and negotiation of these countervailing beauty ideals. In making sense of the manufactured natural look practiced by K-pop celebrities, our participants’ interpretations simultaneously encompassed the valorization of natural beauty and the recognition that this naturalness is produced through extensive effort. The paradox of manufactured natural look is managed by concealing the fabricated dimension of beauty. In particular, through the interrelated beauty practices of skincare, fashion, and bodywork, young Korean women in our study underscored the labor that is required, and its simultaneous effacement:

Even though K-pop beauty encourages people to work hard to have well-cultivated look, the well-cultivated look is prone to criticism when it becomes too obvious that the beauty is artificially gained. Even though the media encourages people to have plastic surgery to change their looks to fit to the society’s standards, people are often pressured to conceal the fact that they had plastic surgery. (Taeyeon, 23 years old)

K-pop beauty emphasizes the natural look, but this often requires much work. For example, it is not uncommon for celebrities to undergo some form of cosmetic procedure or surgery . . . but they often claim that they did not undergo any procedure because Koreans want to believe that their idols are natural. Make-up is also used to achieve that natural look. [. . .] It actually takes more effort to create the natural look because you have to make the make-up look very subtle. [. . .] Celebrities also receive regular skincare treatments to achieve and maintain a healthy skin, and constantly work out and watch their diets to maintain a slim figure. A lot of effort is actually put into create the natural look that Koreans desire, but these efforts are often not broadcast or they are played down. (Yoona, 21 years old)

Here, Western impositions of a hyper-produced aesthetic are inverted, rendered secondary to the valorization of the primary value of natural beauty. Through the discursive work of concealing and downplaying – as well as the processes of negatively sanctioning unskilled and non-subtle beauty practices – we can see how a global shift toward manufactured beauty is subsumed under the local value of natural beauty. Indeed, scholars have noted that the privileging of natural beauty – while effacing the required work to achieve this effect – is creating new hierarchies of beauty that induce modern categories of social distinction (Holliday and Elfving-Hwang, 2012; Kim, 2003). In the most basic sense, it costs more to commission a cosmetic surgery that strikes the right balance of improvement and subtlety, while covering up any traces that it was ever performed at all (Holliday and Elfving-Hwang, 2012). In privileging long-standing localized values, the participants’ acculturative negotiations belie a bent toward subsuming the global into the local.

In summary, the paradox of manufactured naturalness unveils how Korean women’s beauty standards are a site in which tensions between the global and the local are reproduced and contested. K-beauty, in this hybridized iteration, is a tightrope walk through narrowing and contradictory norms. Korean women’s narratives underscore the contradictory exhortations encoded in K-beauty: on the one hand, exhorting women to perform labor in producing natural beauty, and on the other hand, exhorting women to conceal the labor required to produce this gendered effect. Thus, the labor here is two-fold: the labor of production and the labor of concealment. Our participants demonstrated an astute and sophisticated awareness of how this inherently contradictory beauty regime has hybridized to impose a double bind on the performance of feminine beauty.

Hyper-sexualized cuteness: the labor of selective resistance

Another ambiguous contradiction suffuses the visual vocabulary of K-beauty: the contradiction between performances of cute and a noticeable incorporation of sexualized femininity. While Korean cultural models of femininity ideals privilege passivity, submission, and vulnerability (Kim, 2003; Unger, 2015), as embodied in the performances of cute (aegyo in Korean), K-pop female idols increasingly present aesthetics and performances which juxtapose a hyper-sexualized image against images of girlish innocence (Oh, 2014). Take, for example, how the dominant look of Girls’ Generation – a K-pop girl group – has changed from their innocent, girlish, cute, and playful personae in their ‘Gee’ music video in 2009, to a more hyper-sexualized, aggressive, and overly seductive aesthetic in ‘Paparazzi’ in 2012, while retaining the elements of cute (Unger, 2015). Even though the shift of an innocent girl-next-door image toward a more sexualized recombination for the benefit of global K-pop export is heralded as part of Korea’s drive for soft power (Jung, 2013), this hybridized pastiche is held in tension with the conservative values espoused in Korean traditional culture.

Our participants demonstrated a selective resistance toward this problematic juxtaposition. Even though the performance of cute is open to critique because it reinforces feminine stereotypes of vulnerability, neediness, and dependency (Granot et al., 2014), and can potentially reinforce patriarchal gender relations in the family and workplace (Lee, 2013), within our observed discourses, the criticism of cute was downplayed and subsumed under the selective resistance toward the sexualization of cuteness. In particular, while the performance of cuteness is observed by participants, these performances are not problematized or critiqued as a form of feminine infantilization. This may be because cute, as a cultural category, is part of the taken-for-granted fabric of Korean media culture – and accordingly, coded as local. In contrast, what is most problematic for participants is the construction of young women as sexualized objects of a male gaze.

There is so much sexual connotations in the way they [K-pop celebrities] dance, dress, facial expression and the lyrics they sing. Beauty is not just about the face, I feel now. It is so much more about that feeling that you send to attract the opposite gender for them to become your fan. What is even more ironic about this is that society in Korea is still quite conservative . . . (Seohyun, 22 years old)

The recent broadcast of Produce 101 [a K-pop TV show] is one prime example of [K-beauty]. The girls, who are as young as 14 come on the show to seem innocent and naïve. But they are dressed in very sexy outfits [. . .] this feeds into the ideals of cute and innocent girls who have what Koreans call ‘Ban Jun Mae ruck’. This means that they are cute and sweet on the outside, but there is a twist to them. That twist is one that is very sexual and naughty. Linking this to beauty, women are expected to have pure white skin like a child, and rosy cheeks. That being said, women wear a lot of powder on their skin to make it white. But the expectations of body shape are completely different. When they dress up, they should have a big bust and a curvy body. If they don’t, they undergo plastic surgery. (Sooyoung, 22 years old)

This ambiguous expression of beauty is interpreted by our participants as an encroachment on local Korean conservatism when it comes to the expressions of sexuality – in the sense that the sexualization norm is imposed from the outside and constitutes a disjuncture from what it means to be Korean. Even though the sexualization of age-ambiguous girl-/woman-hood is not culturally specific to Korea (Cook and Kaiser, 2004), participants readily constructed a binary distinction between Korean conservatism and Western licentiousness. In particular, Hyoyeon (23 years old) discussed the sense of sexiness as a performance mode and cultural value that is imposed from the outside: “For Western people, when they dress sexy and look sexy, it kind of feels like they want to do that, but it is different when K-pop artists do it. It feels like they are forced to do it.”

Such images of the hypersexual pander to Western stereotypes of Asia and the Orient as sites of exotic sexual fantasy (Jung, 2013; Oh, 2014). Jung (2013: 109), in this vein, illustrates how K-pop girl groups Girls’ Generation and Wonder Girls embody the “conventional China Doll stereotype [. . .] ready to serve men with their docile, cute, sexy, vulnerable and playful attitudes”. Seoulhyun (21 years old), in a similar vein, expressed strong concerns that such images reproduce outdated colonial stereotypes from the “comfort women period” which portray “our country as basically a brothel”. In these narratives, we see the strongest resistance to the sense that these representations of feminine beauty have become unrecognizable – un-Korean – as these images morph to meet the demands of the global gaze.

Scholars have discussed the problematic dialectic of girl power, a potent and contradictory expression which on the surface is an empowering re-appropriation of femininity, but on a more critical level represents the post-feminist complicity with consumerism and the commodification of women’s bodies (Elias et al., 2017; Kim, 2011). Even though hyper-sexualized cuteness represents a problematic commodification of women’s bodies on two fronts, we see how young Korean women perform the labor of selective resistance in response to these hybridized images. Although they code the problematized hyper-sexualized performances as global, in so doing they elide the problematic issues of cute and normalize this as part of the taken-for-granted fabric of local cultural values. Similar to the labor of concealment, this acculturative negotiation heightens the danger of the global and overshadows the problem of the local. This selective resistance is conditioned by a context where the Korean wave has emerged as a culturally significant platform for the exercise of soft power (Nye and Kim, 2013) and nationalism (Joo, 2011; Kim, 2011). The increasing global legitimacy of K-pop provides South Koreans with a cultural product that, despite its reproduction of localized patriarchal images of ‘cute’ women, forms a source of nationalist pride. Against this backdrop, women are expected to represent the nation in specific and highly normalized ways, as echoed by participants’ relative silence on this issue. In this way, the labor of selective resistance sustains patriarchal imagery, which is contingent on the construction of women as malleable consuming – and consumed – bodies.

‘Harmonious kaleidoscope’: the labor of compliance

A final paradox of K-beauty is the harmonious kaleidoscope, where superficial heterogeneity in beauty ideals masks an underlying homogeneity that emphasizes conformity to a collective norm. Despite a seeming shift toward new forms of soft subversion, as exemplified in masculinized costuming and bad girl personas, and a pastiche of diversity in the archetypes embodied by female K-pop idols, the homogeneity of K-pop celebrities’ facial and bodily features are often more striking than any illusion of variation achieved through costume and performance (Oh, 2014). As Unger (2015: 31) writes, these constitute “various but limited identities”. K-beauty has resulted in a shift to the preference of a thin body with more Western-type facial features, reflecting the elements of Western and Asian modernity. For instance, a specific facial shape has been popularized by K-pop idols in which the jawline has a ‘V’ shape, in addition to wide-set eyes, a high nose bridge, and white skin (Holliday et al., 2015). As our participants explained, K-beauty is characterized by a recognizable dominant and homogeneous “doppelganger look” (Seohyun, 22 years old).

The basic characteristics and feature of K-pop beauty are the same: small face, small nose, large eyes, small mouth, fair skin, V-shaped jaw. [. . .] Many women go to beauty clinics and get plastic surgery to make themselves fit into the characteristics of K-pop beauty. That is why if you go to those locations, you will be able to find a lot of women who either look alike [because they have gone through plastic surgery] or have bandages around their faces [recovering from plastic surgery]. This situation is to an extent that mothers ask their daughters if they want the double-eyelid surgery as a graduation gift when they are done with high school, so that they become more standardized with the concept of Korean beauty before they go to college. (Hyoyeon, 23 years old)

They [K-pop celebrities] put the bar up so high to follow [. . .] and like TV shows they make these women with great body, they say that women who have very skinny bodies have great bodies. And that is the standard of beauty. [. . .] TV shows make it look like this is what society views as beauty and they enforce onto us. (Mina, 20 years old)

As illustrated above, the homogenizing forces are not only played out on the bodies of female K-pop idols, but more importantly translate into the practices of everyday beauty. The “pervasive visualization” (Unger, 2015: 30) of superficially kaleidoscopic, yet ultimately collectively harmonious, expressions of feminine beauty translates into a high degree of standardization in everyday beauty expressions. South Korea has the highest number of plastic surgery procedures per person, with estimates of at least one in five Koreans opting for cosmetic surgery (Holliday and Elfving-Hwang, 2012). Although plastic surgery was prominent in South Korea prior to the rise of K-beauty, the “commercial uniformity” (Unger, 2015: 25) of K-pop idols has contributed to the narrowing and homogenizing of young women’s beauty ideals.

While scholars have called attention to the disciplining power of the fashion-beauty complex in other cultural contexts, this power is heightened in modern Korean society. In contrast to the social construction of beauty in Western consumer cultures as a site of individualized expression, albeit with its own logics of governmentality (Delhaye, 2006), Korean beauty practices conform to the logic of collective harmony. This, as Kim (2003) argues, resonates with neo-Confucian ideologies where females are socio-culturally constituted as subject-less bodies. In the same way that covering one’s face or rendering one’s body invisible in the public sphere was part and parcel of female social decorum in pre-modern Korea, the modification of facial and bodily features in line with K-pop mediated ideals induces a labor of harmonious compliance with collective expectations.

Nobody seems to want to stand out and be proud of their differences in Korea, because being like everyone else [the same beauty standards set by K-pop] seems to be the cultural norm. This phenomenon is evident not only in the way people do make-up, but how they dress and also how they act. [. . .] Uniformity and conformity [. . .] is the underlying cultural norm in Korea. (Seoulhyun, 21 years old)

The visible outcome of this cultural logic is that “the female bodies seen in the streets of Korea are nearly identical to the bodies depicted in media portrayals” (Kim, 2003: 107). Despite the level of discursive disquiet and criticism evidenced in the first two themes, this remarkable disconnect between discursive resistance and practical conformity underscores the regulative, homogenizing force of K-beauty. This contradiction was underscored through everyday immersion within the space of the university, where a high degree of standardization of beauty and fashion practices was observed among female students. Notwithstanding the problematic contradictions inherent in the hybridized images of K-beauty, young Korean women’s bodies are inscribed into this hegemonic beauty regime through the labor of compliance.

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.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The first two authors contributed equally to this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of the Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies at the University of Auckland (AKS-2017-OLU-2250001) to Yuri Seo, and Research Grants from Monash Business School to Angela Gracia B. Cruz.

Author biographies

Yuri Seo is a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland Business School. In his research, he focuses on issues related to how consumer behaviors, mindsets, and choices both shape and are shaped by surrounding cultural and social structures. This includes research on cultural branding, multiculturalism, and digital consumer culture.

Angela Gracia B Cruz is a senior lecturer in Marketing at Monash University. Her research is focused on theories of consumption, marketing communication, and branding at the boundaries of markets – referring to liminal market spaces where complexities, ambivalences, and transformations abound. She frequently draws on cross-disciplinary, critical, and post-structuralist modes of theorizing.

‘Ilaisaane ME Fifita is a professional teaching fellow at the University of Auckland Business School. Her research is broadly concerned with understanding the influence of culture, values and identity on consumer behaviours.

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