The Corporeality of International Relations: Racial Aesthetics and Embodiment in the “Korean Beauty” Project.

This paper argues that the emergence of “Korean Beauty”, a cosmetic surgery/fashion trend which seemingly incorporates a ‘white’ aesthetic into an idealized representation of Korean national corporeality, can serve as a site for critiquing and complicating the racial authority of international relations. Interpreted as an aesthetic regime, “Korean Beauty” has been commercialized over the last decade across Korea and Asia through popular culture exports like television dramas, films, beauty products, and more heavy-handed phenomenon like cosmetic surgery tourism. The popularization of “Korean Beauty” has generated a great deal of industry and desire around various “whitening” cosmetic procedures, clothing lines, dietary and dating regimes and, in broader terms, transitions Korean identity into grander narratives of middle-upper class “cosmopolitan” living, individual happiness, and the virtues of “modern” consumption. At the same time, the celebration of “Korean Beauty” remains firmly ensconced within the discursive confines of a staunch post-colonial nationalism that interprets the globalization and popularization of Korean cultural representations/products as an indicator of successful national competition and developmental progress. Adding to this, “Korean Beauty” makes claims to a regionalist politics, in which it seeks to unite an imagined ‘Asia’ through cultural representations alternative to the United States and Europe. In short, the goal of “Korean Beauty” is not only to represent ‘the Korean people’ as ‘new and improved’ in Korea’s own reflexive national gaze, but, following Leo Ching’s theorization of Japan, presumes to function as a cultural authority and model of emulation for ‘the rest’ of Asia in contradistinction to the ‘West’.Mobilizing Anne McClintock’s critique on the premature and obfuscatory celebration of the “post” in postcolonial studies, this paper attends to the signs and implications of an emerging Korean exceptionalism as postcolonial reason. This exceptionalism enacts postcoloniality as international relations with a context that does not employ the common first-third world dialectic, and which complicates theorizations of “hybridity” and “mimicry.” The goal is to advance a discussion on neo- and comparative colonialisms, which does not assume “a repeat performance of colonialism” and which requires “more complex terms of and analyses of alternative times, histories and causalities…to deal with complexities that cannot be served under the single rubric of postcolonialism” (McClintock, 1995). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]