Performing the Self: Cosmetic Surgery and the Political Economy of Beauty in Korea

This dissertation construes cosmetic surgery as a mode of performing oneself in contemporary South Korea. Reimagining beauty as an incessant doing, partaking, and embodying oneself that is more "becoming" than "being, " I use cosmetic surgery as its performative measure to discuss the political economy of neoliberal self-management within the Korean media, popular culture, and everyday life. With case studies from reality television, performance art, photography, and K-pop, I locate the representational discourse of beauty as precariously imbricated within the social fabric interwoven by neoliberal, patriarchal, and heteronormative systems of power. Interdisciplinary in nature, this project renders the performance of beauty as an ever-shifting construct of subjectivity determined by race, gender, and sexuality. In the process of interrogating what lies at stake for not only the individual subject but for all parties partaking in the Korean cosmetic surgery industry, I hope to destabilize the rhetorical devices that choreograph, construct, and negotiate a particular image of Koreanness.