[KS] The 100th Yonsei-KF Korean Studies Forum (Hyuk-Rae Kim, Yonsei University)

[Renate Clasen]

The Korean Studies Program and the Korea Foundation would like to
invite you to attend the 100th Yonsei-KF Korean Studies Forum.

Title: "Screening Beauty: Plastic Surgery, Gender and Modernity in Korean Film"
Speaker: Sharon Heijin Lee, PhD candidate at University of Michigan
Date: THURSDAY, June 10
Time: 6 p.m.
Location: Room 702, New Millennium Hall, Yonsei University

No RSVP required. For directions, please refer to
http://gsis.yonsei.ac.kr/html/content.asp?code=001007.

Questions? Contact renateclasen at googlemail.com

This will be our third forum in the spring semester 2010.
We hope to see you on the 10th of June.

Sincerely,

Hyuk-Rae Kim
hyukrae at yonsei.ac.kr
Professor of Korean Studies
Graduate School of International Studies
Yonsei University

biography | Sharon Heijin Lee is a doctoral candidate at University of
Michigan’s Program in American Culture and is currently doing
dissertation research in Seoul, South Korea as a Korea Foundation
fellow and a Fulbright-Hays fellow.  Her dissertation project explores
the discursive formations of Korean women’s beauty practices in both
Seoul and Los Angeles in order to understand beauty’s relationship to
diaspora, transnationalism, neoliberalism, popular and national
culture and feminism in Korean and Korean American women’s lives.  By
doing so, she hopes to make a major contribution to scholarship that
bridges the fields of Asian and Asian American studies.

abstract | In the United States, South Korean women are pathologized
in the media as the unconscious victims of internalized racism and
self-loathing in regards to their consumer choices to undergo plastic
surgery.  Although such representations seek to make visible Korean
women’s plight, they remain blind to larger questions concerning the
intersection of beauty trends with issues of colonial modernity,
gendered nationalism and US militarization.  This paper examines how
such beauty practices are theorized and represented in Korean popular
culture, taking seriously forms of theory and expression in the arts,
specifically Korean film.  How are these practices both normalized and
critiqued through these popular cultural forms?  What do these
representations teach us about the epistemic limitations of US
discourse?  Such an analysis illustrates that beauty is not merely a
frivolous everyday concern of women but a space where larger
historical and political forces are often articulated through and onto
women’s bodies.