Introduction
If the need for beauty is commonly understood as a constraint of women’s socialisation in a patriarchal society, all individuals “aspire to enhance their appearance; it’s a universal human desire” (He et al. 2023: 1). He et al. (2023) indeed note men are now also increasingly engaging in short-to-long term beautification practices, although they generally remain stubbornly labelled feminine, or associated with homosexuality if undertaken by men. That, however, does not hold in the South Korean context, where both makeup and surgery are commonplace and largely accepted regardless of gender. Consequently, this raises questions regarding conceptions of gender in Korea and the extent to which aesthetics became a performance of it. Accordingly, it also questions how this might impact already-existing societal cleavages. This article ultimately asks: to what extent do gendered conceptions and performances of beauty and aesthetics reflect on and reinforce (gender) inequalities in South Korea?
This article starts by contextualising and defining notions of gender and performativity. That will help establish how they translate to contemporary Korean society and help locate our discussion surrounding the specificities of gender performances as intersecting with beauty. This paper then discusses how gender is performed in Korea, zooming in on makeup and aesthetic/cosmetic surgery as prevalent, often labelled gendered, phenomena amongst the Korean population. Eventually, it relates these beautification tactics as a common practice and gendered performance to broader discussions surrounding (in)equality in the country.

Gender, Performance, and Aesthetic
Butler (1988, 2015) establishes gender as a socio-cultural construct born out of the need for sexual distinction under a heteronormative patriarchal societal structure. This distinction notably rationalises the discursive opposition and perceived irreconcilability of masculinity and femininity as extensions of the binary makeup of society that heterosexuality requires (Butler 1988: 524). Butler (2015) understands gender as the “repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance” (p.45). However, in Butler's (1988) view, sex arbitrarily acts to determine one’s perceived gender, as infused with cultural but ultimately fabricated meaning (p.520). In that sense, “[gender] is real only to the extent that it is performed” (Butler 1988: 527), a reading endorsing the Foucauldian belief that identity creation is a discourse simultaneously subordinated to yet actively determining social realities. This concept of gender performativity holds that we are societally bound to adhere to behaviours reflecting our assigned identities (Butler 1988). These behaviours can be physically constraining, like hair removal as internalising patriarchal perceptions of hairs as masculine, or conversely growing a beard to affirm one’s identity as a man (Bradford et al. 2021; Pathoulas et al. 2022). The centrality of the body in this process of stylisation defined by Butler (2015) thus references links tying aesthetics with performances. Consequently, it is interesting to define how beauty contributes to performing gender as understood by Butler (1988, 2015).

Gender Performances in South Korea: the Politics and Culture of Beauty
Before industrialisation, Korea was marked by a strong patriarchal family structure defined by traditional roles of the breadwinner husband and the housewife, laying the groundwork for the historic financial and societal subordination of Korean women (Han & Choi 2023; Peng 2012). Today, however, Han and Choi (2023) highlight that women ceased “financially and psychologically rely[ing] on men’s masculinity [and] increasingly support gender equality” (p.583). Still, they fail to acknowledge that, despite this progress, Korea remains understood widely as a state with clear gender division and riddled with inequalities (Kim & Lee 2022). Moreover, as Au (2023) denotes, marriage remains majorly concerning for Koreans and, although these anxieties are shared by both genders, female experiences of singlehood account for additional patriarchal pressures and stigma. Despite progress, Korea still seems to adhere to conservative structures (Youngs 2015), but one element makes the gender question there unique and salient: the relation of its population to beauty. Here, we examine cosmetic surgery and the gradual popularisation of makeup amongst Korean men to understand how it manifests.

Makeup and Cosmetic Surgery as Performing Gender through Korean Beauty
Korean society is characterised by its prevalent culture of beauty standards and aesthetics. Today, it is indeed widely recognised that Korea is a tycoon of cosmetic surgery and care worldwide, whose defining characteristic is that it does not solely accommodate women (Au 2023; Han & Choi 2023; Holliday & Elfving-Hwang 2012). Consequently, strict male-female approaches to cosmetic surgery premised on beliefs that it is inherently feminine risk offering restricted insights on it – a criticism similarly applying to analytical East-West dichotomies (Holliday & Elfving-Hwang 2012). Holliday and Elfving-Hwang (2012) thus mobilise intersecting theories of identity to investigate engagement in surgery consumption in Korea, unveiling it as uniformly shaped by either marital aspirations or career ambitions. That traces back to the displacement of women from their home to the workplace and centres their subsequent elevation as a socio-economic class still constrained by consumer capitalism and normative Neo-Confucian ideals but enjoying increased self-determination and sexual agency (Holliday & Elfving-Hwang 2012).
A notable characteristic of male surgery in Korea has been the development of kkonminam, a new form of metrosexual masculinity which gained traction as a beauty ideal amongst the male population (Au 2023; Holliday & Elfving-Hwang 2012). The overt and increasingly popular male use of makeup in recent years echoes these claims (Han & Choi 2023). Consequently, the widespread use of beautification strategies in Korea does not appear to be discursively gendered as strongly as in the West – i.e., considered de facto feminine or queer (Han & Choi 2023; Holliday & Elfving-Hwang 2012). Conversely, one can even make the argument that said strategies are pursued in an attempt to reinforce heterosexuality, as men arguably seek aestheticisation as result of evolving perceptions of what masculinity women desire, as suggested by scholars such as Au (2023).
In Korea, men thus generally appear less concerned with traditional Western masculinities because androgynous bodies are comparatively less stigmatised in the country and regarded as desirable rather than deviant; non-traditional as opposed to un-masculine (Han & Choi 2023; Holliday & Elfving-Hwang 2012). However, they still subscribe to heteronormativity to an extent, as the popularization of beauty procedures and consumption does not amount to any sort of advancement for queer liberation, since male beauty remains determined by Korean women’s evolving wants (Au, 2023). In Korea, being beautiful ultimately remains gendered as strengthening identity or enacting sexual liberation (Holliday & Elfving-Hwang 2012), but said identity does not always subscribe to traditional Western understandings of what makes the body feminine or masculine. This is the result of complex relations between gender, race, and class, but also the manifestation of increasing anxieties born out of a hyper capitalistic patriarchal system, making both men and women increasingly vulnerable to centring aesthetic in their navigating of contemporary Korean society (Au 2023; Holliday & Elfving-Hwang 2012).

Impacts
The pervasiveness of cosmetic enhancements in Korea creates a general beauty-centric culture that feeds into capitalist and consumerist patterns. Han and Choi (2023) even explicitly suggest that brands might start developing their products to adapt to men’s needs. Additionally, their argument that the spread of women’s progressive views on gender might determine increases in makeup usage amongst men (Han & Choi 2023: 584) does not establish a causal link where men’s performance of gender is the source of this evolution. Indeed, Han and Choi (2023) demonstrate that increased consciousness regarding gender roles has made women more prone to tolerate, and even encourage, makeup usage amongst men. Consequently, as women increasingly reconfigure their approach to gender equality in Korea, they open a space in which men are empowered to use makeup (Han & Choi 2023). This, however, does not necessarily ascribe makeup usage amongst men any degree of tangible subversiveness, as it manifests more as a consequence to women’s already-shifting positions. More specifically, this shift seems derived from their elevation as a socio-economic, working class (Han & Choi 2023). Consequently, the rise of a new form of masculinity appears to evolve parallelly to gender equality more than producing it (Han & Choi 2023; Holliday & Elfving-Hwang 2012).
Moreover, one should remember that surgery and makeup do not necessarily equate greater inclusivity and instead create a distinctive, uniform desired look not inherently challenging ethno-centric, still-gendered beauty standards (Holliday & Elfving-Hwang 2012). Indeed, while this article did not have the opportunity to investigate and hence does not cover the societal perceptions of individuals whose identities challenge traditional binary understandings of sex and gender further, it is important to denote that, if appearances of androgyny are considered desirable, this might, however, not apply to queerness. A testimony appearing in Au (2023), in which the interviewee discusses the emergence of the kkonminam by specifying that he “[is] not gay. It’s just about being good-looking” (p.82) notably highlights it.
Finally, one should note surgery is only seen as desirable to the extent it can go unnoticed, which relates back to the celebrating of ethno-centric features but also the notion that surgery specifically becomes a class matter of who can afford the best surgeons (Au 2023; Holliday & Elfving-Hwang 2012). Moreover, “the pressure to purchase cosmetic surgery to resolve cultural and economic anxieties [can precipitate] the decision to divert precious financial resources from attaining other human rights, like education” (Au 2023: 88), hence maintaining lower classes in a state of financial subordination. Consequently, surgery then specifically becomes a performance parasitised by yet reinforcing dynamics of class inequality (Au 2023).

Conclusion
This article has investigated how Korean gendered conceptions and performances of beauty reflect on and reinforce gender inequalities. It found that, in Korea, makeup and surgery serve as performances transgressing boundaries of traditional Western masculinity and femininity and result from a complex combination of evolving gender roles, capitalistic configurations, and culture of appearances shaped by contemporary anxieties surrounding marriage and work. Ultimately, South Korea’s approach to performing gender through beautification practices is unique in its understanding of beauty as desirable beyond fixed categorisation of what can or should be classified as either masculine or feminine. Accordingly, performing gender evolves parallelly to performing beauty, and whether subjects emulate masculinity or femininity does not strongly affect how this performance manifests itself, with gendered distinctions not strongly marked or necessarily desirable.
While the flexibility of gender expression through beauty in Korea highlights a certain degree of tolerance amongst its population, this article still highlights prominent ramifications of centring beauty in Korean gender performing. Upon investigation, it identifies three consequences: the normalisation of cosmetic care as feeding capitalistic cultures of consumerism, the uniformisation of bodies through beautification tactics without compromising ideals of natural Korean beauty, and the deepening socio-economic cleavages determining access to said tactics. Consequently, this article found that assessing causal links between gender equality consolidation and performances through beauty in Korea is tricky, as it parallelly reinforces marginalisation following alternative axes of oppression. Alternatively, it concludes that it is rising gender equality that actively serves to shape contemporary conceptualisation of Korean masculinity and performances, and that this might ultimately be the most defining aspect of what ties gender and aesthetic in South Korea. 


Editor: Pawel Ostern

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