Politics of Tanning: Overdetermining Discourse on Skin Color, Race, and Gender in South Korea

Abstract

This dissertation explores the ways in which the Western and inter-Asian values of beauty and body ideals influence South Korean women’s consumption and performance of artificial tanning. Since 2019, there has been growing prevalence of tanned bodies in South Korean media. Alongside its rising popularity, various issues have emerged, including new concerns about skin health as well as the associated stigma with sexualized gender images, particularly affecting women in South Korea. In this context, this study takes a nuanced and layered approach by considering regionally and locally specific sociocultural factors to add nuances to our understanding of the interest in seeking and desiring dark(er) skin for aesthetic purposes in South Korea. I argue that Western and Asian value systems overdetermine the meanings of women’s artificially tanned skin in South Korea due to various structural and ideological forces such as including neoliberalism, multiculturalism, colorism, inter-Asian hierarchy, and transnational Asian Americanness. To map the discursive configuration of tanning performance in South Korea, this study explores various cultural sites, including YouTube as a media space, tanning salons as a material site, and Korean women’s personal narratives as a rhetorical venue for generating meanings about darkness in South Korea. Within these different sites of investigation, I employ multiple qualitative research methods, such as critical textual analysis, multimodal critical discourse analysis, techno-visual analysis, and in-depth interviews. When exploring multiple discursive sites, I keep in mind two research inquiries for this project: What kind of discourse about race, gender, nationality, and class are constructed on and around tanning beauty performance in South Korea? Do these discourses of tanning performance in South Korea reproduce, negotiate, or challenge racialized and gendered scripts of Blackness/darkness within and beyond South Korean contexts? and if so, how? Seeking answers to these questions, I do not intend to determine, fix, and repeat Westernphillic readings of artificial tanning performance by looking at those bodies through the binary lens of aspirational Whiteness and anti-Blackness. Instead, by looking at both global, regional, and local structural layers, I propose that skin-color should be examined as a signifier that is not situated in between racial categories but moves along with them to reconstruct perceptions of race and racism in South Korea. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to introduce different, alternative, and sometimes resistive cultural narratives of Korean women to Western critical cultural and postcolonial feminist scholars. These narratives finally interrupt dominant discourses of Whiteness/lightness, speaking against histories of racialization and understanding of Blackness/darkness in South Korea.