Please register here, and see here for more details.
Here’s a quick summary from the latter:
[Dr. So-Rim Lee from the University of Pennsylvania] will discuss remedy (koch’ida), a term she uses to refer to changing one’s appearance through medical interventions—including plastic surgery, cosmetic injections, among others—to make life better. Remedy is much broader than medical discourse alone; Lee’s current book project contends that remedy is a critical cultural ethos, a teleological narrative, a social performance of subjectivity, and a material praxis of embodiment where state biopolitics and individual desire for belonging are inextricably entangled. From the postwar 1950s to the 1970s, remedying the body primarily signified rehabilitating disabled bodies; its grammar was integral to the narrative of nation-building under developmental dictatorship by way of remaking a healthy, re/productive national body marked by continued economic development. However, with the emergence of middle-class consumer culture and rapidly changing mass mediascape in the 1980s-1990s, remedying the body through plastic surgery became normalized in various print media as a gendered, individualized, and hyper-visible consumption practice undertaken by women for upward mobility. Perusing teen pictorials, feminist magazines, newspapers, and films, this work-in-progress talk explores how the consumerist discourse of remedy in post-authoritarian South Korea was keenly entwined with the discursive marginalization of different yet intersecting strata of women—specifically, housewives and working-class young women/teens.
See you there!
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
(Also available as an in-person lecture at 6PM, Monday, November 13 at The Institute of Fine Arts, 1 East 78th Street, New York.)
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes. Image source (cropped): NYU The Institute of Fine Arts newsletter. NSFW images follow.
For the sake of shorter, more impactful and easy-to-remember announcements, I’m posting about notices about webinars and virtual lectures (that I’m able to attend) separately from now on.
Sorry that this one comes so last minute, but as far as I know registration for the webinar is available right up until the event itself:
“As part of the Institute of Fine Arts’ (Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, X/Twitter) ongoing tradition of inviting contemporary artists to speak about their practices in the Duke House Lecture Hall, this year’s Artists at the Institute Lecture Series invites four artists who explore the body as a site of confrontation. The body is continuously subjected to political, social, and aesthetic judgments both within and outside of the art historical canon. Whether it be through the ongoing battle with reproductive rights or the modification of the body in digital and social media, this phenomena proves to be omnipresent. Contemporary artists are constantly grappling with conceptions of corporeality, and each artist brings a diverse approach to what this means to them. This year’s series is committed to uplifting the voices of women working in representational practices across a range of media, styles, and backgrounds. Through feminist, cross-cultural, and art historical methods, these artists challenge the contours of corporeal form, transcending the limitations and restrictions that have bound the female body to the canonical canvas, and imagining how such liberation might transform aesthetics.”
Sources: NYU Institute of Fine Arts Instagram & Newsletter.
“For our second installment of Artists at the Institute, Visions of Corporeality, lecture series we are excited to welcome Misha Japanwala. Misha Japanwala (b. 1995, London, England and raised in Karachi, Pakistan) is a Pakistani artist and fashion designer, whose work is rooted in the rejection and deconstruction of shame attached to one’s body, and discussion of themes such as bodily autonomy, gender based violence, moral policing, sexuality and censorship.” (Instagram, homepage.)
“In our second installment of this series, Misha will touch upon what it means to be a Pakistani woman familiar with the historical objectification, commodification and control exerted on marginalized bodies by societies and systems enveloped in patriarchy.”
And as a reward for those you still reading, please click here to register for the next virtual lecture I’ll be announcing tomorrow: “Remedy, Mobility, and the Feminized Consumption of Beauty in Post-Authoritarian South Korea,” a virtual talk featuring So-Rim Lee from the University of Pennsylvania, and presented by the Korean Studies Research Network. In South Korean time, that event will be on Thursday, November 16, again at 8am.
Less than 20 years ago, Korean women could get assaulted for publicly smoking. Less than 2 days ago, a short-haired woman in Jinju did get assaulted for the same, real reason—openly defying restrictive gender norms.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes. Image sources (adapted): @TheKpopProf on X/Twitter and @cottonbro at Pexels.
An academic friend has asked for help for her students, who are having trouble finding participants for surveys they need to conduct as part of their coursework.
If you’re eligible, both surveys are completely anonymous, and each should just take just a few minutes to complete.
The first is about how women feel about the way women and young girls are portrayed in anime/hentai. Your nationality is not important, but it is open to women and non-binary participants only.
The second is about smoking habits and perceptions of men and women smoking in Korea, and is open to all Korean smokers, although Korean ability is not required.
Alas, I don’t think I’ve written anything much at all about anime. But back between 2010-2013, I did write the long series below about the gender politics of smoking in Korea, prompted by an incident in the news about a young woman getting physically attacked on the street for openly doing so. So I can certainly understand what prompted the line of questioning in that survey, and am very interested in learning from the students about how much things have changed in the last 10 years.
Fortunately, cases of women getting assaulted in Korea for smoking now seem like ancient history. But then it was never really about smoking, was it? The real reason female smokers were assaulted back then was for openly defying restrictive gender norms and roles. And, sadly, as more and more women are brave enough to do so in other aspects of Korean social life, it seems the rates of assault against them are only increasing in response. Most recently, with a woman in Jinju this week being attacked for having short hair.
I really didn’t intend to sound so cynical. And I’m not—preventing such crimes starts with undermining the attitudes behind them, and determining how prevalent they are helps towards that. So, thanks in advance for your help with the surveys, and please feel free to share them with your networks!
Is contemporary Korean dance always as hypnotic as this? Have I been wholly misjudging it all these years?
Actually, if you’re at all knowledgeable, please reserve your answers for the comments. Better that most readers approach the video with no preconceptions like I did, puzzled at the notification from an unfamiliar YouTube channel on my phone. Better still, that first they turn off the lights, get close to their screens, plug in their headphones or ear buds, are slightly sleepy, drunk, or high…and be ready for their jaws to hit the floor:
The choreographer and performer is Jinyeob Cha (차진엽) founder of Collective A, an interdisciplinary dance performance group, and who is probably best known for having been the director of the choreography for the opening and closing ceremony of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games. But the reason I personally was subscribed to her channel was because in March 2022, London Korea Links wrote about her and Collective A’s performance there of “MIIN: Body to Body,” in which Cha:
“…examines perceptions of beauty and femininity beyond societal norms and traditions.”
“Accompanied by a hypnotic soundscape created by two acclaimed musicians based in Seoul, Eun-yong Sim, from Korean Avant-rock band Jambinai, and haihm, an electronic musician, six female dancers flit between precise, discreet, feminine poses and aggressive, erratic movements to embody all aspects of a woman.”
“Miin (미인) is a Korean word meaning ‘beautiful person’, but is more often used as a synonym for ‘beautiful woman’. This work challenges the meaning of ‘beauty’ and encourages women to embrace their bodies as they are without succumbing to unrealistic expectations.”
She’d slipped my mind though, because this was the first upload on her channel in a year. There seems to be little information specifically about the “원형하는 몸: round1” (“Body Go-round: round 1”) performance in English available too (or at least that I could find), which is surprising because it was actually first performed in 2021. What I could find then, was a quick explanation in the blurb to another UK performance in September 2022, that explained it was:
“…a genre-bending, mixed reality, dance spectacle inspired by the process of melting to evaporation in the water cycle.”
“Looming above the stage, a giant ice formation slowly melts as performers respond to the process of circulation and transition through dance. Each drop shaping the sound and visual landscape of the stage influences the interaction of each body in the space.”
And in Korean, a blurb from the tumblbug page used to raise funds for it, that at least hints at feminist themes:
차진엽 작업의 중심은 한 인간으로서의 인간성, 여성으로서의 여성성을 둘러싼 몸의 안과 밖을 연결하기 위해 몸을 둘러싸고 있는 세상에 관심을 두며, 몸/몸짓 을 통해 끊임없이 존재에 대해 질문한다. 이는 곧 예술행위를 통해 자기 자신의 본질적 가치를 찾아가는 여정이며 collective A의 궁극적인 모토이다.
The center of Cha Jin-yeop’s work focuses on the world surrounding the body in order to connect the inside and outside of the body surrounding humanity as a human being and femininity as a woman, and constantly questions existence through body/gesture. This is a journey to discover one’s own intrinsic value through artistic activities and is the ultimate motto of collective A.
And finally, a in-depth making-of video on her channel, in which she likely expands on those themes at some point:
Only “likely” though, because of her background (so…very likely!), and because I haven’t had the chance to watch myself yet sorry—powerpoints for tomorrow’s lectures beckon. But please do let me know if you’re interested but can’t speak Korean, and I’ll watch properly and translate the relevant segments as soon as I can. (I’m interested too!)
In the meantime, why not check out more of her performances on her YouTube channel? ;)
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
Today I learned that Vitamin-D, produced in the skin through exposure to sunlight, is vital for staving off depression. But various lifestyle and physiological changes complicate the effects of supplements on postmenopausal women, let alone applying recommendations from studies based on men.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes. Photo by Alonso Reyes on Unsplash.
Oh, the photo? Well, free-to-use images of Korean women avoiding the sun seem surprisingly hard to come by. Which is ironic, considering how many I can see doing so at I type this, assiduously touching up their SPF makeup as they wait for the crosswalk lights. (My apartment overlooks a busy intersection.) Some will even spend 1-2 minutes fiddling with awkward parasols at each side of the road too, all for the sake of avoiding 10 seconds of sun exposure as they cross it.
Skincare as self-care starts with skin protection and preventative maintenance. Koreans take sunscreen more seriously than do people in any other place I’ve ever been on earth. “The people of the entire nation wear sunscreen all year round with a devotion bordering on religious fervor,” writes Korean dermatologist Hae Shin Chung. On average, 90 per¬cent of Korean women and 56 percent of men apply sun¬screen at all times, compared to the 30 percent of women and 14 percent of men who wear sunscreen in the United States. Chung came to the United States to advance her experience specifically because it’s rare to encounter skin cancer patients in Korea. In the U.S., skincare—compared to makeup or haircare—accounts for 20 percent of the beauty market; in Korea, it’s 50 percent of the market. And prevention—in the form of sunscreen and its various form factors—is the biggest segment.
It’s not unusual to see men and women carry sun umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun on bright days. Staying out of direct sunlight is culturally and even governmentally supported. During the muggy, sun-drenched summers in Seoul, the city puts up giant umbrellas or erects sun shade sails over the sidewalks at intersections, helping block pedestrians from being in the sun while awaiting a traffic light change. Going to outdoor pools felt like entering a weird vortex, because no one seemed to wear swimsuits to swim. Koreans covered their bodies by wearing rash guards as swimsuits, sometimes with full-length pants, giant sun visors, and a thick coating of pasty white sunscreen.
So, when my image search led me to a Korean model looking just fabulous in the Mexican sun instead, I didn’t need to think twice. Less obviously incongruous though, is that my clickbait statistic actually comes from 2006 (sorry), which my 17 year-old daughter especially likes to remind me wasn’t “just a few years ago.” Yet a whole decade later, it didn’t seem out of place to the authors of the source I actually found it from. And in 2021 too, another study found Vitamin D deficiencies in a very similar 89% of 20-45 year-old Korean, female nurses specifically. I’ll wager that today then, although one or two other countries may well have surpassed Korea in terms of female vitamin-D deficiency rates, not least because the Korean Wave has been so successful in promoting Korean beauty ideals overseas, that unfortunately Korea will almost definitely remain in the top 3. (Photo, right: Movie Review: Our Body/아워 바디, 2019.)
Still, until the 2023 article “The Difference between Serum Vitamin D Level and Depressive Symptoms in Korean Adult Women before and after Menopause: The 5th (2010–2012) Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey” by Sumi Lee et. al. (Korean J Health Promot 2023;23(1):18-27) randomly appeared in my feeds, the link between vitamin-D levels and depression hadn’t really registered, frankly. (Because, yes, there may well be 1.8x more female than male patients being treated for it in Korea at the moment—but there’s many, good, non vitamin-D related reasons for that.)
Open-access, and just 10 pages, I highly encourage interested readers to download the article for yourself. But for those of you too busy to, I’ll pass on the most relevant passages:
When dividing all adult women based on their menopausal status, premenopausal women tended to show decreased rates of depressive symptoms experience as serum vitamin D levels increased; however, it was not the same case in postmenopausal women. After confirming this trend, all female participants were divided into two groups; and the relationship between serum vitamin D concentration and experience of depressive symptoms was analyzed using multivariate logistic regression.
As a result, in premenopausal women, the increase in serum vitamin D was associated with the reduced prevalence of depressive symptoms. On the contrary, in postmenopausal women, the increase in serum vitamin D was associated with the increased prevalence of depressive symptoms….
This division is significant and useful because it’s the first such age-differentiated study of its kind of Korean women. And, alluding to my mention of men in the lede, seeing how of course that division is not experienced by them (who just show a direct, inverse relationship between vitamin-D and depression symptoms, across all age levels), this points to a much narrower applicability of studies of men than researchers may have previously realized.
As for possible explanations of the division, the authors mention the wide variety of effects of decreased estrogen levels among older women, including a decreased ability to produce vitamin-D:
Postmenopausal women show a major characteristic of decreased estrogen, which causes 80% of women to undergo physical, hormonal and mental changes. Several studies have shown that estrogen is strongly related to the pathogenesis of mental illness, including emotion and behavior control especially in older women, when they reach menopause….
Decrease in estrogen is also related to a decrease in serum vitamin D. During menopause, women experience thinner skin and lower ability to produce vitamin-D, in addition to reduced intestinal absorption of vitamin D and decreased vitamin D hydroxylation in the liver and kidneys. Vitamin-D reportedly reduces depressive symptoms in postmenopausal women by controlling the concentration of the neurotransmitter, serotonin, which increases the production of sex hormones and reduces the frequency of depression-associated receptors, within the pituitary gland in the brain….
The combinations of various supplements used to counter those further complicate matters. Including—I think implied—an excess of vitamin-D:
Postmenopausal women with low serum vitamin D may have experienced related symptoms, which could have increased the use of dietary supplements, including vitamin-D, or treatments for depression. This tendency may have disturbed the association between serum vitamin-D concentration and depressive symptoms, and eventually showed a different trend in premenopausal women.
Finally, now in my late-40s myself, I can confirm that the changes my own body is undergoing are no joke (photo, right, by Michael Amadeus on Unsplash). But Korean society’s negative judgments and stereotypes about my particular demographic group pale compared to those reserved for ajumma, which have a palpable effect on their levels of depression:
Postmenopausal women had a higher mean age; therefore, they had a high percentage of underlying chronic diseases, and were likely to belong to low-activity groups. Depressive symptoms are subjective problems affected by various physical and social factors, which can cause emotional instability combined with stress of chronic diseases, lack of confidence due to social and environmental changes, and reduced activity due to physical changes. These conditions in postmenopausal women were found to affect the rate of depression experience and have a greater impact than serum vitamin D concentration, resulting in different results from other groups in postmenopausal women. In this study, we tried to adjust for these factors by using social characteristics, underlying chronic disease and exercise and activity data.
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes.
The Grand Narrative 