The Violence of Beauty: Relating plastic surgery prevalence in South Korea to violent developmental histories

By Chloe Elizabeth Palmer

Let us imagine someone is describing plastic surgery to you without context. What words might they use?

'A painful act that violates skin and flesh.'

'Executed with knives, scalpels and saws, leaving scars and deformities that can take months to heal.'

'Occurring on a scale that totals hundreds of thousands per year.'

Pictured in this way, the violent connotations of procedures are suddenly clear - lacking the mitigatory spell that a beautiful façade casts. Of course, this image misses an important ingredient: consent. When an arguably violent act is controlled and agreed to, does it disassociate itself from violence as a result? The answer to this is equivocal, relying upon each individual’s personal interpretation of violence. However, while the link between the physical act of plastic surgery and violence might be the most naturally recognisable, the intersection between plastic surgery and deep-rooted, structural violence is perhaps less overt.

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The fact that plastic surgery has almost become quotidian within South Korea is well-documented. Various media outlets have labelled it the plastic surgery capital of the world, with multiple reports revealing the extent to which cosmetic procedures have become a common cultural practice – in 2015, Gallup Korea found that, between the ages of 19-29, around one in three women had undergone cosmetic surgery. It is unsurprising, then, that much plastic surgery speculation has been applied to South Korea in particular. In 1991, Kathryn Morgan identified plastic surgery as a tool of the patriarchy that colonises the female form. Succeeding this, most analyses have stemmed from a feminist framework that positions women as victims of a widespread patriarchal ideology that exerts an insidiously violent form of control, convincing women to undergo bodily alterations in service of the male gaze.

Indeed, some argue that South Korea’s dominant patriarchal landscape greatly influenced the country’s late industrial development, reinforcing a form of structural violence against women that relegated them to a subordinate position within a neo-Confucian society. Its pertinence during the country’s crucial years of initial development has arguably stretched to encompass every aspect of South Korean society, shaping the country’s bedrock and moulding generations of women to believe that worth and power lies mostly in the way that men perceive them. Today, Korean feminists are protesting against the residing cultural violence against women that they feel is embodied through plastic surgery, with criticisms even beginning to enter mainstream literature. Here, authors draw attention to the similarities between the after-effects of plastic surgery and violent attacks through graphic descriptions: “I could see the wounds weeping as the skin was exposed … She looked like a burn victim,” (Dusapin 2016). This perspective fuses the physical dimensions typically associated with violence with an emphasis on the myriad and continuing forms structural violence can undertake as it manifests itself in the pillars of society without war or physical conflict (Rangelov and Kaldor 2012).

However, the failure of feminist theory to adequately explain further nuances, such as the growing abundance of men who are also going under the knife, has led to more complex investigations, which lay bare further intersections between plastic surgery and the violent undercurrent of certain developmental ideologies. One of the most prominent theories identifies plastic surgery as a corollary of white Western cultural influence and imperialism. Under this view, cosmetic procedures reinforce racist ideals that frame white, Eurocentric features as universally superior, with proponents using the popularity of double eyelid surgeries as evidence of the Korean desire to possess ‘western’ characteristics. In this way, the industrialisation of the South Korean plastic surgery industry feeds into the systematic erasure of alternative cultural identities in favour of a Western ideal – an extension of early colonial practices that continue to penetrate global society. Through its links with Western colonialism, a process carved through tremendous violence and enforced cultural erasure, plastic surgery is similarly linked to those same mechanisms of violence and coercion – critics have identified plastic surgery as a branch of neo-colonialism, which has in turn been described a structural continuation of the violence exerted by Western colonialism (Schuller 2009).

Some argue that this view fails to consider alternative influences and internal processes. While the previous two ideas position cosmetic surgery as a tool of two forms of structural violence, the last inverts this narrative to identify it as an active mode of resistance against Japanese colonialism, which extended across the years 1910-45. At the close of WWII, Japanese occupation ended, but it is suggested that resentment to Japanese cultures and identities penetrated the post-colonial period, leading to a Korean desire to emphasise their features to distinguish themselves from the Japanese. Under this view, plastic surgery is co-opted as a method through which Koreans can physically and forcefully reject foreign influences and reassert a sense of nationhood by accentuating features they see as conventionally Korean. In this sense, histories of violence and war are encapsulated within cosmetic surgery and entangled with identity politics. Through this act, the violence of war is translated into a non-war violence that is nonetheless equally significant in its resistance and instrumental in the formation of a sense of nationhood – an idea that once again highlights the malleability of violence, and its ability to embed itself in a country’s development through diverse forms (Rangelov and Kaldor 2012).

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Whether they complement or contrast with each other, these insights all support the notion of beauty as a resource that is extracted through structurally violent means. Furthermore, each intersectional insight dives beyond the aesthetic veneer that cosmetic surgery often creates to reveal a concealed foundation of both physically and subtly violent practices that were significant in South Korea’s development. Through each theory, the interconnection between plastic surgery and violent developmental processes becomes increasingly apparent – a prime example of the way imperfect origins can be instrumental in forming normalised practices and can become hidden beneath a pristine façade. Beauty is violent.

Works Cited

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Balanescu, M., (2020). 'A coldness that masks a burning rage': South Korea's female writers rise up.’ The Guardian, 23 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/23/south-korea-female-writers-rise-up-cho-nam-joo [Accessed Nov 2020

Dusapin, E., (2020). Winter in Sokcho. Daunt Books.

Ha, Y., (2019). ‘How double eyelid surgery has become a rite of passage for many south korean youths.’ Vice I-D, 03 April. Available at: https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/8xyzag/double-eyelid-rite-of-passage-korea-beauty [Accessed Nov 2020].

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Rangelov, I. and Kaldor, M., (2012). Persistent conflict. Conflict, Security & Development, 12(3), pp.193-199.

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