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Consumer Culture and Gender Identity in South Korea

Abstract This paper examines how consumer culture works as a cultural backdrop to the process of women's identity construction, reproduction, and transformation. In particular, it seeks to understand the correlation and interaction between gender identity and self-identity in women. The study, therefore, focuses attention on three aspects, first, the reinforcement of gender identity and the fostering of postmodern identity. Second, it looks at the split of gender identity as the so-called phenomenon of “neo-tribalism.” Finally, it examines the tyranny of a self-oppressive gender identity by means of which self-identity is constructed in women, by enhancing the body or what I refer to as “body making.” These points are examined through the recent phenomenon of the Korean consumer culture, comprising the commercialization of the role model of the professional housewife and postmodernism; the “Missy syndrome,” as it is called in Korea; and the craze for what I refer to as “body making.” Therefore, in this study, I seek to explore mechanisms that force women into internalizing a self-oppressive gender identity, perpetuated as a type of self-identity by consumer culture.