Beyoncé, Bloodlines, and Globalization

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I have a confession to make: since last month I’ve been sneaking into bookstores under cover of darkness, snapping up various editions of CéCi (쎄씨), Jubu Life (주부생활),Vogue, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Maxim, and so on, trying to get a feel for which ones I’ll use to conduct my own study of the way gender roles are portrayed in their advertisements. True, sometimes I do get some odd looks from the proprietors, arriving as I do close to their closing time (when I get off work) with a backpack for the bulky, mostly women’s magazines I’m buying…but when did that ever stop a visionary?

After a lot of heavy lifting back home then, I’m increasingly thinking that my own study will have to be broadly similar to that of Oh and Frith’s comparing those in Korean women’s magazines with Korean editions of Western ones, albeit with much more attention paid to the race of the models as explained in the previous post. It’s only with the greatest reluctance that I’ve abandoned the idea of comparing men’s magazines too (they’re much thinner), but then Korea seems to lack any domestic equivalents of “Lad’s mags” unfortunately, or at least the general ones which would be the women’s magazines’ closest equivalents.

I’m kicking myself for not have chosen Elle though (although who knows, it may be in the backpack somewhere), for I would have liked to have known if this L′oréal advertisement with Beyoncé in last month’s US edition was reprinted here too:

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Now, I may be a little out of touch with my US entertainment news, but I could have sworn that Beyoncé’s skin color was somewhat darker than that:

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Clearly the first advertisement was heavily photoshopped, although L′oréal deny it. While photoshopping a model beyond all recognition is in itself nothing new, rendering someone with an African-American father and a Creole mother into a Caucasian clone of herself certainly is, especially in such a racially-charged environment as the US; indeed, the contrast is easily visible even with L′oréal’s own previous advertisements with her. Hence the resulting furor in the US over the advertisement was arguably justified (if somewhat predictable), and you can read more about that here, here or here if you’re interested, or alternatively here if you’d prefer a short video summary.

But what does this have to do with Korea?

Well, nothing on the face of it (no pun intended), although naturally I think I can be forgiven for passing on something at least advertising if not strictly Korea-related. But then it is related in the context of recent posts, primarily because while if the L′oréal advertisement was a one-off then I wouldn’t be writing about it now, it did remind me of something that I mentioned with relation to Vogue in this post, but didn’t highlight enough: the fact that despite it’s reputation for ethnic diversity, the US modeling and fashion industries themselves are actually heavily biased in favor of Caucasian models. Consider this explanation for that:

Agents blame designers for the current state of affairs. Designers insist agents send them nothing but skinny blonds. Magazine editors bemoan the lack of black women with the ineffable attributes necessary to put across the looks of a given season.

The current taste in models is for blank-featured “androids,” whose looks don’t offer much competition to the clothes, pointed out James Scully, a seasoned agent who made his mark casting the richly diverse Gucci shows in the heyday of Tom Ford. In today’s climate, it is far more difficult to promote a black woman than her white counterpart.

“You want to sell the model on the basis of her beauty, not her race,” said Kyle Hagler, an agent at IMG. Yet when he sends models out on casting calls based on what he terms a “beauty perspective,” omitting any mention to potential clients of race, “You always get a call back saying, ‘You didn’t tell me she was black.’” (My emphasis).

Sound familiar? Recall why you see so few Korean lingerie models here:

The main reason is the body types of foreign models. They’re tall and their skin is white and clean. Above all, they have glamorous figures which let them effectively show off the underwear. With well-developed chests and bottoms, they have a sexual magnetism that stimulates the interest of women consumers. Underwear manufacturers and home shopping programs also choose foreign models. And with no aversion to being exposed, they are willing to strike daring poses without feeling it to be too much. (My emphasis)

As I discussed here, I beg to differ on the claim that Korean women lack glamorous figures that don’t look good in lingerie. But with Koreans’ preferences for Caucasians in women’s magazines’ advertisements in particular being well known (sometimes they even outnumber Koreans), then I wondered where exactly the advertisement with Beyoncé would fit in to Korean consumers’ notions of race if it indeed it was published in the Korean edition of Elle. What do Koreans know about her? Do they know that she is actually, well, Black? While there obviously wouldn’t be the same sense of outrage about the advertisement as there was in the US, would Koreans still be angered at being duped by L′oréal as it were? Or would they not mind, perhaps finding the change acceptable and even preferable?

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Questions to pose my Korean friends, as although I will look for Korean language articles on L′oréal’s faux pas, I suspect that it would be such a non-issue here that they would do little more than pass on the basic details. In the meantime though, the advertisement did serve to reaffirm to me the need to study and understand the role of international magazines in globablizing and/or Westernizing the Korean advertising industry as a whole.

Why? Well not for a moment because I’m implying that Koreans are passive, unthinking recipients of Western notions of race and sexuality and so on, and in fact I have repeatedly pointed out the exact opposite, most recently in the overwhelmingly domestic origins of metrosexual notions of Korean male beauty, better known as the “Flower Men” (꽃미남) phenomenon here. Moreover, Korea has definitely has its own century-old notions of “bloodlines” and race that somewhat incongruously place both Caucasians and Koreans on a pinnacle, and which any parent of a mixed-race baby and/or anybody not belonging to either of those groups can readily confirm still have very strong influences on Korean society today. For the definitive guide to that subject I highly recommend reading Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, And Legacy (2006) by Gi-Wook Shin, the conclusion to which you can read online here, and Michael Hurt has also done some work on the practical mechanisms by which Korean children learn their stereoypes of Africans.

But no, despite that legacy, the reason is more my belated recognition that Korea is not exactly immune to Western influences either, and if notions of race in the Western media – the global norm – that arrive in Korea via those magazines still bear little evidence of Western countries’ ethnic diversity in 2008, is it any surprise that Koreans, manifestly lacking that diversity themselves, would also subscribe to it? If not always with actual Caucasians used as models, then at least with preferences for light skins?

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Certainly Koreans still have issues with race when they don’t find themselves attractive enough for their own advertisements, but still, in a sense they can’t entirely be blamed for having Caucasian ideals of women’s beauty: indeed, very few countries don’t. What I’ve personally learned from the L′oréal advertisement then, is that although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I have overemphasized the effects of the uniquely the Korean origins of those, I have at the very least concentrated my attention on them to the exclusion of other aspects. It’s high time that I stepped back and started looking at the forest rather than just the trees.

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