This article aims to understand how young Korean women respond to the changing ideals of K-beauty, a form of gender imagery embodied by Korean pop celebrities, when such ideals become exported as global cultural products. The findings reveal that K-beauty is characterized by three paradoxical themes: manufactured naturalness, hyper-sexualized cuteness, and the ‘harmonious kaleidoscope’. When we unravel these paradoxes further, we observe that they provoke unsettlement and ambivalence among young Korean women, who shed light on the acculturative labors of concealment, selective resistance, and compliance that permeate the field of K-beauty. We argue that through these new layers of women’s work, the paradoxes in beauty are re-domesticated, the globalizing Western dictates are brought into alignment with neo-Confucian cultural ideology, and a new hybridized hegemonic regime of feminine beauty becomes established.

中文翻译：

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文化全球化与韩国年轻女性的适应劳动：K美作为霸权杂交

本文旨在了解当年轻的韩国女性作为全球文化产品出口时，韩国年轻女性如何应对不断变化的K-beauty理想，这是韩国流行名人所体现的一种性别形象。研究结果表明，K美容的特点是三个矛盾的主题：自然的制造，超性的可爱和“和谐的万花筒”。当我们进一步揭露这些悖论时，我们发现它们激起了年轻的韩国女性的不安和矛盾，她们揭露了渗透于K美容领域的隐蔽，选择性抵抗和顺从性的容忍劳动。我们认为，通过这些新的女性工作层面，美的悖论重新得到了本土化，全球化的西方命令被与新儒家的文化意识形态相结合，