Old, down and out? Appearance, body work and positive ageing among elderly South Korean women

Journal of Aging Studies 38 (2016) 6–15

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Old, down and out? Appearance, body work and positive ageing among elderly south korean women Joanna Elfving-Hwang School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley 6009, Australia

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 2 March 2015 Received in revised form 29 February 2016 Accepted 12 April 2016 Available online 29 April 2016 Keywords: Physical appearance South Korea Elderly women Body work Cosmetic surgery Ageing body

a b s t r a c t This article offers an as yet unexplored dimension of our current understanding of the ageing body in the context of contemporary South Korea. Drawing on interviews with twenty elderly women living in the greater Seoul metropolitan area, this article explores the role of appearance, body work, and the presentation of self in the women's everyday lived experiences. Existing research on the ageing female body in South Korea has primarily focused on the so-called noin munjae (‘the elderly issue’) discourse, within which the ageing body is framed as passive, undesirable, or outof-control. Contrary to this, the elderly women's own narratives of everyday beauty practices suggest that the act of sustaining well-ordered appearance in later life allows for the enforcing of positive selves in the context of personal beauty and body work. Maintaining a positive appearance was shown to play an important part of their everyday lives, and functioned as a ritual of not only presenting an appearance that signified control over the ageing body, but to continue to enjoy it. The carefully calculated engagement with various non-surgical and surgical beauty practices also emerged as an embodied practice of mediating intersubjective social encounters through which self-esteem was engendered by evidencing the self's efforts to show respect to others. The findings of this study challenge dominant discourses in the west which present body work on the ageing female body as primarily self-indulgent, or driven by anxiety about the body's inability to fit within existing youthful beauty ideals. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Background Existing academic literature on ageing in South Korea (hereafter, Korea) has highlighted a number of growing shifts in how the elderly feature in public discourses about ageing. These include social policy and concerns about public health care provision and services integration (Kim, Shin, & Kim, 2012; Kwon, 2008; Seok, 2010), high rates of poverty among the elderly (Hong & Kim, 2012; Midgley & Tang, 2009; Yun, 2010), perceived disintegration of traditional values such as filial piety (hyo) and how this is increasingly placing stress on the family-centred welfare system (Hong, 2014; Sung, 2007), as well as clinical interventions to curb worryingly high levels of depression and above-average OECD rates of suicide (Inoue

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2016.04.005 0890-4065/© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

et al., 2010; Jung, Muntaner, & Choi, 2010; Kim et al., 2011; Lee, 2014b). In these discourses, elderly Koreans are depicted as passive, isolated, and within the discourse of the so-called ‘elderly problem’ (noin munjae), as a growing drain on the state's resources, and as a problem that is in need of an urgent solution. Moreover, the ageing bodies of elderly persons are rarely represented as anything other than passive objects of care, a burden to the national economy or to families and grownup children whose filial duty it is to take care of the elderly as the government does not yet have the means to do so.1

1 It should be noted that this is by no means unique to Korea, as much of the feminist critique of current social gerontology is concerned with the way in which elderly women's bodies in particular are reduced to objectified bodies in need of care and assistance (see Twigg, 2004).

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The way in which the elderly are framed in these studies denies older persons' creative agency which, as critical gerontological research conducted in western settings has shown, is used in such diverse settings as citizen's activism, voluntary and paid work after retirement age, leisure activities, life-long learning through college courses and continuous self-study. While Hong (2014) has explored the positive ways in which Confucian teachings have presented the ageing body, noting that in Eastern (as opposed to contemporary Western) societies the ageing body signifies safety and honour, rather than shame and insecurity (52), less explored to date are the ways in which Koreans in their later years engage with physiology in positive ways, or resist sweeping assumptions made about their bodies as objects of pity in public media through engaging in everyday (and sometimes surgical) beauty work in their everyday lives. This research focuses on elderly women's own narratives of their bodies and how each body is experienced and performed through everyday beauty work. Drawing on findings from interviews with 20 elderly Korean women in the Seoul metropolitan area where participants were invited to reflect on beauty practices and appearance, this article will discuss how elderly Korean women relate to and utilise beauty work in social contexts in which the ageing body is increasingly perceived as non-normative, and perhaps seen as no longer worthy of investment. This article discusses how in everyday lived situations, physical appearance and beauty work among the participants of this study were utilised as a relationally affirming and affective practice in the context of between-women sociality, in personalised and often highly self-satisfying ways. Moreover, I will suggest that these findings challenge existing assumptions about the ageing female body as passive, burdensome, and out of control. Theoretical considerations: Existing research on appearance and ageing The analyses presented in this paper build on previous research on appearance and cosmetic surgery in Korea. Existing literature has sought to explore motivations behind the cultural narrative that emphasises the social importance of beauty and appearance in contemporary Korea. One of the key arguments takes ‘lookism’ as evidence of how patriarchal sociocultural pressures appear to compel many young and middle-aged Korean women to engage with highly time-consuming and occasionally painful beauty practices (Kim, 2003, 2009; Park, 2007; Woo, 2004). Others have argued that given the high consumption of cosmetics and cosmetic surgery among both women and men in Korea, attractive appearance intersects with positive notions of success and signifiers of social status (Davies & Han, 2011; Elfving-Hwang, 2013; Holliday & ElfvingHwang, 2012). However, very limited research exists on the way in which beauty work (such as cosmetic surgery, antiageing treatments, and diets) is utilised and experienced by elderly women in Korea. While there is a growing body of research into the meanings that women in later years of life attach to beauty work, cosmetic surgery, and appearance in the West (see for example Garnham, 2013; Hurd Clarke & Griffin, 2007; Paulson, 2008; Smirnova, 2012; Twigg, 2004; Twigg & Majima, 2014; Ward, Campbell, & Keady, 2014; Winterich, 2007), such studies do not yet exist in

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Korea in any meaningful numbers. One of the few relevant studies to address this area is that of D. Lee (2014). Lee argues that Korean society imposes unrealistic beauty ideals on elderly women by presenting young (female) bodies as the somaticaesthetic norm for female beauty. She hypothesises that this can be said to explain (presumed) high levels of depression in elderly women, as youth-focused beauty ideals are highly damaging to the mental well-being of elderly women who feel unable to emulate norms promoted in the media. Similar claims have also been made in some of the existing body of literature on elderly women in the West, which assert that much of the body dissatisfaction among the elderly corresponds closely to discourses of body dissatisfaction among the younger demographic in terms of weight concerns and weightrelated behaviours (Baker & Gringart, 2009; Hurd Clarke, 2002; Roy & Payette, 2012). Some studies have also expressed concerns about perceived ‘anomalies’/non-normative features in appearance observed in the elderly when normative and youthful beauty ideals are applied to self-evaluating ageing bodies (Grippo & Hill, 2008; Hurd Clarke, 2000; Hurd Clarke & Griffin, 2007). Moreover, studies conducted among the elderly in the US and the UK suggest that as a person ages (particularly in the case of women), maintaining beauty ideals and sexual attractiveness becomes less of a concern as body competence and health become more central to women (Deeny & KirkSmith, 2000; Roy & Payette, 2012). However, a significant number of studies have also attempted to show that ageing is not necessarily a disempowering and negative process and that many existing studies ‘fail to recognise the positive strengths of female old age, projecting onto old age, wide culture's own negativity about the subject’ (Gibson, 1998; quoted in Twigg, 2004: 64). Beauty cultures can provide significant way in which agency can be exercised, and which, as Garnham (2013) and Furman (1997) have noted, provide contexts for social connections and embodied practices that are alternatives to the dominant depictions of ageing bodies as passive, burdensome, and no longer a source of pride or pleasure. An important addition to existing literature is an Australian study by Garnham, who seeks to contest the assumption that older people engage with cosmetic surgery in order to ‘deny ageing’ (2013, 38). Instead, Garnham found that ‘older people who undergo cosmetic surgery are designing “older” rather than denying ageing,’ (39) and noted that these practices were often seen as positive, rather than negative forms of engagement with the ageing body. Following Garnham, this article aims to move away from concentrating on describing a simple ‘attitudinal dimension of women's body image’ (one of the weaknesses of the current corpus of research identified by Roy & Payette, 2012: 518). I situate elderly women's beauty practices within their culturally and socially specific contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the social significance that appearance and beauty work hold for individual women in every lived context. Maintaining an attractive and appropriate physical appearance is extremely important in contemporary Korea as it links with the more abstract notion of ‘face’ (chaemyeon). The ‘face’ in this context refers to the way in which individuals present themselves to the outside world in ways that are culturally and socially acceptable. In one sense, the ‘face’ refers to one's reputation; however, it is a complex cultural construct that relies on the presentation of self in socio-

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culturally and class-specific ways. Lee (2004) has sought to explain the presentation of self in Korea. He argues that the importance placed on presenting an acceptable social image of self is driven by a Neo-Confucian concept of ‘intersubjective gaze.’ The intersubjective gaze refers to a process of ‘performing one's social status and the way in an individual's position in society and sense of self are reaffirmed through the others' recognition of the legitimacy of that position. Lee's ‘intersubjective gaze’ is similar to Goffman’s idea of self as a ‘performance’ and the way in which each social role that an individual assumes already has a ‘particular front’ or ‘face work’ that the actor must maintain in order to be recognised as genuinely inhabiting that role (1959, 37). Goffman argues that outward markers of status as well as speech patterns and social interactions play an important part in this process of presenting a positive image of self to others and that the individual is therefore a social product, created in the context of interaction between self and other (Goffman, 1959; 1967). Taking both Lee's and Goffman's concepts of the presentation of self in social interactions as a starting point for analysing the role of maintaining appropriate appearance, this article will discuss how ageing bodies, appearance, and the care of self are understood and narrated by the elderly subjects included in this study.

Methods Participants and recruitment The twenty participants included in this study were all aged 63 and over, and lived in the greater metropolitan area of Seoul, where beauty industries and advertising are prominent and formed part of participants' everyday visual landscape. Participants belonged to two age groups; 8 of the participants were 75–93 years old (‘Fourth Age’), while 14 belonged to the age group of 63–74 (‘Third Age’). The exclusion criteria applied to participants who were aged 60 or less as the 60th birthday is typically considered as the point in life when a person symbolically enters ‘later life’ (as opposed to being considered middle aged). The participants were recruited in two ways: a Seoul-based local research assistant assisted with the recruitment of the participants through contacting local senior groups for participants with expressed interest in taking part, while some of the participants were recruited through my own existing networks and long-standing links with Seoul metropolitan area-based senior groups. The size of the sample (N = 20) offered a snapshot of the general elderly urban Korean female population in the greater Seoul metropolitan area with roughly half of the participants residing in the outskirts of the city, and the other half within the inner metropolitan area. Considering the relatively small sample, no claims will be made about the applicability of the findings of this data across Korean elderly female population. Information letters and consent forms in the Korean language were distributed to each participant prior to interviews. The study was approved by the University of Western Australia’s Human Research Ethics Committee prior to commencing the study, and all of the participants gave their expressed consent prior to participating in this research. The participants were also reminded of their right to withdraw from the interview at

any point and were free to refuse to answer any questions put to them. Interviews I conducted one-to-one semi-structured interviews in Korean with each participant at local coffee shops and a social space provided by a local church. Each interview was audio-recorded and lasted between 30 and 40 min. The core objective was to understand the roles care of self and various technologies of self (such as cosmetic surgery, skin care, beauty treatments, and everyday beauty work typically associated with the care of self in developed societies) play in how the elderly in Korea perceive their somatic subjectivities within an extremely appearance-conscious society. For this reason, the participants were encouraged to narrate their experiences and daily practices in detail through ‘storying their lives’ (Roach, Keady, Bee, & Williams, 2014). The interviews were loosely organised around thematic prompt questions on the following topics: participants' routine care of self; their motivations; appearance-consciousness as a cultural trait; their aesthetic beauty preferences now and when they were younger, as well as their opinions on the kinds of cosmetic surgical practices available and the likely reasons people might have for choosing to undergo such procedures. The participants were also encouraged to ‘digress’ and to narrate their views and experiences about other appearance and beauty related issues they found personally important to them. While I expected many of the participants to have had some form of invasive surgical beauty treatments (such as laser surgery for skin blemish removal, and blepharoplasty in particular), I was careful not to enquire directly whether the interviewee had had any cosmetic surgical procedures to avoid potential embarrassment or ‘loss of face,’ especially as I was aware that many elderly women prefer not to discuss their surgeries with anyone outside their immediate family or close friends. The issue of cosmetic surgery was therefore always discussed in the third person unless participants volunteered to talk about their own surgical experiences without prompting. Participation in the study did not require participants to have had surgery, as my main interest was on body work in the broader sense, and how the women positioned themselves in relation to it. I was not strict in adhering to the same themes if the participants were not keen to pursue a particular topic, and allowed the conversation to be steered in directions that the women themselves decided. Conversely, where I detected an unwillingness to talk about a certain issue, I did not probe the subject any further. This kind of intentional ‘sidetracking’ proved effective in allowing women to explore issues that I had not previously considered, but that they identified as significant. Finally, my own position as a fluent Korean speaking, but fairskinned Northern European researcher proved also very useful in the interviews as many of the participants felt it important to provide in-depth explanations of localised meanings attached to beauty and appearance. In addition to narratives about everyday beauty practices and reflections on appearance, some basic statistical data were collected, namely, the participants' age, marital status, and level of education (Table 1). The data about the level of education were collected to gauge that the sample included

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participants from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, which in this age group is often indicated in their level of education. Almost half of the participants had been educated to high school level, while seven had gained a university degree. Data analysis The recordings of all interviews were transcribed in Korean by a research assistant and analysed in the original language2. All responses were anonymised and participants were invited to choose a pseudonym of their choice to ensure participant anonymity (Saunders, Kitzinger, & Kitzinger, 2015). As the aim of this study was to gain understanding of how women themselves experienced their ageing bodies in the context of highly appearance-focused society, narrative analysis provided a useful approach to analyse the experiences of the women in this study. Narrative analysis allows for the exploration of ‘the meaning that the participants attribute to their experience’ (Holloway & Freshwater, 2009, 91). However, narrative analysis as a methodology is not easily defined as a singular clear-cut approach. Nevertheless, and as Phoenix, Smith, and Sparkes (2010) note, ‘various forms of narrative inquiry share a commitment to viewing identities as constituted through narratives, emphasising that we are relational beings, and taking seriously the storied nature of our lives and lived experiences.’ (2) Similarly, the interview data were analysed as series of subjective constructions of reality in interview contexts (Riessman, 1993). In other words, the interview situation is analysed as a situation in which the participants gave meanings to and attempted to make sense of the relations between their ageing bodies, appearance, and beauty work as a social ritual (Holloway & Freshwater, 2009; Riessman, 1989), and thus as a social phenomenon that carries with it certain ‘socially shared forms of organization’ (Atkinson & Delamont, 2006, 170). Each interview in this study was worked one at a time by coding key themes that were frequently brought up by the participants. These key themes were then organised into key headings that emerged from the data, which were then organised into thematic sections to present the data. In the following section, I will present the findings drawn from the interview data, with specific focus on how the participants described and explained their motivations behind engaging with maintaining a positive appearance in later life, and what meanings were attached to these practices. Results Maintaining a positive body image as a sign of respect to others One of the most prominent findings to emerge from these interviews was the way in which appearance—and in particular tidy and well thought-out apparel and makeup appropriate to a given social context—was seen as essential to ensuring the maintenance of social relationships. All of the participants described the necessity to make some kind of effort (some more elaborately than others) to dress appropriately and to apply some form of makeup before presenting themselves in public. This intersubjective context that informed considerations 2 Translations of excerpts from the interviews included in this article are the author's.

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Table 1 Age and educational level composition of the interview sample (N = 20).

Participant age Level of education Middle school certificate High school leaving certificate First degree Higher degree

60–69 years

70–79 years

80–89 years

b90 years

12

2

5

1

1 5 2 4

2 3

1

1 1

of appearance and beauty work was emphasised by a number of participants and explained as a specific feature in the Korean cultural context. For example, as ‘Kaebuchirŏn,’ an outgoing and carefully presented participant, explained: ‘It is extremely uncomfortable for us [Koreans] to go out without having applied any makeup. [Looking at it from a foreigner's perspective] you might think that paying so much attention to your appearance means prioritising your appearance over inner substance, but I think that making sure that one looks tidy and correct [depending on the situation], wearing smart clothes and looking after one's hair in order not to make the other person feel uneasy is something that we [Koreans] see as correct manner and etiquette.’ (Kaebuchirŏn, 67) This statement reveals the participant's concern that the beauty work related to social encounters was misunderstood by foreigners as indicative of a lack of moral character where the exact opposite is in fact intended. Rather than evidencing focus on the external self for the sake of personal vanity, beauty work (at least among elderly women) in Korea was explained as being understood in the context of respect of others. This concept was referred to as yewi (‘correct social etiquette’) by all of the participants. When asked to explain what they meant by yewi in the context of maintaining a positive appearance, the participants explained it to mean a sense of awareness of culturally specific social rules of behaviour and an appearance fitting to one's social status, gender, and age. In the context of beauty work and appearance, yewi was seen to relate to this learned awareness of the kind of appearance appropriate for each social situation. When asked to explain the concept further, ‘Kaebuchirŏn’ gave the following example: ‘When I was young I was a teacher. I remember how the teacher who was teaching the children Chinese characters used to leave his clothes hanging on hanger in his office and wear the same clothing every day. Even the students began to ask why he was always wearing the same clothes. Of course they expected that their teacher would look after his appearance. For me, presenting a smart and correct appearance to the students is yewi. Even if I wear whatever I like at home, when I go out I put clean clothes on, makeup and spray in my hair—this comes naturally to us. If I don't, I myself feel really uncomfortable.’ (Kaebuchirŏn, 67) The final point emphasised by ‘Kaebuchirŏn’ is significant because it suggests that rather than being experienced as an oppressive practice imposed on elderly women, it is seen as an affective and reciprocal one. For this reason, beauty work in the context of yewi was not considered burdensome by most of the

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participants, but rather a source of mutual satisfaction because of its effect in allowing everyone in a given situation to feel at ease. ‘Mrs Lee,’ for example, was careful to emphasise this reciprocal nature of projecting a pleasant appearance to others: ‘Whether you're old or young, it is important to look after yourself. If you are young, you need to look smart the way young people do; if you are old, you need to look smart the way old people do. To look good… the kind of care of self (chagi gwalli) that makes others feel good is important, I think.’ (Mrs Lee, 64) In fact, when asked to describe their motivations behind investing in self through beauty work, most saw it almost too obvious to even merit an answer. ‘Mrs Lee’ explained: ‘Of course you do it [engage with beauty work] for yourself. And you do it in order to make a good impression (insang) on others. But if I make a good impression on others, it makes me feel good too.’ (Mrs Lee, 93) ‘Mrs Lee's’ explanation illustrated the way in which notions of vanity intersected with concern for how one's appearance affects others. Her views were echoed by ‘Mrs Baek,’ who noted: ‘You're not alone in this world, are you? Whether you go to the market, department store, or the church, it's good to make a good impression (insang) on other people, isn't it?’ (Mrs Baek, 70) Similarly, Mrs. Park emphasised that putting on makeup and priming oneself for public encounters was only in part motivated by vanity, because the main concern was not to cause offense to others. Mrs. Park expressed anxiety over others ‘looking at her and despairing (silmanghada)’. The choice of the strong wording (‘despair’) in this context suggests that the process of fashioning of the ageing female body is highly socially minded, rather than being driven by individualistic concerns over a beautiful appearance. Some of the participants, such as ‘Kaebujirŏn’ (67), became highly animated when describing the potential social disgrace of not wearing makeup in public: ‘If a person does not put on any makeup or make any kind of effort to look presentable in public, then just looking at them makes me feel bad.’ This focus on maintaining positive social encounters was seen as particularly important when it came to social encounters with new acquaintances: ‘Even wearing nice clothes is something that you do in order not to appear shabby (ch'orahada) to others, isn't it? If my friend introduces me to someone and I look like a beggar then that's really unpleasant for everyone, isn't it? So that's why I put on at least some lipstick, for my own sake.’ (Mrs Yi, 83) In all of these examples, the act of wearing appropriate clothing and suitable makeup was closely related to a desire to ensure that the social etiquette is through presenting a positive image of self to others. However, the work associated with maintaining a positive appearance was not necessarily considered as burdensome, but rather linked to sense of selfsatisfaction (‘for my own sake’) and which drew on the knowledge that the proper etiquette has been adhered to. In

fact, the only context where everyday beauty work was considered burdensome rather than rewarding was where some participants in the ‘Fourth Age’ group described their reasons for having had their eyebrows or eye lines tattooed. The motivations turned out to be physical as the constant application of eyeliner and brow pencil were becoming bothersome and even physically difficult as the participants' hands began to become less steady with ageing. As a result, the application of eyeliner was then described as increasingly time consuming and came with anxiety about failing to present a tidy appearance. Within this context, tattooing practices were embraced as enabling practices to allow the participants to maintain a tidy appearance as expression of yewi. Maintaining a suitable appearance was not without anxiety, however. In particular, some of the participants expressed concern over presenting an appearance in public that would cause embarrassment to their families. Lia explained: If you ignore your appearance and look untidy when out and about, your family will not like that. And when you go out together and the parent looks shabby (ch'orahada), you might embarrass the children and so even if just for the sake of your children it seems right to adorn yourself a little bit and put on some nice makeup and nice clothes… In that way they will want to take you with them. In Korea people consider each other's [feelings] a lot, you know.’ (Lia, 66) Related to the rewards of the positive outcomes of achieving validation of self through the intersubjective gaze described above, the fear of appearing ‘unkempt’ (ch'orahada) and thus failing to perform age-appropriate appearance also came up in most of the interviews. As the anxiety about unkempt appearance became an important theme early on in the interviews, I asked the participants to describe how they felt that their ageing bodies were being perceived by others in public encounters with strangers, and whether they felt that their age might have an impact on this. All but one of the participants claimed that age was irrelevant to how they were treated in public and that the only reason why one might be shunned or ignored in public was entirely due the individual's failure to maintain an appearance suitable for public consumption. ‘Susan’ explained: ‘I really don't want to look unkempt (ch'orahada) in the eyes of others. In any case the older one gets, the shabbier one looks. That's why [the elderly] want to show that they have confidence. If I, say, travel in the underground and someone sitting next to me is smelly or looks unkempt, I automatically shy away from them.’ (Susan, 68) In this context, the unkempt (ch'orahada) body was coded as evidencing potential terminal decline of a body that was in danger of being rejected by others. However, the presentation of self was not limited to public encounters. One of the participants, ‘Mrs Yi,’ described how she had only recently decided to stop dyeing her hair black as she felt it was no longer appropriate for an octogenarian. Nevertheless, she had also attended a makeup tutorial for the elderly in order to adapt her makeup techniques to ‘freshen’ her changing facial features. Although she spoke about the satisfaction she drew from her close friends' complimenting her well-maintained appearance,

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her main motivation for wishing to invest in self was not simply vanity. Instead, ‘Mrs Yi’ expressed concern that her gradually ageing appearance would become a source of sorrow or worry for her children: ‘[When I was younger] I lived overseas, and when I came back I was shocked to see how much my mother had aged, with age spots having appeared on her face. It really made me sad. I worry that if I look like my mother did then, my children will think that their mother has now aged, and it pains me think that this will make them sad. The thought makes me want to look after myself.’ (Mrs Yi, 83)

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Again, however, none of this was experienced as burdensome, but rather as a calculated act of agency, and an investment in one's body. Thus body work that was carried out to maintain an ‘appearance appropriate to one's age’ was associated with achievement and evidence of self-discipline. In this sense, the ways in which body work were appropriated by the participants were often very measured, personalised, and experienced as rewarding practice of self-expression and investment, which was validated through the gaze of others, and typically that of friends. Maintaining positive selves through creative use of ageing bodies

The psychosocial rewards and responsibilities for making a good impression on others, and easing anxiety in the eyes of one's family about the ageing self (and the eventual separation that it implies) formed important motivation for engaging in beauty work for most of the participants interviewed for this study. This said, many of the participants were well aware of the limits of what anti-ageing treatments could achieve. While many of the participants held very low expectations of what commercial anti-ageing beauty products could actually achieve, engaging with anti-ageing beauty treatments was perceived as a positive way of investing in self. ‘Susan’ (68) expressed her own approach to using anti-ageing products as follows: ‘I don't believe in [anti-ageing] advertising, but rather than letting yourself go, I think that if you constantly pay attention [to your appearance] you age half as fast. As you get older, your confidence takes a knock, and you worry about appearing scruffy [ch'orahada] to others.’ (Susan, 68) Everyday beauty practices were therefore understood as positive and empowering sites of resisting a sense of decline brought about the obvious signs of ageing. When asked to describe their daily beauty regimes, many of the participants became very animated and described an array of treatments, some of which were homemade and required a considerable preparation time. The average time that the participants took to achieve what they considered as acceptable appearance in public ranged from 30 min to an hour, and many invested an additional hour in the evenings for facial cleansing, massage, and masks. However, none of the participants expressed resentment for the time invested in this activity. Quite the contrary, in many of the women's descriptions of their everyday beauty routines, beauty work was constructed as highly personalised and enjoyable activity. One of the participants (Mrs Go, 63) brought with her a sample set of the kinds of commercial products she routinely used: Interviewer: Do you use all of these? [Points at eight products laid out on the table] Mrs. Go: Yes, from cleansing products to moisturising creams. I apply these once in the mornings and once in the evenings. If I leave any out it feels as if I might get wrinkles and it doesn't feel good. I don't get careless about this. Most other women described similar (and even more elaborate) beauty treatments that all pointed to a significant degree of discipline and time investment in the care of self.

Aside from everyday beauty practices, I also asked the participants about their views on cosmetic surgery as a way of maintaining positive appearance in later life. While three of the participants were highly critical of surgery (one in her 90s and two others who were tertiary educated and objected on ethical or religious grounds), most of the participants were generally positive about cosmetic surgery. However, all were highly ambivalent about surgeries that were seen to alter the subject's ‘natural’ appearance. Interestingly, there was a lack of distinction between natural-looking and natural (non-surgically enhanced) beauty, and a natural-looking surgical result was considered desirable as long as it allowed the patient to feel good about themselves. Four of the participants were happy to talk about their own experiences of undergoing cosmetic surgery procedures, and all others expressed a stance toward cosmetic surgery on ageing bodies. ‘Lia’ reminisced how as a young person she would never have considered surgery because she was happy enough with her natural appearance. In fact, the reason why she decided to have a blepharoplasty (double eye-lid surgery) was a medical rather than aesthetic choice: ‘I turned 55 and my skin began ageing and my eyes began drooping. My eyes were constantly tearing up, and because bacteria got in [my cornea] I started getting eye infections which left me scarred [around my eyes because of the constant inflammations]. So that's why I had the blepharoplasty. Thinking about it now, I'm so pleased with myself for having had it done. People around me said that I looked younger, which was nice, and because I no longer have problems with teary eyes and scarring, I am very happy about it. […] But I still think that natural-looking beauty is important. It seems right to me to look after this body that my parents gave me. But I think it's nice to have wrinkles too, to look natural [for your age].’ (Lia, 66) ‘Lia’ describes a very common trajectory of how and why some of the participants elected to have cosmetic surgical procedures—out of perceived medical need. Nevertheless, and as ‘Lia’ notes above, the pleasing aesthetic results were also greatly appreciated for their socio-aesthetic outcome because she was consequently complimented by others. Yet the limits of what constitutes a benefit to an individual through cosmetic surgery were defined carefully by all participants, and implied in the insistence for natural-looking results. The main concern that the participants expressed with cosmetic surgery was the

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potential for an unnatural-looking outcome which might then cause discomfort to others and cause friction. As ‘Mrs Song’ noted: ‘One has to look natural after surgery. A person I know had liposuction and Botox, and spent 10,000,000 won on it. She said she did it to get rid of wrinkles, but because it looked really unnatural, I didn't think it was pretty. I felt it was awkward (putamsŭrŏpta) and over the top.’ (Mrs Song, 67) In the above passage, ‘Mrs Song’ describes how unsuccessful surgery (that is, with unnatural-looking results) made her feel uncomfortable and implied how the person in question had transgressed the social etiquette attached to presenting an acceptable appearance to others Another participant, ‘Mrs Kim,’ commented on how a facelift had changed her friend's appearance beyond recognition (‘ttan saram kat'ayo’), and as a result she felt at ill-at-ease with her friend in social situations and had become reluctant to engage in social encounters with her. Thus, while cosmetic surgery itself was not considered necessarily as a negative choice per se, and in fact in many cases was thought to be beneficial to both health and mental wellbeing, altering one's appearance excessively is considered as a failure to adhere to proper yewi. The embodied lack of yewi implied in ambivalent statements about unnatural appearance was also linked to a belief that excessive tampering with a person's natural looks would harm their insang. Insang was a term used by many of the participants to describe way in which one's inner self is perceived as reflected to others through embodied practices, behaviour, and facial features. This idea draws on traditional Korean beliefs in physiognomy (gwansang), and how a person's facial features (myeonsang) were seen as linked with their fortunes. Traditionally, a person's insang was seen as open to improvement through self-discipline and effort, such as study or meditation (Lee, 2004). However, many participants expressed concern that taking the ‘shortcut’ by resorting to facelifts or excessive use of facial fillers could be interpreted as evidence of a lack of substance or character in an ageing body. ‘Mrs Kim’ explained: ‘Fillers and laser surgery are fine. But I think you need to have wrinkles that reflect your age. If it is too obvious that you've had a lot of work done—wrinkles removed or skin tightened—it looks cheap and you feel that the person only cares about their appearance and has no substance on the inside. For TV personalities I think this comes with their job so that it [tampering with appearances] can't be avoided, but even among them there are some who have gone a bit too far.’ (Mrs Kim 64) This suggests a distinction between ‘rational’ beauty work (which aims to preserve what is natural or enhance existing features) and ‘irrational’ beauty work that changes one's appearance beyond recognition and is done for ethically ‘wrong’ reasons—and potentially harming the insang of the person in question. The participants were all in agreement that to be considered beautiful in an age-appropriate way meant that evidence of age should not be completely erased. It is also telling that ‘Mrs Kim’ is sympathetic towards TV personalities' professional burden of having to pay excessive attention to their bodies because such an artificial look is expected of people

in their position. In other words, while many participants felt sorry for certain TV personalities who they felt had not been successful in attaining ‘natural-looking’ beauty through surgery, they were not judgmental, because the celebrities were not seen to break rules of yewi in that particular context. While the Goffmanian notion of presenting an appropriate self to others clearly motivated many of the participants to engage with beauty work, looking after one's body was also seen as something that one also does for one's own pleasure. Almost all of the participants made no excuses in declaring that they engaged in beauty work for their own satisfaction (chagi manjok). When asked about motivations for engaging with various beauty practices, Mrs Go replied: ‘I want to look young and pretty, of course. Even if I just make a little bit of an effort, I want to look younger. I don't want to look old and the way I am [without the beauty work]. It's first and foremost for my own satisfaction (chagi manjok). […] When my friends say that I look young, it feels good and makes me want to straighten my back, which is good.’ (Mrs Go, 63) The reciprocity of giving and receiving assurances and compliments regarding appearances emerged as an important social function of beauty work and maintaining positive appearance. Positive comments about one's appearance were highly appreciated and functioned to improve personal levels of self-confidence. The link to self-satisfaction (chagi manjok) gained through affective practices on performing appropriate beauty work and complimenting others was therefore never denied, and even celebrated. As ‘Susan’ noted: ‘It [beauty work] is for the sake of your own gratification (chagi manjok), of course. That's because when you hear the others congratulating you for looking younger, it really feels great. That's why I have [cosmetic surgery] done, but I think the young people are having [surgery] because of the problematic way our society is structured [around beauty discourses]. (Susan, 68) While engaging with beauty practices purely for enjoyment was seen as a possibility for elderly women, implied in the above comment and others like it was an interesting discourse within which beauty work for the elderly is constructed as an optional and empowering choice, whereas for young people it is seen as a potentially problematic practice which was not always even a question of choice. ‘Mrs Yun’ noted that: ‘It seems to be that the young people have surgery in order to look pretty in the eyes of others, but as you get older the reasons why you look after yourself are different—it's about your own satisfaction (chagi manjok)’ (Mrs Yun, 83) ‘Mrs Go’ described her views on the motivations behind younger and older people's cosmetic surgical choices as follows: ‘We [older people] might want to look a bit younger than our friends [laughs] and that's why we might choose to have surgery. But in some cases young people have to have surgery just to get a job or find a marriage partner. These days first impressions seem so important in job interviews that it is no longer enough to be talented. In the past, we

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didn't bother to fix our faces even if they were not pretty, but these days young people's faces come under scrutiny from birth.’ (Mrs Go, 63). ‘Mrs Go's’ concern for the way in which increased levels of ‘lookism’ put pressure on young people is shown to be at odds with the way in which surgery on ageing bodies is presented as an agentic choice. Similarly, while many of the participants were critical of some of young people's cosmetic surgery choices in particular, they were also sympathetic to the young people's motivations for doing so. Many referred to the competitive job market and how beauty may give one a competitive advantage in the marriage market, but emphasised that this was not the case for adults in later life. In fact, a germane distinction was made throughout the interviews whereby body work designed for altering one's appearance was considered to be a young person's domain - and worryingly burdensome as such. On the contrary, cosmetic surgery, fashion, and beauty work on ageing bodies were seen as a resource that the participants could draw on in order to maintain a socially acceptable appearance in later life. However, this resource was presented as a choice, and not a necessity. Discussion This study has described the social function of appearance among a sample group of elderly Korean women. It has highlighted how for the participants in this study, body work, and personal beauty practices were highly personalised and performed in relation to the carefully calculated and embodied practice of mediating intersubjective social encounters. The findings from this study suggest that the participants engaged in various forms of surgical and non-surgical beauty work in order to maintain a positive body image as a sign of respect to others. Related to this, an equally important motivation was found in the creative ways in which body work was utilised to allow for the participants to maintain a positive sense of self in later life. While younger Koreans' motivations to engage with body work have often been linked to neoliberal and entrepreneurial technologies of individual self-management, the interview narratives analysed in this study suggest that, for the elderly, engaging with body work was underpinned by different motivations, albeit equally complex. Body work was certainly seen as an investment in self for the participants. However, the returns are calculated not in terms of ‘obsessive pursuit of personal fulfilment and the incessant calculations necessary to achieve it’ (Seo, 2010: 85), but in empowering pursuit of self-satisfaction (chagi manjok) through respecting the needs of self and others. The findings of this study present partially contrasting findings to literature on women's experiences of ageing and appearance in the West. Some existing research suggests that much beauty work in ageing women in the West (and the US in particular) is driven by a sense of inferiority and low selfesteem that result from the ageing body's inevitable inability to resemble youthful beauty ideals (Cruishank, 2013; Winterich, 2007). Katz (2001) argues that successful ageing in the West is typically constructed as a process within which the visible signs of ageing have been minimised or erased. Related to this, other studies have highlighted the pressures that women in particular face to resist visible signs of ageing in the West (Brooks,

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2010; Clarke, Repta, & Griffin, 2007), and how beauty work on the ageing body functions both as a source of anxiety and possible redemption from that anxiety through anti-ageing treatments as the participants struggled to maintain youthful beauty ideals (Hurd Clarke & Griffin, 2007, 2008; Winterich, 2007). Interestingly—and in particular since so much emphasis in Korea is placed on physical appearance—such desire to erase signs of ageing did not correspond to the participants' motivations to engage with beauty in significant ways. Preparing oneself for social encounters was understood not in terms of trying to fit into an unobtainable and youthful beauty ideal presented in media, and one of the participants expressed concerns over the ageing body's inability to fit within the current youthful beauty ideals. Instead, the participants described their everyday beauty rituals as a source of pleasure to self. In this respect, the findings are reminiscent of Furman's ethnographic study on the way in which beauty shop experiences were utilised by a group of mostly Jewish women who were shown to invest in beauty treatments, and how in the context of beauty salon cultures ‘pride in one's appearance, earned by time and attention devoted to it, is a way of positively identifying the self with one's body,’ and the ageing body in particular (1997, 63). The participants in this study expressed a view that in later life maintaining a positive appearance continues to play an important part of their everyday lives, and functions as a ritual not only to present an appearance that signifies control over the ageing body, but to continue to enjoy it. For most of the participants, everyday cosmetic cultures and practices emerged as calculated and often carefully thought-out expressions of ‘designing “older” rather than denying aging’ (Garnham, 2013: 39). Within this context, the erasure of markers of ageing through invasive practices such as cosmetic surgery was perceived as potentially undesirable if the outcomes made others feel uncomfortable. This said, natural ageing did not necessarily foreclose the possibility of engaging with a number of beauty practices and treatments, including invasive cosmetic surgery. What was emphasised by the participants, however, was the necessity to maintain a natural-looking and ageappropriate appearance which was then utilised for both the pleasure of self and others. The findings of the interview data thus correspond closely to Garnham's analysis of how body work on the ageing body can be read as a signifier of ‘ethical self-care’ rather than being ‘associated with superficiality and vanity’ (2013, 44). For the participants, body work was a highly personal activity in which one's social self was ‘primed’ to embody respect for others in interpersonal encounters. As a result, the appearance presented in public was expected to show evidence of effort invested in appearance, although the ways in which these were displayed varied considerably. Moreover, the presentation of self in social interactions was not simply performed in order to gain the respect of others through the maintaining of ‘a corresponding front’ to one's social status and standing (Goffman, 1959). Instead, the women's narratives described a deep seated concern for displaying respect of others through the self's efforts to present a pleasant appearance that would not become a source of friction in everyday social encounters. This notion of social etiquette (yewi) as demonstrated by performing an appropriate appearance also challenges existing—often simplistic—assumptions about the relationship between various forms of body work and how the

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ageing body is experienced in everyday lived contexts, and more specifically in non-Western cultural contexts. The ways in which these motivations were described in affective terms suggests that the participants did not simply see appearance as an instrument to maintain a positive image of self as a calculated investment to maintain social status (Goffman, 1959; Lee, 2004). For example, a face with carefully applied makeup was taken to signify effort, and therefore coded as a sign of respect of others. In this sense, the kind of physical appearance aspired to by the elderly participants of this study was one that promoted harmony within the group, allowing individualised opportunities for expressions of mutual acknowledgment and positive reinforcement through well-intentioned observations of each other's appearance. This illustrates how appearance and body work in later life were experienced as deeply entangled in a culturally specific ways of displaying respect for the maintenance of socially coherent relationships. However, because the social codes that inform the performance of proper yewi through appearance were not uniform, participants of this study did not describe their beauty regimes as a constraining process that would cause anxiety or stress. Intertwined with the considerations of self-satisfaction through beauty work, however, was the emphasis on ensuring an appropriate presentation of self in public as a sign of self that was still seen as being in control. The anxiety about presenting an ‘untidy appearance’ (ch'orahada) was a particularly strong concern for the participants. In much of Western social gerontology, untidy appearance is often linked to the first signs of an ageing process, signalling the start of a perceived inability to look after self and the subsequent loss of agency (Ward et al., 2014). Similarly in my interviews, beauty work was also closely linked to a shared view that a tidy appearance was also an expression and reflection of a healthy and wellfunctioning body and mind. Within this context, however, while many expressed concern about how deteriorating health would impact their quality of life, body work was described as a positive resource to alleviate such concerns. Conclusion What the findings of this research suggest, therefore, is that our current conceptual tools to understand old age in Korea provide only a partial view of somatic aspects of ageing in a non-Western context. The way in which beauty work becomes an immediate space for enforcing positive sociality between women and for engendering self-esteem through mutual respect offers an as yet unexplored dimension of our current understanding of the ageing body in the context of contemporary Korea. Moreover, the findings of this study highlight the way in which various forms of beauty work on the ageing body are culturally contingent. Anti-ageing treatments and cosmetic surgical procedures can be coded as evidence of age denial, resistance to culturally defined norms of beauty or positive engagement with the body in one cultural context (Twigg, 2004). However, the findings of this study have demonstrated that the same practices can be coded as signs of respect of others in different cultural contexts. The difference in the ways in which the participants in this study relate to beauty and personal body work point to a significant gap in our current (mostly Eurocentric) understanding of how the ageing body is understood and appropriated in

diverse cultural contexts. In particular, further research on the positive aspects of engaging with beauty cultures in nonWestern cultural settings can offer important ways of imagining positive ways of allowing women (and men) to ‘positively identify with their bodies’ (Furman, 1997, 63). The ageing body both as an object of enjoyment, and ritual object to acknowledge the feelings of others, points to an important new way of conceptualising positive ageing.

Acknowledgements This research has been funded by a grant from the Academy of Korean Studies (grant number AKS-2014-R41). The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and detailed comments. Their suggestions helped improve and clarify this this article a great deal.

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