Soo Kyung Lim

I started the Ph.D. program in anthropology at UIUC in fall, 2001. Previously, I worked with female Korean immigrant bartenders in a metropolitan city in America for my M.A. thesis. I examined how they performed their gender, ethnicity and sexuality in their work. Currently, I am preparing for going to the field in South Korea. My dissertation research will explore middle-aged South Korean women’s body management work at fitness clubs in Seoul. The research will examine how South Korean women in their thirties and forties consider their body management work as gendered, sexualized and classed projects in the midst of neoliberal values, which emphasize individual ability and individual responsibility, and celebrate autonomy and self-realization. I hypothesize that in this neoliberal discourse middle-aged women today are burdened with more intensified care-giving gender roles because of their responsibility for nurturing ”productive” men and children in an ever more competitive and globalizing South Korea, while at the same time they ascribe to the ideas of self-realization and self-management through powerful new body regimes in which they are to be fit, desirable and desiring.

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