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Le Collège d'études mondiales a le plaisir de vous convier à son séminaire de recherche. Pour la séance prévue la semaine prochaine, nous accueillerons :So Yeon LeemBeauty and the Monster: Aesthetics and Plastic Surgery in Globalized South KoreaMARDI 3 MARS – 11hSALLE 318190, avenue de France, 75013 ParisMétro: BNF ou Quai de la Gare&#160;&#160;Since the turn of the 21st century, there has been a new kind of plastic surgery boom in South Korea. While the old trend of plastic surgery aimed to modify the size or shape of certain parts of a face such as the eyes or nose, the new trend of plastic surgery – facial contouring or facial bone surgery – is mostly concerned with the overall shape and structure of a face, which is claimed to enhance aesthetical values of a face more drastically and fundamentally. In this paper I pay attention particularly to ambivalent discourses of a surgically- made beauty related to this new plastic surgery phenomena – plastic beauty (成形美人) vs. plastic monster (成形怪物). Although both terms may refer to the same person who receives plastic surgery, they have very different implications with ambiguous boundaries between them. ‘Plastic beauty’, often without a direct mention of ‘plastic’, is associated with the success of plastic surgery, a desirable beauty, and therefore a Korean style of beauty; in contrast, ‘plastic monster’ refers to one whose face has been excessively modified by plastic surgery usually due to overly widened eyes, a too prominent nose, a unnatural shape of the mouth, and/or an absurdly narrow jaw. More interestingly, on the one hand, the former – perhaps, a good hybrid of western and Korean authentic beauty – is appropriated to promote Asian plastic surgery industries along with pan-Asian popularization of Korean popular music and drama, and, on other hand, the latter becomes an object of ridicule and concern among Korean young people as it is seen as a hyper-westernization of a Korean body. From these extremely ambivalent plastic surgery discourses and practices, this paper reveals the emergence of ‘globalized’ visions and aesthetics in the 21st century Korean society, which is distinguishable from ‘westernized’ ones in the 20th century. Supporting data for this paper is drawn from two sources: firstly, I have examined media coverage of plastic surgery in two major Korean daily newspapers from 1960s up to present; and secondly, I have conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork at a plastic surgery clinic, Seoul, South Korea, between 2008 and 2011. Dr. So Yeon Leem is a postdoctoral fellow at Collège d’études mondiales, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, France; she was awarded a Fernand Braudel Fellowship in 2014–2015. She published a number of articles about feminist critiques of Dr. Hwang’s stem cell research, visualization technologies and plastic surgery, feminist STS, science museums, and new research methodologies both solely and jointly in East Asian Science, Technology, and Society: An International Journal, Korean Journal of Science and Technology Studies and Cross-Cultural Studies. She taught at several universities in Korea (2007–2013), worked for the Science Culture Research Center at SNU, and continued her career at the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics in the UK. Currently, in Paris, she has been developing her ethnographic study of plastic surgery in the context of globalization. Pour plus d'informations: http://www.fmsh.fr/fr/c/6821&#160;Seminar_MSH-So Yeon LEEM