The massifying consumption of embodied goods in an advanced capitalist state: Capital, economic anxieties and social networks

Abstract

Embodied goods like cosmetic surgery comprise a unique and growing consumer industry, most of all in the Asia-Pacific, yet the rationalisation processes motivating their purchase are less understood. Addressing this lacuna, this article builds upon open-ended surveys and semi-structured interviews of consumers in Seoul, South Korea to articulate a relational approach to examine the rationalisation of purchases of cosmetic surgery as an embodied good. Theorised through the conceptual lens of Bourdieusian capital, participant accounts point to macro-level economic anxieties that inform a micro-level cognitive logic of competition through which consumers rationalise the purchase of embodied goods as a form of aesthetic capital. When performed, this capital is believed to offer actors social distinction that provides workplace and social networking advantages by impressing gatekeepers and alters. Participants are shown to reconceptualise their bodies in a means-end orientation for upward mobility but stress their resignation and powerlessness in being forced to adopt this instrumental reconceptualisation as a response to intensifying economic hardships in contemporary capitalist South Korea.