Beauty Regimens, Beauty Regimes

Abstract

AsianAmerican beauty videos on YouTube uniquely intersect with both domestic racial and economic schemas and the vicissitudes of the global beauty market, making them a unique archive of the operations of global neoliberalism as it articulates through social media and raced and gendered ideas about beauty, makeup, and self-care. Reading a series of Korean and Korean American YouTube makeup tutorials and beauty videos, I argue that these videos reveal a map of connectivities between seemingly disparate global economic and social structures. In particular, they reveal how two striking features of global neoliberalism—the centralizing of women as a global labor and consumer force and the “globalization” of capital as marked by the rise of capitalism in Asia—converge to remap and remake race and gender as global biopolitical schemas.