Self-Transformation and Symbolic Boundary Drawing through Beauty --an Ethnography Study in K-Pop Cover Team in Hong Kong

This paper analyzes how Korean popular music (K-pop) cover teams in Hong Kong embody beauty standards, and how team members draw symbolic boundaries (Lamont, Beljean and Clair, 2014) through these beauty standards. The so-called Korean Wave spreading across the globe has brought not only a new cultural field with new aesthetic standards, but also a new form of embodied experience: groups of dancers, usually female and young, cover the dances in public recorded performances. For these performances, dancers style and change their appearance, in an act of collective self-transformation according to specific beauty ideals. It is particularly interesting in the case of Hong Kong: a post-colonial city strongly influenced by multiple popular cultures and marked by beauty culture. The relations between self, beauty, and broader social inequalities manifest certain patterns when K-pop meets Hong Kong’s cultural context in drastic social changes. This paper is based on an ethnographical study of a K-pop cover team in Hong Kong, including participatory observation online and offline over 6 months and interviews of 10 active members. Defining self-transformation as both the construction and improvement of self, we reveal how it happened through beauty practices. Furthermore, we investigate the wider questions of how beauty standards mark symbolic boundaries, particularly related to gender, age, ethnicity and social class, but also to beauty as a distinct axis of inequality, in the swiftly changing context of Hong Kong.