Experiencing globalization

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, thisarticle aims to detail the specific ways in which the cultural experience of globalization impinges upon, and becomes integrated into, the changing lives of young women of different classes. The central arguments revolve around the significance of reflexivity: global TV, in particular, helps to create an important condition for the practice of reflexivity, by opening up a rare space where Korean women can make sense of their life conditions in highly critical ways and can imagine new possibilities of freedom – social mobility and individualization – within the multiple constraints of their social context. The imagination of freedom is however bounded by the pervasive main concept governed by local rules – sexual morality – which means young women's lives are made and remade through the dialectical negotiation between the locally governed rules and the globally defined fields of possibility.