Korean American Aesthetics and Style

This study examines how Korean and Korean American students use style and their bodies as active discourses through which they negotiate identity within an ethnic community on campus. It focuses on Korean Americans and Koreans perceptions of each other in their style and personal appearance and explores the role of style in the making of ethnic identities among these two groups. The author seeks to answer the following questions: How do Koreans and Korean Americans use style to align themselves with particular groups of people and distance themselves from others? What does this say about the creation of ???ethnicity???? Based on individual student interviews and group observation, this study concludes that style is intertwined with values about education, religion, and class and is used to mark one???s ethnic identity or to reject it.unpublishe