Beauty, Precarity, and the Gendered Economy of the Body in Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face

Abstract

This research examines Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face (2020) as a critical representation of beauty culture under the circumstances of neoliberal capitalism and gendered precarity. The study concentrates on cosmetic surgery, emotional work, and spatial insecurity and states that the novel creates the body of the female as a biocapital conditioned by the market discipline and societal control. Based on Foucauldian ideas of biopower, Bourdieu's theory of capital, feminist body theory, and feminist political economy, the analysis shows that aesthetic self-management is a survival technique and a controlling mechanism. The storyline reveals how the discourses of choice and empowerment conceal the structural restraints concerning the inequality of classes, labour insecurity, and the valuation of the patriarchal system. Placing intimate bodily practices in the context of the wider economic systems, the research locates the novel as an important contribution to the modern literary consideration of neoliberal subjectivity, aesthetic capitalism, and the process of the body becoming an economic asset.