ABSTRACT
Cultural cosmopolitanism is part of the structure of feeling associated with modernity at a global level. Women's mediated experience as global consumers in everyday life is locally situated but globally connected by imagined, cultural cosmopolitanism. This chapter argues that imagined, cultural cosmopolitanism is intrinsically bound up with the intensification of media globalization in Asia and its effects on young women, as it provides a condition for everyday reflexivity and possible self-transformation. Educated, middle-class and upper-class urban young women are held up as exemplars of global modernity. Learning English and involving themselves in wider Western culture through travel and global television are distinctive characteristics of the lives of middle-class women. Young middle-class women commonly criticize Korean gender models and appropriate forms of behavior predicated on rigidly defined matrimonial roles, family expectations and direct parental control. The troubling signs of female individualization as intersected with everyday media culture have become a new arena of anxiety for women in contemporary Asia.
