(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Freedom yes, but for whom? To do what?-V I. Lenin (as quoted in Zizek 2001:114)The quandaries of advertising censorship in South Korea in the first decade of the 21st century struck me when, in the fall 2009, I went to see Ms. Cho,1 a one-time public representative to the advertising review committee of the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC). To serve as a public representative of this key advertising censorship body, Ms. Cho had been nominated by an influential feminist organization, Womenlink (Yosong Minuhoe), where she was a senior member of the staff involved in contesting gender portrayals in the media. My primary interest was in Ms. Cho's experiences at the KCSC, but our conversation meandered to a recent controversial advertising campaign, which the KCSC found merely humorous but Womenlink objected to. The campaign in question, ubiquitous in the summer 2009, illustrated a telecom company's commitment to surpassing customers' wildest hopes: a series of animations showed funny situations in which protagonists, mostly men, had their expectations exceeded-often with attention from sexualized women. Many appreciated the campaign for comic relief. Others, however, criticized it for belittling women. As Ms. Cho recalled, Womenlink received a steady stream of calls urging an intervention. Eventually, Womenlink did intervene and, after briefly boycotting the advertiser, succeeded in stopping the campaign-but only after hesitating for over a month, during which the campaign ran most of its course and entered popular culture (Fedorenko 2014:346-349). Ms. Cho reflected on Womenlink's prolonged inaction:At our organization we thought that there was a problem [with the campaign] from the very beginning. But we also thought, Don't we need to recognize freedom of expression even in advertising these days? Although we thought there was a problem, initially we had no intention to address it.Ms. Cho's concern with respecting freedom of advertising expression introduces the theme of this article-the dilemmas of policing advertising when (neo)liberal ideologies of freedom are hegemonic, as they were in South Korea of the 2000s.2 In South Korea, the democratization of the late 1980s opened doors to neoliberalization, and, by the 21st century, the national economy has been restructured to enhance the freedoms of capital. Though not without ambivalence and even reluctance, Koreans by and large acquiesced in the neoliberal imperative to treat their lives as an enterprise, not to count on state protections, and to personally leverage social risks (e.g., Abelmann, Park, and Kim 2009; Cho 2009; Song 2009, 2010): in other words, most embraced freedom as the principle for governing self and others (Foucault 2008, Rose 1999). Advertising censors, too, embraced this primacy of freedom, hence the quandaries of advertising censorship as seen in Ms. Cho's comment. I examine their dilemmas to question the effects of privileging freedom of advertising expression in neoliberal South Korea, and to enrich the ethnographic understanding of censorship and censors in general.3At its broadest, this article provides a rare ethnographic glimpse of how censorship happens on the ground. I observed censorial meetings at the quasi-government media watchdog, the KCSC, in the fall 2009 and spring-summer 2010, and got to know those policing advertising within formal and informal censorial organizations.4 With this ethnographic data, I draw out the contingencies of censorship, which are often flattened in the studies that rely solely on censorial records. Even juxtaposing official records with recollections of those involved in censorship, while certainly insightful (e.g., Boyer 2003, Ganti 2009, Mazzarella 2013), can only approximate the thickness of traditional ethnography, as Dominic Boyer (2003:514-515) notes while discussing the limitations of his historical ethnography of censors in the German Democratic Republic. …