“Kisaeng Awakening”: Colonial-Korean Women’s Entertainment Work and Spectacles of Political Agency

Even though the kisaeng (women in state-regulated entertainment work) of colonial Korea waged labor actions throughout the 1920s and 1930s and were often involved in organized anti-imperialist actions, popular portrayals of the kisaeng during the colonial period cast their lives as futureless and non-viable and the kisaeng themselves as devoid of agency. The kisaeng’s perceived lack of agency was presented as a social problem by socialist intellectuals promulgating an agenda for national and social liberation and by feminists envisioning new modes of autonomy for Korean women. This talk explores how such abject portrayals of the kisaeng trafficked in a particular aesthetic of political agency by producing fantasies of a “kisaeng awakening” while disregarding less spectacular ways the kisaeng aimed to extend their survival under oppressive structures. The talk then reflects on how the kisaeng themselves often performed such spectacles of awakening in the process of trying to make their lives matter to dominant society, even as their lives exceeded such narrow rubrics of political agency.