The Government Courtesan: State Slavery, Gender, and Performance in Chosŏn Korea, 1392-1910

Hyun Suk Park
Asian Languages and Cultures
UC Los Angeles

My first book project, “The Government Courtesan: State Slavery, Gender, and Performance in Chosŏn Korea, 1392-1910,” explores the intersections of slavery, gender, and performance in Korean literature of the Chosŏn period by focusing on the music and dance performance of “government courtesans (kwan’gi),” female performers of hereditary base status registered by the government. It addresses questions concerning how the performances enacted through the degraded bodies of courtesans naturalize, legitimize, and reinforce the sovereign power of the dynastic state, and how they simultaneously recall the primordial violence, symbolic and physical, involved in the process of social stratification constituting the foundation of sovereignty. It also examines how courtesan performance represents state power as multivalent and unstable through its frequent incorporation of heterogeneous elements crossing the boundaries of gender, hereditary social status, and Confucian rules of decorum, as exemplified by martial entertainment offered by cross-dressing courtesans. This project draws on a variety of literary and historical primary materials both in classical Chinese and in Korean, including documents from the royal palace, travel writings by Korean and Chinese emissaries, and prose and poetry by government officials and courtesans.