Kisaeng: A Sociopolitical History of Entertainment Labor in Korea, 1900–1950

Abstract

This dissertation is a labor history of the early-twentieth-century kisaeng, a class of women entertainers in Korea whose labor comprised a fluid combination of musical performance and sexual commerce. While the figure of the kisaeng had existed under different names and in varying roles over centuries, the combination of the abolition of the caste system and the encroachment of Japanese colonial rule at the turn of the twentieth century caused the kisaeng to be released from their previous matrilineal caste status and a system of state patronage into a competitive, police-regulated entertainment labor market. The colonial state’s subsequent bifurcation of the kisaeng into licensed sex workers and licensed musical entertainers through state-mandated licensing and increasingly corporatized management systems sets the stage for this dissertation’s account of the kisaeng’s labor actions, radical anti-imperialist activities, and struggles against criminalization from within Korea’s entertainment districts. The history of the kisaeng presented here relies on an archival study of colonial-period periodicals, police reports, colonial bank records, and sparse but extant autobiographical writings and testimonials by kisaeng of the early-twentieth century. The reading of these materials is inflected through a careful study of influential politico-ideological discourses and activities in East Asia’s interwar period and of the politico-economic context of colonial-capitalist development in Korea. By positioning the early-twentieth-century kisaeng as composite entertainment laborers who were intimately attuned to the workings of colonial capital, I furnish a reading of imperial capitalism’s impact on precarious and marginalized labor and particularly on women’s state-regulated entertainment work, and of the failure of the political Left in colonial Korea to recognize the sovereignty and political consciousness of entertainment workers. While the kisaeng have generally been historicized as subaltern subjects in an account of Japanese colonialism’s violence against Korean women in general, I aim to reframe the kisaeng as laboring people with complicated and contradictory relations to their work, to capital, and to the state, whose lives hold meanings more broadly than as symbols of colonialism’s emasculation of the nation and whose relevance extends to sexual commerce in modern-day South Korea. The study of how the kisaeng navigated and expressed their sometimes revolutionary and often contradictory desires against the forces of state regulation, capitalist exploitation, and public censure, resists seamless interpolations into accounts of abject victimhood in existing nationalist discussions of women’s sex-and-entertainment labor. In counterpoint to the rich body of existing musicological studies of the kisaeng, and to the field of music studies at large, this history of the kisaeng enacts a turn from the study of “artists” to the study of “laboring people,” departing from the question of how a focus on artists and artistic production can lend itself to abstraction from histories of capitalist systems. From the way that the artistic labor of kisaeng was forcibly separated from and protected over the sexual labor of kisaeng in discursive and judicial means during the colonial period, to the way that the kisaeng is recuperated today through a focus on their artistic legacy over their composite entertainment labor, it is possible to see how the sexual labor was seen as an abhorrent form of commodification, while the artistic labor was seen as an abstract labor of love which resists or floats above classification as “transaction” or relations of exchange. In this sense, this labor history of the kisaeng also serves as a site to explore how the delimitation of an artist always produces, at the same time that it erases, foils separated by classed, racial, and moral hierarchies of work.