Decommodifying the Kisaeng: Women’s Waged Entertainment Labor in Korea’s Transition to Capitalism

PLEASE NOTE: For non-Columbia guests, registration is required to access the Morningside campus 24 hours prior to the event. After registering you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by 11:30 AM on Tuesday, March 24 for campus access.

Names will be submitted for QR codes 1-2 days prior to the event and subsequently reviewed. Registrants will receive an email from CU Guest Access with the QR code before or on the day of the event.

Speaker: Laurie Lee, Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania

Laurie Lee is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. She researches music’s place in the lives of laboring people and in histories of racial capitalist systems, with a research focus on the twentieth century in Korea. She received her PhD in music from Harvard University and BA in music from the University of Chicago. Her work has been supported by grants from Harvard University’s Korea Institute, the Korea Foundation, and the Academy of Korean Studies.

This talk focuses on the colonial period in Korea (1910–1945) and its immediate aftermath, tracing the transformation of kisaeng—a class of women entertainment workers—from a hereditary caste under Korean court patronage to waged entertainment workers managed by the colonial state and capital. While the colonial state’s enforcement of an exploitative union system galvanized kisaeng to organize and demand remuneration for historically unpaid work and to align themselves with the colony’s proletariat, the kisaeng’s transition from feudal patronage to waged labor prompted accusations from Korean social elites and ideologues that the kisaeng had “fallen” from their pre-capitalist past and that their arts had been compromised by colonial capital.

This narrative of the kisaeng’s “fall” from a system of state patronage to that of exchange on a capitalist market animated widespread calls for the eradication of the kisaeng system among nationalist reformists, socialists, and feminists, and significantly took the form of an anti-capitalist critique. The ultimate dismantling of the kisaeng system, achieved through feminists’ successful lobbying of the US military government after liberation from Japan, has been seen as a generally liberatory outcome achieved by anti-colonial interests. This talk recasts the kisaeng’s formal “disappearance” as the result of an anti-kisaeng campaign that did not seek to get rid of kisaeng labor but rather to absorb it into the unpaid work of the new, modern family and into the decommodified labor of the post-colonial “artist.”

This event is co-hosted by the Department of Music and the Center for Korean Research.