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Gender Politics in Performance and Acceptance of Female Gukgeuk in 1950s.

Je Hye Kim 1

1이화여자대학교

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ABSTRACT

This essay explores how gender politics was deployed in the performance and acceptance of Female Gukgeuk(FG) in relation to the socio-cultural contexts of 1950s in Korea. I approach 1950s in Korea as a time when tradition and the desire for Western modernization were merged or negotiated, and social arrangements of gender norms were radically reconstructed. I aim to examine the social causes and implications of FG's great popularity and to evaluate the limitations and possibilities of FG by analyzing the testimonies of FG performers and female audiences and the representations of FG in the printed mass media. While FG was perceived as a regressive performance form in that it was a traditional music theatre rooted in premodern narratives, FG found its modern form in the enhancement of spectacles, daring sexual and romantic expressions in love relationships, and the theatrical advancement of Changgeuk. By aligning femininity with premodernity, however, FG in dominant discourses was portrayed as an anti-modern women's genre. With both anxiety and curiosity, FG flirted with gender transgression through male impersonation and cross-dressing performances and it produced a resistant pleasure to cross the gender border and provoked homo-eroticism, which undermined the seemingly male-dominant FG narratives. However, conventional disdain for female Chang singers, the sexual division of labor within FG theatre troupes, and gender inequity in private life restricted and diluted FG performers's challenges on stage.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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