Women Gendered Hospitality, and (Trans)Nationalism in Postcolonial Cold War Korea.
Open Access DepositedThe Making of Kisaeng Tourism
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This dissertation examines the historical phenomenon known as kisaeng tourism, which flourished in South Korea during the postcolonial Cold War from the 1960s through the 1980s. It argues that kisaeng tourism cannot be explained simply as a euphemism for sex tourism or reduced to an authoritarian, state-managed prostitution system driven by militarized misogyny, developmental economic priorities such as the pursuit of foreign exchange, or U.S. and Japanese dominance, as much existing scholarship suggests. Instead, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s theory of conditional hospitality, which emphasizes the host’s authority to regulate the guest, this study reconceptualizes kisaeng tourism as a historically layered and politically consequential regime of gendered hospitality through which South Korea negotiated sovereignty amid profound foreign dependency. Rooted in a longue durée tradition of diplomatic hosting that mobilized kisaeng’s cultural performance and intimacy since the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392), this dissertation shows how gendered practices of reception enabled the state to perform its authority by transforming diplomacy and economic development into rituals of hosting.This dissertation also demonstrates that kisaeng tourism developed through the interdependent and dialectical dynamics of state and nonstate actors. Following the 1965 Korea–Japan Normalization Treaty and the surge of Japanese male tourists, the cultural dimension of kisaeng entertainment eroded as bottom-up actors entered the expanding tourism economy in pursuit of profit, contributing to the industry’s increasing sexualization. As the boundary between kisaeng entertainment and sex work blurred, more Koreans became intermediaries or facilitators, and women from other sectors of the entertainment industry joined this market as well. The distinction between elite yojŏng (kisaeng houses) and lower-tier commercial sex venues thus became increasingly difficult to sustain. At the center of this project are women’s roles as indispensable historical agents. Rather than treating women as victims of authoritarian regimes and patriarchal society, this study foregrounds their everyday strategies of mobility, respectability, and survival amid structural constraints. It examines anti–kisaeng tourism activism and the transnational politics of feminist and Christian women’s movements across Korea, Japan, and the West. The dissertation then turns to Korean local wives of Japanese men (hyŏnjich’ŏ) to show how transnational intimacy extended the world of kisaeng tourism into domestic life and became a site where women contested imposed moral regulation shaped by patriarchal and nationalist norms. Finally, through oral history interviews with former female entertainers, the dissertation not only highlights kisaeng tourism as lived experience but also challenge the notions of respectability and national belonging, rooted in purity and victimhood, that have long determined what can be recorded, narrated, and recognized as “legitimate” historical knowledge about women’s sexuality in contemporary Korea. Drawing on sources from North Korea, Japan, West Germany, and the United States, as well as South Korean government documents, media and visual sources, women’s autobiographies, and oral history interviews, this interdisciplinary project recovers kisaeng tourism as a critical yet erased chapter of modern Korean history.
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