Dedicating the Immortals’ Peach to Your Majesty: The Courtesan Performances for Lady Hyegyŏng in 1795

Abstract The article discusses how courtesan performances were involved in constructing the theatrical dimension of royal power in Chosŏn by focusing on the banquet to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Lady Hyegyŏng (Hyegyŏng Kung Hong Ssi 惠慶宮 洪氏, 1735–1815), King Chŏngjo’s 正祖 (r. 1776–1800) mother, which followed the royal procession of King Chŏngjo to the mausoleum of his father, Prince Sado (Sado seja 思悼世子, 1735–1762), located in Suwŏn 水原 in Kyŏnggi 京畿 Province. The major works of courtesan court performances in royal banquets of Chosŏn enacted narratives in which courtesans played the roles of mediators who delivered auspicious objects from the divine world to the king. Courtesans were able to stage the unorthodox divine kingship, paradoxically because they were constructed as dehumanized liminal figures in state slavery practices and thus shared nonhuman qualities with the kings who were imagined as elevated liminal figures in divine kingship. The political implications of courtesan performances simultaneously were made equivocal, as some works of performance were focused on providing gendered entertainment to the audience. The sexualized bodies of courtesans on the stages of state rites therefore produced a sexualized form of royal sovereignty that preserved the traces of the primordial violence that constituted absolute kingship.