Reproducing Confucian Patriarchy in Korean Mask Dance (Gamyeon-Geuk): Critical Discourse and Gender Analysis of Hahoe and Bongsan Talchum

Abstract

This article examines how Confucianism becomes religionized through ritual performance in Korean mask dance drama (gamyeon-geuk), focusing on Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori and Bongsan Talchum. It argues that these performances should not be understood only as folk entertainment or carnivalesque satire, but as ritualized forms that mediate divine and ancestral witnessing, communal publicity, and gendered moral evaluation. Within this ritual horizon, laughter, music, embodied movement, masks, props, and stage choreography distribute authority, visibility, speaking positions, and standards of judgment. Methodologically, the study employs multimodal critical discourse analysis of contemporary full-length performance recordings, treating language, movement, staging, costume, props, and audience response as an integrated semiotic field. Across both repertoires, female figures are repeatedly configured as silent or constrained speaking subjects, as visible carriers of moral disorder, or as expendable intermediaries within marital and status hierarchies, while male characters more consistently occupy positions of interpretation, judgment, and ritual agency. By foregrounding ritualized spectatorship as a process of moral common-sense production, the article contributes to debates on Confucianism as lived religion and shows how performance can stage critique while reauthorizing Confucian patriarchal order.

1. Introduction

In Korean mask dance drama (gamyeon-geuk), performance is often not a free-standing “artistic activity” detached from religion, but a ritual action embedded in village rites, tutelary-spirit worship, and the seasonal life of festivals. Under the presupposition that gods and ancestors are “present” as significant witnesses, masks, embodied techniques, sound, and spatial organization translate “what counts as proper” and “what counts as disorder” into a moral framework that becomes visible, sensorially graspable, and socially judgeable. The broader moral horizon sustaining this framework draws on several intersecting Confucian principles. Ritual propriety (ye), righteousness (ui), integrity (yeom), and shame (chi) provide the evaluative vocabulary through which conduct is sorted into proper and improper categories. Status order (myeongbun) determines who may speak, act, and be seen in public. The inside-outside division (nae-oe) regulates the boundary between female domestic space and male public space. For female figures specifically, the Confucian codes of samjongsa deok and jungjong further organize what counts as virtuous womanhood. Samjongsa deok prescribes the three obediences and four virtues that define a woman’s proper conduct across the domains of speech, appearance, behavior, and domestic work. Jungjong prescribes lifelong devotion to one husband. Together these codes do not merely describe gender roles. They provide the moral grammar through which female figures in performance are evaluated, judged, and found wanting.

Therefore, this article is concerned not only with “who is mocked,” but with how ritualized spectatorship distributes authority, speaking positions, and standards of propriety, and how certain ethical arrangements can become commonsensical through repetition. Drawing on a Durkheimian perspective, the discussion approaches such collective performances as occasions that may generate shared evaluative frameworks and moral visibility (Durkheim 1995). This is not intended as a claim of uniform or total social effect across all audiences or contexts; rather, the aim is to clarify the representational and interpretive mechanisms through which gendered moral categories are staged and made available for communal judgment.

Historical context is therefore approached not as a way of recovering a single original meaning, but as the accumulated moral framework that makes ridicule, shame, and failure publicly recognizable. This framing also clarifies why carnivalesque laughter should not be equated with structural resistance. In gamyeon-geuk, satire may expose the failure of yangban, monks, or patriarchal authority, but it often does so by drawing on inherited vocabularies of propriety, shame, discipline, and status. Ridicule can therefore unsettle prestige while also reaffirming the evaluative terms through which authority, disgrace, and gendered disorder become socially recognizable. This point is important for the present study because it explains how performance can stage critique while still making Confucian-patriarchal moral categories available for communal judgment.

Methodologically, it employs multimodal critical discourse analysis (multimodal CDA) to analyze full-length recordings of contemporary performances of both repertoires, triangulating them with scripts and secondary scholarship as contextual layers (Song and Park 2025). Because the study analyzes recorded performance rather than written text alone, it approaches dialogue, silence, embodied movement, spatial blocking, masks, costume iconography, props, scene closure, and audience response as interconnected semiotic resources. Drawing on Fairclough’s three-tier model linking text, discursive practice, and social structure, these elements are examined not in isolation but as mutually reinforcing resources through which performance produces, reproduces, and occasionally contests power relations, particularly gendered hierarchies and Confucian moral categories. More specifically, the analysis examines how these elements interact within particular scenes to construct authority, disorder, gendered positioning, and moral judgment, while remaining attentive to tension and ambiguity in performance. The interpretive framework employed is elaborated in full in Section 4.

This article has three interrelated aims. First, it identifies how ritual practice, narrative structure, and performance conventions distribute speaking positions, visibility, and authority. Second, it examines how gendered roles are positioned within Confucian marital, status, and shame orders. Third, it explains how contemporary heritage transmission helps stabilize these meanings as teachable and repeatable forms.

The article proceeds as follows. Section 2 provides the historical and institutional background of gamyeon-geuk, situating it within contemporary heritage governance and the distinct performance ecologies of Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori and Bongsan Talchum. Section 3 reviews the relevant literature across three intersecting fields: ritual and religious performance studies, gender representation in mask drama, and multimodal critical discourse theory. Section 4 details the multimodal CDA methodology and the evidentiary corpus of contemporary full-length recordings. Section 5 presents scene-level analyses of both repertoires, organized around the four analytical dimensions of speech distribution, embodied technique and blocking, mask and costume iconography, and narrative sequencing. Section 6 offers a comparative map of shared mechanisms and points of divergence across the two traditions. Section 7 discusses the implications of these findings for understanding how carnivalesque critique and patriarchal reproduction can coexist within ritual performance. Section 8 draws conclusions and considers directions for future research and heritage practice.

2. Background

This section situates gamyeon-geuk within its contemporary institutional context, focusing on how intangible-heritage governance, UNESCO designation, and preservation-association transmission systems shape the conditions under which Confucian-patriarchal moral imaginaries are staged, repeated, and naturalized. It also specifies the distinct performance ecologies of Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori and Bongsan Talchum that inform the comparative analysis in Section 5.

In recent years, ICH has attracted renewed attention in both scholarly and public arenas. This article does not treat ICH as a neutral framework of “protection,” but as an institutional field that reshapes the terms of transmission through designation, safeguarding, and transmission. Within this chain, what becomes teachable, repeatable, and representational is often determined by interpretive authority and value hierarchies. In the case of gamyeon-geuk, institutionalized transmission does not necessarily eliminate polysemy; rather, through repeated performance and retelling it may selectively stabilize moral imaginaries of authority, propriety, and gender order. Previous studies often describe gamyeon-geuk as a hybrid of dance, slapstick, and satire, highlighting its ridicule of yangban elites, precept-breaking monks, and social hypocrisy, and it is frequently read through a Bakhtinian lens of carnivalesque reversal (Bakhtin 1984). While a carnivalesque reading is important, I develop this point more fully in the discussion to clarify how licensed inversion can coexist with ritual reproduction.

When re-situated within local rites and related ritual contexts, performance is not merely entertainment appended to ritual. It is a collective practice through which boundaries and role ethics are repeatedly rehearsed. In such settings, laughter and humiliation can also help make particular evaluative frames shareable and durable as everyday criteria.

A further blind spot concerns the “transparency illusion” of historical sources: filmic records and textual materials are not neutral windows onto a premodern past but cultural artifacts shaped by recorder positionality and regimes of seeing. In the case of Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori, colonial-period survey photographs and visual records, through repeated viewing, citation, and scholarly uptake—can in turn shape how later audiences come to “recognize” tradition (Heo 2022). As a result, this article treats historical accounts, images, and textual materials as contextual reference points for tracing how “tradition” has been produced through documentation, reconstruction, and institutionalized preservation, rather than as transparent evidence of an “original” form. In contemporary contexts, both Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori and Bongsan Talchum circulate through institutional transmission, including preservation associations, training systems, and recurring performances, within a broader heritage framework. Although UNESCO’s 2022 inscription has drawn increased outside attention, its significance appears to lie more in symbolic recognition and international visibility than in any fundamental transformation of everyday rehearsal or performance practice.

Discussions of Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori performances often characterize them as more tightly embedded in village ritual and communal well-being contexts. Bongsan Talchum is commonly understood as developing under more outward-facing conditions of circulation and spectatorship (Choi, ㄘ, and Lee, as cited in 55).

Rather than treating this contrast as a developmental timeline, I use it as a heuristic for specifying how moral judgment becomes visible, assessable, and stageable across different performance ecologies. The point is not that one is more ritual and the other more theatrical in any absolute sense, but that conditions of presentation shape how authority, disorder, and evaluation are organized and made discussable through performance.

Their differences should therefore be read in terms of distinct performance ecologies and degrees of ritual embedding, rather than a simple “religion versus entertainment” binary. Placing them side by side thus helps this article examine how Confucian-patriarchal ethics are repeatedly naturalized and reproduced through ritualized spectatorship across distinct staging environments.

Both traditions are widely recognized for episodes that satirize yangban and monks, indicating that the “misconduct” of authority can be repeatedly staged as a morally readable event. Even in locales where Confucian elites were prominent, satire of yangban or Confucian literati does not necessarily amount to anti-Confucianism. Instead, it often presupposes Confucian vocabularies of propriety and moral failure, translating elite lapses into shareable, nameable deviations (Deuchler 1992). Satire, in other words, frequently operates within Confucian moral logic by dramatizing the gap between normative ideals and lived conduct. What becomes laughable is not merely “authority” as such, but authority failing to embody the very standards by which it claims legitimacy. This is why a more explicit historical contextualization supports the present argument: it specifies the moral terms that make satire legible and that allow performance to render authority publicly judgeable.

3. Literature Review

This section reviews three intersecting strands of research that orient the present study. The first treats gamyeon-geuk as a medium of traditional knowledge and transmission. The second emphasizes rituality, satire, carnivalesque inversion, and the sacrality of performance objects. The third examines how female figures are positioned within Confucian patriarchal frameworks.

Research on gamyeon-geuk has developed in several related directions, but these strands have not always been brought into sustained analytical dialogue. Recent studies of Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori, including Seo and Shin (2025), Lee and Shin (2023), and Yanhui (2025), are useful for showing that Hahoe should not be understood simply as secular folk entertainment detached from ritual context. Like these authors, this article approaches Hahoe as a living ritual-performance tradition. At the same time, it places slightly different emphasis on how rituality becomes visible through performance mechanisms such as speech distribution, spatial arrangement, props, masks, and scene closure. Where these studies focus on whether and how rituality persists, the present article asks how it operates as a mechanism for gendered moral evaluation. Where these studies focus on whether and how rituality persists, the present article asks how it operates as a mechanism for gendered moral evaluation.

A related line of scholarship, including Saeji (2012, 2017), Smertin (2024), and Song and Park (2025), has clarified genre specificity, spectatorship, satire, and traditional knowledge transmission in Korean mask dance. Building on these studies, the present article asks how ritualized performance distributes authority, visibility, and moral standing across gendered positions. In this sense, the article does not treat genre complexity, satire, or traditional knowledge only as descriptive concerns, but considers how they participate in the organization of gendered moral evaluation. None of these studies, however, asks how the transmission of traditional knowledge becomes a mechanism for reproducing Confucian gender hierarchy.

Ha (2015) is a useful contextual reference for understanding gendered embodiment and patriarchal hierarchy in Korean performance culture. Building on this broader insight, the present article turns to contemporary full-length performances of Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori and Bongsan Talchum to examine how ritualized spectatorship and multimodal performance mechanisms make Confucian-patriarchal role ethics publicly perceptible and repeatable.

Gendered representation forms another important point of contact. Drawing on Chan E. Park, Saeji (2017) shows that female figures in Korean mask dance often operate within a “patriarchal imagination,” where women’s presence is more readily organized as a vehicle of laughter than as a source of dignity or interpretive authority. Building on this observation, the present article examines how such comic positioning becomes a multimodal mechanism of gendered moral evaluation, especially through speech restriction, bodily display, spatial marginalization, and ritual closure.

This article also engages feminist and sexuality-centered readings that examine how female characters are positioned within androcentric storylines and patriarchal family structures. Such work is valuable because it shows that women on stage are often treated less as autonomous agents than as objects of exchange, ridicule, desire, or disposal within male-centered narrative worlds. The relevance of this scholarship lies not simply in its identification of patriarchal representation, but in its attention to how repeated performance conventions stabilize constrained models of womanhood for public recognition and evaluation. This concern helps explain why the present study asks not only how patriarchy is represented, but how it is reproduced through speech distribution, embodied movement, spatial arrangement, props, masks, and scene closure.

Confucian gender ethics further prescribe specific codes of conduct for women across different life stages. Samjongjido, or the three obediences, requires a woman to follow her father before marriage, her husband during marriage, and her son after her husband’s death. Jungjong prescribes lifelong devotion to one husband. These codes do not remain abstract doctrine. They organize the interpretive frameworks through which female conduct is evaluated in performance. A woman who fails to embody these obligations does not simply fall short of an ideal. She becomes readable as a source of disorder within the moral community. This helps explain why female figures in gamyeon-geuk who deviate from prescribed roles tend to be absorbed into laughter or ritual closure rather than sustained as subjects whose grievances demand a response.

Judith Butler’s account of gender performativity is useful here because it treats gender not as an inner essence but as an effect of reiterated acts and citational conventions (Butler 1990, 1993). Applied to gamyeon-geuk, this perspective helps illuminate how repeated gestures, vocal styles, and bodily routines sediment recognizable forms of femininity and masculinity on stage. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence further clarifies why these evaluative arrangements can appear natural rather than imposed. Hierarchy is reproduced when classificatory schemes are misrecognized as common sense and carried by recognition, affect, and everyday judgment rather than overt force (Bourdieu 2001).

A related problem concerns voice and representation. Spivak’s distinction between Darstellung (symbolic portrayal) and Vertretung (speaking-for) is especially helpful because it shows that placing "women" on stage does not necessarily produce conditions under which women can speak from an authorized subject position (Spivak 1988). This is not to claim that performers in mask dance drama were socially elite; historically, many were non-elite, and in some contexts performance was associated with low-status labor. The point is instead that stage representation can substitute for voice. Female figures may be highly visible as objects of communal evaluation while the terms through which they are understood remain organized by inherited performance vocabularies rather than by women’s own participation in authorized speech.

Research on transmission, rituality, satire, and gender in Korean mask dance has developed in parallel, but these dimensions are rarely examined together within contemporary full-length performance. No existing study has analyzed how they operate collectively as multimodal mechanisms of Confucian patriarchal reproduction in contemporary gamyeon-geuk. The present article addresses this gap through multimodal critical discourse analysis of Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori and Bongsan Talchum.

4. Method

This study employs multimodal critical discourse analysis. Its evidentiary strategy is deliberately present-performance oriented: the core multimodal dataset consists of contemporary, full-length performance recordings of Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori and Bongsan Talchum, supplemented by scripts, scene descriptions, and secondary accounts as contextual layers rather than as proxies for current practice.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) approaches discourse as a site where power relations are produced, reproduced, and contested (Fairclough 1995; van Dijk 1998). Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of text, discursive practice, and social practice, this study examines language, movement, and staging as mutually reinforcing semiotic resources rather than isolated elements. CDA treats discourse not merely as description but as a site of ideological and social struggle (Fairclough 1995; van Dijk 1998). Fairclough further argues that discourse is ideological insofar as it helps sustain relations of domination, and in later work expands semiosis to include visual and other semiotic modes beyond language (Fairclough 1995).

Foucault’s concept of discourse as a system of statements that defines and delimits fields of knowledge, and his account of the power/knowledge nexus, have also deeply shaped CDA. For Foucault, power operates through discursive practices that generate subject positions and normalize particular ways of seeing and acting (1977). In the present context, this perspective helps explain how repeated public ritual performances may make particular gender orders appear as truth.

CDA therefore aims to uncover hidden ideologies in texts and practices, increasingly foregrounding multimodality, including visual design, photography, film, and performance (Roderick 2018). This multi-layered understanding is particularly relevant for gamyeon-geuk. The form combines verbal scripts, bodily movement, mask imagery, spatial arrangement, and audience response as interlocked semiotic resources.

Specifically, the allocation of “speech versus silence” identifies whether a character is granted a discursive position from which claims can be stated and defended. A character who appears only through lamentation, complaint, and fragmented utterances codes “propriety” as restraint and silence. Excessive speech and shame-worthy language codes “boundary violation.”

Materials and Data Sources

The present-performance focus is also a methodological response to how “transmission” operates under contemporary intangible-heritage conditions. Korean scholarship on intangible heritage has emphasized that transmission is not a neutral relay of an unchanged past but a process in which performance practices are reorganized through institutional arrangements, training ecologies, funding mechanisms, and performance environments (Park and Kim 2020; Park 2021, 2022). Recent studies further highlight that contemporary gamyeon-geuk performances should be understood as historically layered outcomes shaped by heritage governance, preservation associations, and state-supported transmission systems rather than as transparent access to a single historical origin. Comparative research on national intangible heritage systems likewise shows that transmission is structured by institutional mechanisms such as funding programs, evaluation criteria, and cultural policy frameworks that actively shape what forms of performance become recognized, teachable, and repeatable within official heritage regimes (Jeong 2024). From this perspective, what appears on stage in present-day performances reflects not only historical inheritance but also the institutional environments that regulate training, certification, and public presentation.

In light of these conditions, this study treats contemporary full-length recordings as the primary evidentiary corpus because they preserve the interaction of language, movement, staging, props, and audience response as an integrated semiotic field. This orientation also aligns with the UNESCO inscription description of gamyeon-geuk, which stresses that performances can be staged in open space and that audiences actively participate with cheers and jeers as the drama unfolds (UNESCO 2022).

To strengthen traceability and version control, the analysis relies on publicly accessible full-run performance recordings and explicitly records the source, upload date, and performance provenance for each video. For Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori, the primary recording analyzed is the full-length YouTube video uploaded on 18 July 2023 by Hahoe Folk Village, titled Hahoe Folk Village, which includes on-screen subtitles and preserves the complete performance sequence. For Bongsan Talchum, the primary material is the full-length video of the 77th (2024) regular performance publicly disseminated by the Bongsan Mask dance-Drama Preservation Society. Scripts and secondary accounts are used only as contextual layers, rather than as proxies for current practice, and analytic claims are grounded in observable features of contemporary performances. Where relevant, recent institutional policy documents and heritage support programs are referenced solely to clarify the contemporary transmission environment in which regular performances circulate (Jeong 2024).

Using publicly available full-length recordings on YouTube is appropriate for this study for three reasons. First, full-run videos provide continuous access to an entire staged enactment, allowing the analysis to track scene sequencing, speech distribution, and embodied interaction without relying on excerpted clips. Second, because these recordings document performances presented under contemporary heritage conditions, they offer direct evidence of how the traditions are enacted in current practice rather than only as textual reconstructions. Third, the selected Hahoe recording includes on-screen subtitles, which enables more precise identification of dialogue segments and the distribution of speech and silence. For analytical transparency, I repeatedly reviewed the full-length recordings, documented key moments with timestamps, and anchored interpretive claims in observable performance features.

These theoretical resources are operationalized through four interrelated analytical dimensions, each of which is applied consistently to scene-level evidence drawn from the contemporary performance recordings:

(1) Narrative structure and scene sequencing: This dimension examines how episodes move through entrance, encounter, escalation, and resolution. It considers how conflicts are introduced, how attention is redirected, and how endings reshape the meaning of preceding actions. Particular attention is given to ritual passages, blessing scenes, deaths, exits, and soul-pacification rites, because these moments often transform disorder into a settled theatrical event. Sequence is therefore treated as a semiotic device through which performance assigns responsibility, manages affect, and makes conflict publicly intelligible.

(2) Distribution of speech and silence: The analysis identifies who is granted extended lines and interpretive authority, who appears only through cries, lamentation, complaint, or fragmented utterances, and who remains entirely silent. It then assesses whether a character is afforded a discursive position from which claims can be stated and defended. Restraint and silence are traced as recurring encodings of propriety, while excessive speech and unruly language are read as encodings of boundary violation, shame, and disorder (Fairclough 1995; Foucault 1977).

(3) Bodily movement, spatial positioning, and performance technique: This dimension treats the madang as a moral and spatial field where authority, disorder, and gendered evaluation are organized through movement. It examines how characters enter, occupy, cross, or leave space, and how gesture, gait, pursuit, physical contact, exposure, and removal turn ethical boundaries into visible action. It also considers cross-gender performance as a repeated staging of femininity through bodily signs that invite public recognition and judgment within ritualized spectatorship (Butler 1990, 1993).

(4) Mask and costume iconography: The analysis traces how masks, costumes, and props mark decorum versus licentiousness, desirability versus repulsiveness, and legitimacy versus shame, thereby fixing status and “female virtue” in visible form. It also considers the asymmetrical visual authorization of roles: female characters are frequently coded through shame, ugliness, or seductiveness, while male characters are more often pre-authorized through signs of authority, wisdom, or religiosity. Features such as beards, noses, and wrinkles are examined as visual devices that materialize gendered and classed identities (Saeji 2012).

5. Results

I place Hahoe and Bongsan side by side without presuming a shared origin. The two traditions developed in distinct performance ecologies, a distinction Jeon (2007) draws between repertoires embedded in village ritual festivals and those shaped by more outward-facing conditions of transmission. The analyses below examine how laughter, embodied technique, and role frameworks render Confucian moral imaginaries perceptible across both traditions, including patriarchal gender ethics, status order, role propriety, and shame-based moral regulation, while simultaneously staging critique. To improve readability, the following sections separate shared mechanisms from repertoire-specific evidence and move from general performance conventions to concrete scene-level analysis.

• Male Cross-Dressing and Ritual Fecundity

In gamyeon-geuk, many central female roles have long been performed by male actors. In Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori, these roles include the bride (gaksi), the female entertainer (bune), and the old woman (halmi), while in Bongsan Talchum they include the courtesan-like figure (somu) and the elderly female figure more specifically designated as Miyal Halmi.

This study treats male cross-dressing not simply as an inherited convention but as an identifiable performative mechanism. Through repeatable bodily, vocal, and scenic cues, it shapes what femininity can look and sound like on stage and renders gendered role propriety readily recognizable and open to collective judgment in performance. As discussed in the literature review, gender performativity is useful here not because male actors literally “become women,” but because repeated stage practices organize femininity through a limited repertoire of recognizable signs. In gamyeon-geuk, these signs may include tiny steps, partially concealed faces, coy laughter, exaggerated bodily unruliness, loud or chaotic complaints, marked gait, hip and waist movement, selective bodily exposure, and the staged display of bodily functions (Butler 1990, 1993). This process is not neutral. It compresses femininity into predictable markers that lower the interpretive threshold for distinguishing propriety from transgression and make judgment easier to organize within the parameters of li.

This mechanism becomes especially visible in the staging of female figures such as bune, halmi, and Miyal Halmi. performed by male actors. In the contemporary full-length recordings analyzed here, older female figures are often stylized through a marked gait, conspicuous hip movement, and costume framing that draws attention to the torso; these cues repeatedly help organize audience laughter. By contrast, in Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori, bune is first staged through tiny steps, restrained posture, and carefully managed modesty. When she checks that no one is watching and then squats to urinate, however, this watchable modesty is abruptly converted into laughable bodily transgression. In this way, male-performed femininity does not simply “represent women”; it operates as an evaluative surface through which disorder is made visible, sharable, and morally readable.

Saeji’s performer-centered discussion of performance and heritage transmission is helpful here because it clarifies how cross-gender casting can be sustained as a comic mechanism within institutional contexts. She suggests that cross-gender casting is repeatedly framed as funny in part because unmasking can produce a pleasurable reveal of the male body and invite admiration for performative skill. She also indicates that, when “women” are carried by male bodies, coarse, sexualized, or grotesque femininity can more readily be authorized as comic spectacle rather than approached as women’s embodied self-expression (Saeji 2017).

Saeji further shows that disputes over women’s participation are often entangled with heritage logics of authenticity and transmission. In these debates, women performing women may be treated as “natural” rather than skilled, while women entering men’s roles are more likely to be framed as disrupting the authenticity expected of nationally registered heritage practice (Saeji 2017). These patterns are discussed here as tendencies reported in Saeji’s account rather than as uniform features across all groups or venues.

This configuration also highlights a gap between visibility and interpretive authority. Female figures may be highly exposed on stage while remaining less able to define the terms through which femininity, propriety, or disorder are judged. In this sense, laughter can operate not only as comic release but also as a mechanism through which devaluation is shared, normalized, and made to feel like common sense. The scene-based analyses that follow trace these dynamics through specific bodily cues, prop use, spatial positioning, and audience response (Spivak 1988; Bourdieu 2001).

5.1. Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori

Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori has historically been associated with the broader ritual context of byeolsingut, a village rite oriented toward divine protection, prosperity, and the expulsion of misfortune. Within this broader ritual context, mask dance has served as an important performative component through which the community publicly stages and negotiates the boundaries of proper and improper behavior before tutelary powers and ancestors (Saeji 2012). In Durkheimian terms, the performance creates a liminal sacred time in which the group experiences collective effervescence and renews its sense of being a Confucian patriarchal community (Durkheim 1995).

5.1.1. Mask and Costume Iconography

In gamyeon-geuk, masks are not neutral props. They often operate as “material theologies” that render social hierarchy and gendered authority immediately legible on stage. In Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori, male masks often feature exaggerated beards, large noses, and pronounced wrinkles. These visual cues compress secondary sexual characteristics, age, and authority into a single face, and they pre-authorize certain figures, from the outset, to speak at length, judge others, and take the initiative in moral or ritual action. In this repertoire, the beard functions as both a bodily sign and symbolic capital, marking the face as publicly “qualified” to embody authority (Bourdieu 2001). Moreover, yangban characters in Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori frequently wear hat ornaments that historically signaled yangban status in the Joseon period. Such sartorial codes are not merely decorative forms of historical realism. They materialize status itself as a class marker that audiences can recognize at a glance. As a result, yangban authority is not established only through dialogue or plot development. It is visually secured at the moment of entrance through the combined force of mask and headgear, which sets the stage for subsequent speech, judgment, and eventual ridicule.

From a performativity perspective, these masks do not merely “represent” gender and rank in Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori but repeatedly teach them as recognizable stage truths. Through the logic of material religion, masks are ritually handled objects believed to carry sacred presence. When such faces are placed on actors within ritual publicity, they help naturalize who can speak, who can judge, and whose body is made available for looking, laughter, and moral evaluation.

5.1.2. Speech Distribution and Female Visibility

In Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori, younger female roles, most notably the courtesan, bune, tend to be coded through stylized modesty and erotic legibility rather than through conspicuous signs of public authority. This unequal visual distribution of authority becomes especially clear in episodes where rank and gender are organized through posture, bodily display, and the allocation of speaking positions. Bune, in particular, is often designed to be watched. Her characterization is carried less by extended speech than by facial coding, choreographed bodily cues, and the reactions she elicits from male figures. Comic momentum is frequently generated through how men approach, appraise, and compete around her, such that her body becomes a focal surface through which desire and moral judgment are organized for spectators. In this sense, even when a female role is highly visible, the conditions of visibility may still privilege being seen over being heard.

5.1.3. Bodily Technique, Spatial Positioning, and Scene Closure

In the third scene, “halmi (elderly female figure)” of the Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori revolves around the old widow halmi’s lament over her misfortune. Although relatively brief, this segment clearly shows how women’s lives are bound to men’s fate. The widow begins by singing: “I had been married for only three days when this happened. If I had known I would become a widow at fifteen, I would not have married… I lived a harsh married life in my parents-in-law’s house… the pink skirt I wore on my wedding day became a handkerchief to wipe my tears; the red skirt became a dishcloth. My husband’s family treated me, the only daughter for three generations, like a servant… (phew).” The widow’s song makes audible what the staging renders spatially self-evident. She has lost not merely a husband but the role through which her social position was defined.

In the present-day performance recording, this structural condition is not merely narrated but embodied and staged. The widow’s spatial marginalization, her labor at the periphery, and her exclusion from central speech positions make the Confucian nae-oe division visible as a lived arrangement rather than an abstract doctrine.

The lyric’s force derives not from being unusual but from being recognizable. Within a Confucian moral order that constitutes women’s worth through relational roles, the widow’s narrative of loss is staged as a structurally legible outcome rather than a personal catastrophe. The heritage performance context in which this episode recurs continues to present the widow’s predicament as moral grammar to be recognized and transmitted rather than as ideology to be questioned (Saeji 2012; Smertin 2024). For the present article, the old widow episode in mask dance is therefore not simply dramatic family conflict. It is an ethical apparatus through which patriarchal order is reiterated, read, and transmitted in public performance.

Within this ethical frame, the widow’s self-narration does not present women’s suffering as accidental misfortune. It appears instead as a structural consequence of displaced status. Once marital status collapses, the woman loses a socially recognizable position within the household and is compelled to sustain survival through labor and submission within her husband’s family order.

The widow is placed in a corner of the stage to perform everyday labor such as spinning thread, singing of poverty and lifelong hardship, and occasionally begging from the audience. Spatially she is fixed at the margins. Narratively she does not intervene in central conflicts.

5.1.4. Narrative Sequencing: The Old Monk Act and the Yangban Scene

The Act 4 episode of Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori, featuring jung, the old monk, and bune, should not be read only as slapstick about clerical misconduct. It also functions as a performance site in which a moral vocabulary takes public form through contemporary performance. This study does not claim access to a single original meaning from the Joseon period. Instead, it treats the historical formation often summarized as Confucian moral orthodoxy and Buddhist marginalization as a durable evaluative grammar, and it asks how that grammar is reactivated through embodied action, spatial arrangement, material signs, and audience-oriented timing.

The sequence analyzed here draws on the full-length contemporary recording of the Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori. While its broad outlines are consistent with the 2007 Hahoe Byulsingut Preservation Society playbook, the following observations concern the specific performance choices, timing, and embodied dynamics visible in the present-day performance.

Jung then verbalizes the breach by declaring that he no longer wishes to be a monk and would rather pursue pleasure with a woman. Even when he briefly returns to self-correction with another invocation, the performance emphasizes the failure of restraint, as he repeatedly moves toward bune, flirts with her, and frames his lust in the idiom of masculine entitlement. When imae enters and mocks the spectacle, jung is exposed, shamed, and forced into a hurried exit, which completes the episode’s public condemnation of clerical hypocrisy.

The episode therefore does not excuse male desire. Instead, it amplifies, vulgarizes, and makes it laughable through repetition and public mockery. At the same time, temptation is made immediately apprehensible through an easily readable bodily cue, namely the act of urination and its sensory trace.

The point here is not to assign moral blame to the woman. Rather, it shows how the performance mobilizes a gendered bodily sign to render the scene’s crisis of discipline immediately legible. The monk remains the principal object of ridicule and disciplinary exposure.

From a multimodal critical discourse perspective, the episode condenses two operations at once. It shames clerical failure through an exaggerated display of lewdness and loss of control. It also distributes moral risk through a semiotic economy. Bune is carried largely by posture, gaze, and choreographed movement rather than extended speech. Jung’s breakdown is staged as an assessable specimen of moral collapse within public spectatorship. The female figure is rendered legible primarily through repeatable bodily cues and comic timing. Ye prescribes her modesty and bodily restraint. Chi ensures that any deviation from this prescribed presentation becomes instantly readable as a transgression. Her visibility is high. Her authority to name or define what is happening is close to zero. The two operations reinforce each other. The more legible her body is as a site of desire, the easier it becomes to route moral risk in her direction while the monk remains the primary object of ridicule.

In the contemporary full-length recordings analyzed here, this distribution makes the representational asymmetry of cross-gender casting observable at the level of scene mechanics. The “female” figure is rendered legible primarily through repeatable bodily cues and comic timing. Propriety and shame are thereby activated as immediately readable coordinates for spectators’ evaluation.

Spivak’s distinction between Darstellung and Vertretung helps specify what is at stake here: heightened visibility of “women” in performance does not automatically translate into an authorized speaking position that can set the terms of propriety, disorder, or moral failure. Under cross-gender casting, femininity is stabilized as a conventional repertoire that organizes judgment in ritualized spectatorship, while the authority to name and justify that judgment tends to remain routed through established discursive and performative conventions rather than through women’s own participation (Spivak 1988).

5.1.5. Speech, Status, and Virility in the Yangban–Seonbi Scene

In Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori, the “noblemen (yangban) and scholar (seonbi)” scene, despite ending in ridicule, can be read from the perspective of reproduction as bringing key patriarchal values into a ritual public arena, where they are reiterated through collective spectatorship and judgment. The sequence opens with a display of Confucian propriety and symbolic capital: two elite figures kneel and exchange formal bows, then compare genealogical pedigree, bureaucratic lineage, and canonical learning. This opening may be understood as staging, before the community, an order of “religious–moral recognizability,” namely, what kinds of persons and what kinds of speech are more readily treated as worthy of acknowledgment. It is important to note that kneeling bows and canonical one-upmanship do not necessarily amount to an unqualified endorsement of the order they cite.

Nevertheless, they do bring “propriety,” “learning,” and “status” into public view as criteria of evaluation. When such gestures and speech genres are repeatedly performed, watched, and understood within a ritual public, some core values of Confucian patriarchy may be reaffirmed at the level of performance.

This rivalry does not remain an abstract display of scholarly credentials; as the scene develops, it also becomes a competition for bune’s favor. Under the men’s boasts of cultivation and noble lineage, bune is positioned as an object through which elite masculinity is displayed and contested. Hence, the rhetorical duel often combines references to the classics with crude anxiety over sexual performance, eventually devolving into a quarrel over the baekjeong (butcher)’s bull testicles. While the men’s hypocrisy is ridiculed, bune again never becomes a speaking moral subject. She is an object of competition and display, not a participant in judgment.

(Dialogue excerpt, summarized)

(They kneel and exchange formal bows.) Yangban: Master seonbi, I am a dignified descendant of the old nobility, the true nobility! My grandfather was a royal chancellor. Seonbi: I too am of the highest noble lineage; my father held an even more exalted office. Yangban: As for learning, I have memorized Four Books and Five Classics by heart. Seonbi (with disdain): “The Four Books and Five Classics? I have mastered the Eight Books and Six Classics.

(This line works as a joke because “Eight Books and Six Classics” is not an actual canonical grouping, but a deliberate exaggeration and distortion of the orthodox “Four Books and Five Classics.”)

Baekjeong (bursting in, holding bull testicles): Who wants to buy these testicles?

Yangban (with disdain): What is that? How vulgar. I’m not buying them.

Baekjeong: When you eat them, nothing’s better for your manhood!

Seonbi: I’ll buy them!

Yangban: This one tried to sell me the item to me first. The balls are mine.

(They wrestle over them; they slip and drop to the ground.)

Halmi (picking it up, scoffing): I have seen them fighting over bull testicles.

Yet once the object is renamed as a resource that can “fill a man with yang energy” and increase “manhood,” both the yangban and the seonbi abruptly reverse course and compete to purchase it. They even dispute who was approached “first.” This turn invites mockery of yangban hypocrisy. It also re-centers male potency as a publicly contestable value.

At the same time, the scene’s closure complicates any straightforward reading of this sequence as simply reaffirming elite masculinity. In the performance, the bull testicles are dropped during the scuffle, and halmi picks up. This transfer can be read as an ironic reversal, because an item verbally framed as enhancing male virility ends up in the hands of a socially marginalized female figure. Since the scene does not specify what she does with them afterward, I treat this moment not as a fixed moral conclusion but as an instance of scene-level ambiguity. It foregrounds male anxiety about virility while also unsettling the masculine authority that the rivalry appears to stage. Depending on interpretive framing, the moment may also sharpen a tension between the rhetoric of virility and the ethical economy of chastity and marital status through which female respectability is rendered recognizable in this repertoire.

Finally, if we situate these scenes within the broader ritual frame of village guardian worship, a more encompassing gendered configuration becomes visible. Across the Hahoe repertoire, male figures tend to occupy structurally central positions as representatives of morality and order. They can speak, fail, and be laughed at, yet remain central, whereas women more often appear as silent brides, peripheral laborers, tempting courtesans, or expendable figures whose suffering stabilizes the patriarchal cosmos. In this sense, Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori draws on the ritual framework of village guardian worship to bind together Confucian gender ethics, sacrificial imagery, and the authorizing presence of male bodies within the performance space.

5.2. Bongsan Talchum

Bongsan Talchum has long circulated through public gathering sites associated with market activity, where large audiences could readily assemble, and it is well known for its vigorous dramatic conflicts (Smertin 2024, p. 493). Here, “market” is used in a limited historical sense to indicate performance circulation through public gathering sites rather than to claim a single commercial origin for the repertoire.

5.2.1. Bodily Technique and Prop Use: The Nojang–Somu Episode

In Bongsan Talchum, the somu mask similarly codes youthful femininity through controlled modesty and erotic legibility rather than through markers of public authority. In the Act 4 “Nojang and Somu” episode, the stage first establishes a sharply asymmetrical distribution of movement that organizes desire and the symbolic authority of religious status in visual terms. The somu figure remains almost entirely in place and dances largely through small sleeve gestures. Her movement vocabulary emphasizes contained, “modest” presentation with minimal traveling steps, so that agency is staged less through spatial initiative than through restrained posture and finely calibrated upper-body cues. By contrast, nojang’s footwork, spatial approach, and bodily closeness provide the main kinetic force that advances the scene.

At the beginning, the somu figure is largely still. She shows a clear reaction only after nojang bumps into her with his buttocks, at which point she shifts slightly. When nojang moves close again, she increases the amplitude of her sleeve movements, yet she still mostly stays where she is. Her response is performed through the upper body and sleeves rather than through steps that would change spatial distance. As a result, the initiative of pursuit is carried almost entirely by nojang’s approach and contact, while the courtesan appears to be drawn into the interactional rhythm more than she actively sets it.

The scene thus links boundary crossing and desire into a continuous, readable chain. Approach and bumping initiate the interaction, the beads visibly mark the breach, and repeated placement pushes the relationship toward tighter bodily coordination. The somu figure’s position is also easily fixed as a narrative trigger of breach of propriety.

Standing, flicking sleeves, and being approached can be enough for desire to be read as emanating from her body. Responsibility for the breach can therefore drift toward the female body at the level of what is made most visible. In this episode, her limited locomotion and sleeve-focused gestures function less as self-directed agency than as a stylized surface onto which male desire and moral evaluation can be projected.

5.2.2. Monkey–Somu and Sexual Disorder

Some transmitted textual versions of Bongsan Talchum include a monkey–somu sequence in which the monkey simulates sexual intercourse with her. Ha (2015), drawing on Lee Du-Hyeon’s version of the shoe-seller scene, records a sequence in which the monkey imitates human action, moves behind somu, and turns mimicry into a staged sexual act. The contemporary Bongsan recordings consulted for this article, including the 77th and 78th regular performances, present this interaction in a much more restrained form. For this reason, I treat the sequence as a supplementary rather than primary scene-level object of analysis. Nevertheless, it remains important because the monkey functions as a vulgar mirror of nojang’s uncontrolled desire, turning monastic failure into an animalized comic spectacle. Within a Confucian moral framework, the scene brings desire into open conflict with ritual propriety (ye) and bodily restraint, making failed discipline publicly visible and open to communal judgment. As Lim (1996) suggests, erotic scenes in mask dance may briefly loosen class boundaries, but this loosening does not overturn the gendered logic of judgment, since the courtesan-like figure remains the main visible sign through which disorder is staged.

A vigorous young male figure (chwibari)’s entrance further intensifies the public visibility of the lower body. After conflict erupts between chwibari and nojang, the Buddhist staff becomes implicated in groin-directed bodily play between the two figures, turning a ritual implement into comic material. From the perspective of carnival grotesque realism, this gesture relocates a sign of religious discipline to the material bodily lower stratum.

After a fight, chwibari drives nojang away. He then dances back to back with somu again and lures her with money. This sequence drags both the symbolic force of religious status and masculine desire down from any untouchable height into a register of slapstick, excess, and ridicule. In Bakhtinian terms, the emphasis on buttocks, groin, bodily contact, and pursuit transforms solemn signs, including the prayer beads, the staff, and the monk’s identity, into comic material.

For these reasons, the episode cannot be reduced to a single-direction “anti-religion” or “anti-patriarchy” message. It works by producing transgression as a public event that a community can watch and recognize. On the one hand, the repeated sequence of placing, discarding, and replacing the beads clearly marks a boundary and renders moral judgment actionable. On the other hand, bumping, groin humiliation, back-to-back dancing, and monetary inducement pull religious status and masculine desire into a theater of ridicule, so that they become objects the community can process through laughter. In other words, the nojang–somu episode materializes transgression as a visible bodily series, and within that same series it can simultaneously reiterate moral boundaries while exposing authority through comic degradation.

5.2.3. Speech, Class, and Authority: The Yangban and Malttugi Scene

In Act 6 of Bongsan Talchum, the “yangban and malttugi (servant)” episode, the scene first stages class relations for all to see through the yangban’s entrance. Three yangban brothers dance as they bark at the servant, placing elite authority at the center of the stage. Malttugi does not confront them head-on. Instead, he repeats what he has just said in a slightly softened tone. On the surface, this reads as compliance, but it keeps the mockery audibly present in the shared public space. As the exchange unfolds, it increasingly resembles a situation in which the “masters” do not grasp that they are being laughed at, while the servant’s wit is sharpened through a rhythm of repetition, paraphrase, and talking back.

When the yangban order malttugi to capture chwibari for stealing government money, the servant remains positioned as the one who “carries out commands.” Yet the sequence that follows repeatedly exposes yangban greed and incompetence. Apprehending the culprit, bringing him onstage, and negotiating terms all confirm the elite’s inability to act with integrity.

5.2.4. Narrative Sequencing and Ritual Closure: Miyal Halmi and Yeonggam

In the old couple “Miyal Halmi and yeonggam (an elderly male figure)” sequence, sexuality and reproduction are not introduced through explicit moral reasoning. Instead, they are condensed into a bodily syntax that becomes readable at a glance. The couple’s synchronized steps, repeated in rhythmic cycles, first establish an anticipatory tempo, after which the choreography shifts into a more explicitly referential enactment of intercourse. Yeonggam lies down and repeatedly shakes a fan held vertically at his lower body so that the fan functions as a clear phallic sign, while Miyal Halmi bounces above it, translating marital sex into an exaggerated but unmistakable stage image. Drawing on anthropological discussions of ritual fecundity, this stylized intercourse can be read as a form of simulative efficacy, in which the imitation of reproductive action becomes a witnessable technology of blessing that summons imaginaries of continuity, vitality, and protection.

However, such scenes should not be understood only as abstract reproductive simulation or purely ritual symbolism. In performance-historical terms, sexual scenes in mask dance were often more explicit in earlier periods, and even in the 1990s could still involve quite direct bodily enactments of intercourse. By contrast, the more stylized bodily contact seen in contemporary performances does not necessarily indicate a weaker sexual meaning, but may instead reflect changes in modern audience ethics, including Christian sexual prudery and the presence of children in the audience.

The provocation, however, also lies in the way this public display rubs against a Confucian moral imaginary that disciplines desire. On the one hand, ritual propriety demands bodily restraint. On the other hand, marriage status absorbs sexuality into household ethics and into the legitimacy of patrilineal continuity. When an intimate act is relocated onto the stage, marital legitimacy and family continuation are converted into visible signs that become briefly discussable through performance.

This bodily staging also sharpens the moral tension of what follows. Only minutes after the sex sequence, Miyal Halmi confronts the fact that yeonggam is entangled with a younger secondary wife at the edge of the stage. Once Miyal Halmi publicly identifies the relationship, the conflict escalates rapidly into face-to-face confrontation and physical struggle. Here the wife and concubine distinction is established less through deliberation than through pointing, bodily collision, and the management of proximity onstage. Miyal Halmi’s mask exaggerates age and unattractiveness, while her bodily performance is choreographed as excessive and out of measure. Her loud complaint is readily converted into comic noise, which makes it harder for her grievance to register as a claim that demands adjudication. The episode ends with Miyal Halmi’s death, followed immediately by a shaman conducting a soul pacification rite.

Rather than implying that Miyal Halmi is simply “unfeminine,” this sequence can be read as a rapid reframing of the same wife body. The sex scene renders her legible within a sanctioned marital and reproductive horizon, but the subsequent confrontation recodes her protesting voice and bodily excess as disorder that must be contained. The death and ritual closure then process that disorder as something to be dissolved and settled, steering the event toward ritual recuperation rather than toward sustained ethical scrutiny of violence. In the 77th regular performance recording, this pattern is directly observable. Male characters enter and exit with clear narrative purpose. Female figures such as Miyal Halmi tend to appear at moments of conflict and disappear through death or ritual closure. The distribution of speech follows a similar logic. Male characters speak to advance the plot and deliver moral judgment. Female complaint, when it surfaces, is absorbed into laughter or resolved through ceremony rather than addressed as a grievance.

5.2.5. The Nojang Episode and Gendered Moral Risk

Under the late Joseon policy climate that constrained Buddhism, social criticism of clerical secularization and unethical conduct remained visible even as Buddhism lost its dominant institutional position. The “precept-breaking monk” episode translates this moral suspicion toward religious figures into a stage event that can be watched, laughed at, and collectively judged.

Historically, after the consolidation of Neo-Confucian state ideology, Buddhism was increasingly marginalized and represented as morally compromised within elite discourse (Deuchler 1992). The “corrupt monk” figure in gamyeon-geuk can thus be read as a vernacular dramatization of Confucian critiques of rival religious formations.

At the same time, the episode’s explanatory logic often pivots on gendered figures that concentrate moral risk in feminized bodies. Female characters such as bune or somu in the relevant repertoires are often positioned as proximate catalysts within plot structures in which monastic discipline is tested, exposed, and narratively resolved. Under these conditions, women’s limited discursive authority onstage may render the workings of male desire and institutional power less available for explicit scrutiny.

Rather than treating “temptress woman/fallen monk” as a timeless essence, it is more analytically precise to read it as a repeatable performative arrangement that gains force through citation. Across reiterated stagings, femininity becomes legible as a conventional sign for temptation and moral risk (Butler 1990).

Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence further helps explain why such staging can be affectively persuasive. What is at stake is less an explicit endorsement of domination than a doxic recognition of the social world as natural and self-evident. Through this recognition, gendered common sense may be re-stabilized even when the scene appears to mock authority (Bourdieu 2001).

6. A Comparative Map of Hahoe and Bongsan’s Mask Dance Dramas

Based on the foregoing analyses of character interaction, bodily movement, and prop manipulation in Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori and Bongsan Talchum, this section offers a deliberately restrained cross-repertoire “comparative map” that highlights shared mechanisms and points of divergence across the two plays. The aim is not to build a new theoretical framework, but to re-order concrete scenes already discussed into a scan-friendly set of contrasts, so that the subsequent discussion can return more clearly to the materials themselves. This comparative mapping responds to recent scholarship by moving from repertoire description to an account of how comparable performance mechanisms distribute gendered authority across different ritual and theatrical ecologies.

My concern here is not to suggest that both repertoires preserve the same present-day casting structure. It is rather to explain how femininity has been historically staged and codified in these traditions, and how traces of that history may remain visible in certain recognizable performance conventions.

What organizes these scenes is often the gaze of male performers and male spectators, working within a Confucian moral imaginary that already knows what a woman’s speech and movement should look like. Bune and somu are made watchable through fine-grained bodily techniques: gait, posture, the controlled arc of a sleeve. Male characters approach, pursue, and operate props. The women are largely still, or move in response. This asymmetry is not incidental to the scene. It is how the scene produces its meaning.

Secondly, visual cues of rank and gender are often “pre-secured” at the moment of entrance. In both repertoires, class and gender order is not built only through dialogue or gradual plot development. It is frequently pre-established through the combined force of facial design, costume, and props that immediately signals who is entitled to speak and who is more likely to be positioned as an object of looking. In Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori, male masks often compress age, masculinity, and authority into a single face through exaggerated beards, pronounced noses, and deep wrinkles, thereby granting certain figures a stronger visual aura of public dignity and legitimate initiative from the outset.

Moreover, yangban characters in Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori frequently wear hat ornaments that historically signaled yangban status in the Joseon period, materializing “status” itself as a class marker recognizable at a glance. Authority therefore does not need to wait for narrative justification. It is visually secured at entrance through the combined force of mask and headgear, which sets the stage for subsequent speech, judgment, and eventual ridicule. In Bongsan Talchum, authority is not indexed through beards in the same way. Role-coded facial designs, mask color, and props such as a monk’s ritual implements condense hierarchy into visual cues that audiences can quickly recognize. In short, visual codes provide an entry point for reading order, making subsequent interactions more easily intelligible as patterned relations of initiative and judgment.

A third pattern concerns female figures who function as trigger sites for plot turning. Bune in Hahoe and somu in Bongsan perform closely parallel narrative functions, though their role identities differ. Neither needs to speak to shift the scene. They are approached, gazed upon, and drawn into conflict, and that proximity is enough to make the boundary of order visible. Male desire and marital status are not argued about in the abstract. They are enacted through what happens around these women’s bodies.

Both repertoires also use female figures to displace the moral risk that male desire generates. The yangban, the scholar, the monk: each claims an authority grounded in cultivation, learning, or religious discipline. Each fails, publicly and humiliatingly. Yet the scene does not simply expose male weakness. It routes part of the disorder through a female figure who is easier to read as its source. Male failure becomes laughable. Female presence becomes suspect. The two moves happen together, and the performance gains its force from that combination.

In Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori, the bune type becomes a focal surface around which male desire is articulated, joked about, and competitively performed. Rather than stabilizing elite masculinity, the episode punctures it. Men lose composure, abandon restraint, and reveal their status claims as performative bluff once desire enters the scene. Yet the same staging can also channel moral risk onto a gendered bodily sign. Disorder becomes quickly legible through the woman’s sexualized visibility and the reactions it triggers, which can reduce sustained scrutiny of male entitlement while keeping blame conveniently localizable within the female figure.

In Bongsan Talchum, the juxtaposition between the abandoned legal wife and the younger concubine produces a similarly ambivalent configuration. The husband’s shifting attachments make male irresponsibility and the instability of marital authority unmistakable. His failure is staged as evasive and accountability-avoiding, and it generates harm without any stable ethical self-governance. At the same time, both women remain structurally expendable within the episode’s moral economy. The wife’s protest is driven toward violent and ritual closure, while the concubine remains legible primarily as a detachable object of desire rather than a fully authorized speaking subject. Read together, the two repertoires stage a shared mechanism in which the exposure of male failure coexists with a gendered distribution of vulnerability and blame.

Across both repertoires, female figures who mediate desire rarely speak at length. They are approached, singled out, competed over, and absorbed into conflict. Bune and somu do not drive their scenes through dialogue. They become the surface through which male desire organizes itself and becomes legible to the audience. This is not a minor feature of the repertoire. It is a structural condition that allows transgression to be staged, judged, and then settled, without the patriarchal order that generated it being fundamentally called into question.

What makes these figures effective as stage devices is precisely their limited discursive position. Because they do not speak to define the situation, the audience is left to read them through the moral coordinates that the performance has already established. Disorder attaches to their bodies. The scene resolves. The order holds.

Lastly, across both repertoires, monastic transgression is staged as a visibly embodied event. Through props and physical action, critiques aligned with a Confucian devaluation of Buddhism are translated into a desire-based comedy. Yet the most legible markers of boundary crossing still tend to be placed on the female body.

In Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori, the contrast is produced through bune’s decorous entrance and a sudden bodily lapse. The monk’s immediate approach and sniffing lowers the ascetic posture into palpable sexual impulse, making the moment of transgression instantly readable. In Bongsan Talchum, nojang’s active pursuit of somu and a sequence of prop-based actions similarly externalize transgression. Most notably, prayer beads are repeatedly hung on somu’s body, relocating an object of purity onto a female figure so that “crossing the line” becomes readable without explanation. The monk’s staff can then be discarded or drawn into obscene gestures, further reducing monastic authority to slapstick material. Even so, the trigger and the most visible sign of disorder are often attached to women. Bune’s bodily exposure and somu’s bead-marked body become the clearest sites where “disorder” is seen, even when the monk is the one who initiates the transgression.

7. Discussion

Drawing on the scene-level analyses and comparative mapping in Section 5 and Section 6, this section addresses three interpretive questions. First, how can carnivalesque critique and patriarchal reproduction coexist within the same ritual performance. Second, how should the polysemic character of gamyeon-geuk be understood in relation to audience reception and the conditions of spectatorship. Third, what implications does the present analysis have for ongoing scholarly debates on Confucianism as lived religion, the ritual function of laughter, and the gender politics of intangible-heritage transmission. The discussion therefore treats critique and reproduction as coexisting interpretive effects rather than as mutually exclusive conclusions.

The yangban sequence in Hahoe shows this clearly. The two elite figures kneel, exchange formal bows, and compete over classical learning. Confucian legitimacy is staged as a recognizable language of rank. But before long, imae rams his buttocks into a yangban’s head while they are still mid-bow, and the ceremony collapses into farce. In Bongsan’s yangban-malttugi episode, the same structure holds. Hierarchy is announced through command and posture. Then malttugi’s wit and dancing expose the yangban’s ignorance and greed, and authority becomes briefly laughable. In both cases, the terms through which legitimacy is judged remain Confucian. What gets mocked is the failure to live up to them.

A related pattern appears in the female figures, though the two traditions handle it differently. In Hahoe, the widow sustains daily life through weaving and labor. Her capacity to manage without male support is visible, even if the performance does not dwell on it. In Bongsan, Miyal Halmi is not coded primarily through domestic labor. She is agentive in a different register: she drives the confrontation with her husband, makes the marital grievance public, and keeps pushing even after a long separation. Both figures are more than passive objects. The question is what the staging does with that agency once it appears.

At the same time, the visibility of these female figures is frequently drawn back into an evaluative horizon of Confucian marital ethics, in which women’s value becomes legible through virtue, chastity, name/status, and legitimate standing. In the Bongsan Miyal Halmi sequence, the confrontation after reunion, the husband’s attachment to a concubine, the escalation into physical struggle, and Miyal Halmi’s death followed by ritual closure can make cracks in marital order and the wife’s grievance readable. At the same time, the “death–ritual handling–closure” structure can reincorporate disorder into an event that is processed and settled, channeling conflict back into horizons of name/status and ritual propriety. Rather than reducing gamyeon-geuk to either pure hegemonic reproduction or pure resistance, these scenes suggest that ritual performance can sustain multiple readings at once, including those that diverge from, or even contradict, one another. At the same time, the very mechanisms that license critique and momentary subversion can also facilitate the repeated recognition, reaffirmation, and remaking of Confucian patriarchal ethics.

In addressing audience reception, this article draws on two sources. The first is existing scholarship on reception tendencies and interpretive possibilities in mask dance performance, presented not as universal claims about contemporary spectators but as frameworks for understanding how audiences have been theorized to engage with performance. The second is audible audience response captured in the contemporary full-length recordings analyzed throughout this study. Such recorded responses are treated not as ethnographic evidence but as directly observable features of the performance itself, noted as part of the multimodal analysis consistent with the methodological approach established in Section 4. This article does not, however, draw on in-person ethnographic fieldwork. The discussion of audience reception is therefore presented as reception tendencies and interpretive possibilities reported in the literature, rather than as a universal claim about contemporary spectators. The aim is to clarify what kinds of responses have been theorized as available within mask dance drama performance, and how such possibilities can support the present interpretation, without treating them as fixed or uniform outcomes (Saeji 2012; Lee 2005).

Related scholarship also foregrounds the participatory affordances of mask performance. Smertin (2024) notes that Talchum episodes typically proceed through loosely connected comic scenes built around situations familiar to spectators, drawing audiences into emotional involvement and readiness to participate. Through the practice of chuimsae, performers invited vocal responses from the audience, establishing an interactive exchange rather than a one-way spectatorial relationship (Smertin 2024).

Within the materials analyzed in this article, reception-relevant cues are especially concentrated in scenes where Miyal Halmi, the husband, and the concubine (secondary wife) figure appear together and form a triangular confrontation. Such staging condenses tensions within the household order into a legible relational configuration. The husband’s evasions and shifting alignment are displayed before spectators, while the concubine’s presence reveals how male desire destabilizes domestic propriety and displaces the lawful wife as the central site of conflict (Saeji 2012). These cues are not produced by dialogue alone. They are also shaped by embodied and spatial organization, including blocking, gesture, gaze, and the husband’s movement, pauses, and orientation between the two women. Rather than inferring a single audience reaction, this article treats these staging features as conditions that make certain interpretive pathways more readily available, including ridicule, alignment, and moral evaluation.

Performance style and comedic timing can further recalibrate how the concubine is framed, for example as an object of ridicule or as an agent of provocation. This variability helps explain why a single scene may be received as a critique of male irresponsibility, as carnivalesque play with desire, or as a socially “safe” displacement of conflict into laughter (Lee 2005). For this reason, reception is discussed here as interpretive availability rather than as a fixed function of the genre. Venue and framing, such as village ritual contexts versus staged heritage presentations, as well as the composition and expectations of spectators, can recalibrate whether satire is taken up as moral pedagogy, Bakhtinian carnivalesque critique (Bakhtin 1984), heritage spectacle, or aestheticized folk entertainment.

While I do not claim to report audience reactions empirically, repeated viewing of the full-length recording indicates how the narrative and staging make a sympathetic reading of Miyal Halmi readily available.

After a long separation, Miyal Halmi finally encounters her husband only to confront his attachment to a concubine. When Miyal Halmi sees the concubine, the conflict escalates into physical struggle, and the sequence concludes with Miyal Halmi’s death followed by a ritualized closure. Without assuming any single audience response, this configuration can plausibly support a reading organized around pity or moral assessment insofar as it juxtaposes Miyal Halmi’s sustained attachment with the husband’s abandonment and evasion.

8. Conclusions

This article has offered a religious and gendered reading of Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori and Bongsan Talchum. Rather than treating Korean mask dance primarily as social satire, it argues that, in ritual settings, gamyeon-geuk can operate as an apparatus that sacralizes and reproduces Confucian moral order, including patriarchal gender ethics.

The analysis confirms that gamyeon-geuk has genuine critical potential toward class and religious figures. A butcher mocks yangban, servants expose incompetent gentry, and corrupt monks are made publicly laughable, supporting earlier accounts of gamyeon-geuk as popular critique and symbolic resistance (Jeon 2007). Yet this satire has firm limits. Hierarchies among men can be ridiculed, while patriarchal gender order remains comparatively durable. Female figures are repeatedly positioned as silent ritual objects, carriers of moral risk, or disposable third parties whose suffering and death facilitate the restoration of order.

Under such ritual publicity, performative repetition can make moral categories publicly perceptible and socially shareable. It can also help gendered role ethics appear as part of a naturalized moral world rather than as an openly contestable arrangement (Berger 1967; Durkheim 1995; Geertz 1973). In this sense, gamyeon-geuk does not merely depict Confucian norms.

Finally, this argument should not be read as a judgment on contemporary Korea as a whole. Precisely because modern Korea includes vigorous feminist critique and ongoing reworkings of tradition, revisiting gamyeon-geuk as a ritual gender apparatus can serve as a diagnostic resource for heritage transmission and performance practice. By making visible how patriarchal order can be renewed through ritual pleasure and communal evaluation, this study opens space for reimagining how ritual performance might be staged, taught, and received in more inclusive directions.